An Interview with Fred Iklé

In Every War Must End, Fred Iklé explores the difficult and often painful process through which wars in the modern age have been brought to a close and what this process means for the future. Iklé considers a variety of examples from twentieth-century history and examines specific strategies that effectively “won the peace.”nnQuestion: What do you regard as some of the main mistakes in our war against Iraq?nnFred Charles Iklé: The Pentagon prepared extensive plans for many contingencies, including oil fires, masses of refugees, Saddam Hussein’s use of biological weapons, and so on. This planning was prudent. What was missing was a plan to quickly gain political control once Saddam’s main forces were defeated. And I mean quickly—the day the mobs in Baghdad toppled the statues of Saddam Hussein.nnQ: How should that have been done?nnFCI: We should have demonstrated that our forces—having won the key military battles—were truly in command. Instead, we demonstrated the opposite when American forces looked on while Baghdad was overtaken by looting. Not only did we lose the valuable intelligence documents that the looters took, but we also lost face as these scenes of chaos were broadcast throughout the Islamic world. In his book American Soldier, General Tommy Franks devotes only half a line to the looting. Apparently he missed the importance of capturing the capital of the enemy in a way that imposes discipline and control on the population.nnQ: You write that taking revenge is a “Neanderthal strategy.” What do you mean by this?nnFCI: Once you have defeated the enemy’s main military forces, the priority must be to gain political control over the defeated country. Long court trials to bring bad people “to justice” are a distraction. Revenge is a primitive trait that served Neanderthal tribes well, but it has no place in a modern strategy for winning the peace.nnQ: Are you saying all of Saddam Hussein’s henchman should have gone free or been rewarded with new jobs?nnFCI: No, those guilty of criminal acts should be tried by the Iraqi government. But the war against Saddam Hussein was never meant to destroy the Sunnis or to imprison all members of Saddam’s Ba’ath party. We should have recruited officers of Saddam’s army and knowledgeable people from his party structure to fracture these organizations. Instead, we now face a well organized insurgency who can infiltrate the police forces that we are training. Had we been more clever and used less of the Neanderthal revenge, we might have effective Sunni military forces and a new Ba’athist party working for us.nnQ: You write that the lessons we learn from history keep changing. After World War II, we learned that the appeasement of an aggressor was a mistake. After the Vietnam War, the lesson was to not start a war unless you are sure of winning it. What do you think the lesson will be from our military involvement in Iraq?nnFCI: We will look back at not only Iraq as a lesson, but also at Afghanistan. And if the experience in Afghanistan remains more satisfactory than Iraq, we will seek to use the approaches that succeeded there, such as to move ahead with a coalition, to get backing from the United Nations (if possible), to set up a new government quickly, and to make temporary alliances with warlords or other forces but subsume them later under the new government. We must remain capable to fight such wars and to end them with lasting political success. At the same time, we must also make every reasonable effort to avert such costly and dangerous crises.