By Brig. Gen. John S. Brown, U.S. Army retired

As a nation, we are in the process of proving that those who ignore the errors of the past are doomed to repeat them. Time and again we have made commitments to policies opposite those that historical precedents favor. In Iraq, exemplary missteps have occurred with respect to troop-to-task ratios, de-Baathification, alliance involvement, advisory efforts, constabulary responsibilities, the pursuit of an achievable end state and sources of professional advice. In each instance, historical precedent was dismissed, though it is not too late to reconsider our course in light of what we should have learned.

Seldom, if ever, have we asked so few troops to accomplish so much.

Our forces now in Iraq would be too thin even if we did not have an insurgency and significant border security issues to take into account. This mismatch between manpower and mission has hardly gone unnoticed. Gen. Eric K. Shinseki's prewar congressional cautionary is now iconic. Gen. Shinseki, a thoughtful, deliberative man, considers things carefully before he commits to words. He had the benefit of the Army Staff's analytic capabilities, the Army's historical records and his own personal experiences in Vietnam and the Balkans before he said it would take several hundreds of thousands—which I interpret as 300,000 to 500,000—to secure Iraq. Gen. Shinseki was not alone. Secretary of the Army Thomas E. White backed him at great personal cost, and retired Generals Barry R. McCaffrey and Anthony C. Zinni articulated their own warnings as well. There have been others.

Once occupying Iraq and thinly manned, it seemed imperative that we secure active Iraqi cooperation to redress our troop deficits. During Operation Just Cause we put the Panamanian army in uniform and back on the streets within days of crushing it. We cleaned up criminals in its hierarchy after the fact.

Lt. Gen. Jay M. Garner, U.S. Army retired, who was director of the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for the Coalition Provisional Authority of Iraq, was mindful of this precedent, and of his own realpolitik when in command of Operation Provide Comfort in Kurdistan a decade earlier. He was accompanied by an official historian in whom he had confidence and who had tapped the Army's records on de-Nazification, the postwar settlement of Japan and related topics. Garner absorbed all of this and intended to skim off only the highest levels of the Baathist superstructure. Iraqi Army units would return to security responsibilities as soon as possible, and we would police out criminal elements over time. Garner was replaced by the more politically connected L. Paul Bremer, who decided that half measures would never do. In May 2003, within about a day's time, he fired the entire Iraqi Army and severed virtually the entire Baathist superstructure. Pundits within Garner's organization commented that Bremer created 350,000 new enemies for the United States in a single day.

Given that we would get little help from the Iraqis after May, it would have been helpful to have had numerous allied troops on the ground. Unfortunately, in the rush to go to war we had left virtually all of our traditional allies behind—and alienated many of them. We did not do much to coax untraditional allies into common cause either. Retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark, ever the champion of a combined approach, had forcefully argued for patience. What was our hurry? Would not Saddam Hussein's intransigence eventually become so egregious our allies would become as enraged as we already were? His books Waging Modern War and Winning Modern Wars convincingly make the case that the inefficiencies of working with allies are more than offset by the effectiveness of greater numbers and the moral high ground. He should know; as architect of the successful Kosovo Campaign, he reflected an American capacity for coalition warfare we have refined through four generations of overseas soldiering.

Recognizing that Saddam's army was gone and that allies were scarce, we set about rebuilding the Iraqi Army from the ground up. This required an advisory effort. The U.S. Army has had considerable advisory experience, and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker methodically set about culling lessons we had already learned to support an advisory effort appropriate to Iraq. Given his extensive special operations background, Schoomaker was no stranger to this aspect of warfare. At the height of the Vietnam War, more than half of our advisers were with regional and local forces. Most Vietnamese maneuver divisions were regionally oriented as well. Since the Philippine Insurrection—if not the Indian Wars—we have known that guerrilla wars are won locally. A "neighborhood watch" has far more at stake in a neighborhood than a maneuver force ever could. We have also known that all armed men acceptable to the government need to be on our payroll. Resourcing indigenous troops gives leverage, if not necessarily control. Unfortunately, in Iraq we have been averse to supporting local forces. Advisory efforts have focused on the regular army, when much of Baghdad and the country is actually secured by local militias we object to and with whom we have no influence—despite the fact that the elected government accepts their presence. If we allow local forces to exist, we should be paying them and training them. If we do not allow them to exist, who will reliably secure the people they were attempting to secure? Advocates of the Mahdi Army argue with some persuasiveness that our campaign to curtail them has exposed Sadr City to recent horrific attacks.

To fill the security void that is left by an inadequate Iraqi Army, lack of allies and lack of leverage with local militias, we have fallen back, inevitably, on our American soldiers and placed them in a constabulary role. The U.S. Army has had considerable experience as a constabulary. One of the most important imperatives when filling such a role overseas is divestiture; we want to be rid of that responsibility as soon as possible. Only indigenous forces have the language skills and cultural familiarity necessary to effectively police their own streets. The success of the Philippine constabulary illustrates this premise, as do a dozen other constabulary efforts in Army occupations since. Gen. George W. Casey Jr. recognized this and, after two years of steadily increasing the wherewithal of the Iraqi Army, made it clear that surging American soldiers back into policing the streets of Baghdad was going in precisely the wrong direction. His congressional testimony included T.E. Lawrence's admonition that it is better to let Arabs do things "tolerably well" than to assume (or in this case resume) the burden oneself. When acting as constables, American soldiers shed virtually all of their technological advantages and expose themselves to myriad close encounter casualties they otherwise would not face.

Yet another concern is the pursuit of an achievable end state. The missions of toppling Saddam Hussein's regime and scouring Iraq for weapons of mass destruction were achievable with the forces we were willing to commit, but not the mission of constructing a viable multiethnic democracy in a country seething with ethnic hostilities and without democratic traditions. A sense of community, a willingness to compromise and mutual respect for a body of law are preconditions for democracy. Last December's "Historically Speaking" article ("National Self-Determination") explored promoting democracy amid the wreckage of multiethnic empires after World War I. Democracy was only feasible when ethnicities previously held together by force were permitted national self-determination. This phenomenon has repeated itself more recently in Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and even Czechoslovakia. The Iraq Study Group had much to say about an achievable end state, and Lt. Col.(P) Craig T. Trebilcock's fine article "The Modern Seven Pillars of Iraq" in the February issue of this magazine illustrates Iraqi cultural aspects impeding an easy transition to representative democracy.

In Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam, H.R. McMaster argues that men who knew better failed to speak out as we stepped ever deeper into the morass. This does not seem the case with Iraq. At each major misstep, prominent and positioned members of the Army family spoke out forcefully, sometimes at a risk to their careers. If their public representations were so obvious, one can only imagine how candid their private representations must have been.

Why were they not heeded? There are pundits enough to dissect our political leadership, so I won't, but I will comment upon our own complicity as a profession. We stifle debate, defer unduly to jointness and allow interlopers onto our professional pulpit. One of our hallowed traditions is to express our opinions until the boss makes a decision and then to salute the flag and follow his lead. This is fine when action and result are proximate in time, but dangerous when long durations invite midcourse corrections. Finally, we have dismantled our Army Staff and Army school system to the point that, in effect, we hire contractors to do much of our thinking for us. Once we have given up the pulpit, we are no longer the sole source of professional advice. It will not do for subordinates to reiteratively debate with their superiors, of course, but we should have forums wherein some of our best minds openly debate our most significant issues without being construed as unpatriotic or as a threat to those with whom they disagree. For Gen. George C. Marshall such forums existed within the Army school system and their associated professional journals. If we restored these to their former glory, would our capacity for debate improve?

What should we be debating now? Some argue that we have made significant and consequential mistakes with respect to tactics, techniques and procedures in Iraq. I disagree. Wouldn't we be better off debating our objectives in Iraq and the resources we are willing to commit to achieve them? Within our historical experience we have redesigned alien societies by force, evolved alien societies through education, backed alien winners at the expense of alien losers and facilitated the reorganization of alien societies into entities their citizens could support.

Our post-World War II redesigns of Germany and Japan were predicated by horrific losses we and our allies had inflicted upon their military manpower. Such forcible redesign of Iraq is no longer feasible, however, if it ever was. The manpower required would dwarf present commitments, and the Iraqi blood necessarily shed would be unacceptable to our public.

In the Philippines our Progressive Era Army, after an initial spasm of significant violence, adopted a more benign approach. Educational efforts, civil works projects and steadily increasing Filipino participation in constabulary, army and government combined with commercial investment to steer the Philippines towards independent democracy. This worked, but took two generations to complete. Iraq is not central enough to our national interests to suggest that we will unilaterally support an evolution that long with a sustained military presence.

The British have more experience than we do in advancing their interests by backing the right horse. They built an empire employing the adage "divide and conquer," reinforcing friendly indigenous forces just enough for them to win, and then capitalizing upon gratitude and dependency. During the Cold War we supported a number of proxy wars and insurgencies, with uneven results. Perhaps most notably, we favored Iraq during its 1980-88 war with Iran, only to find that Saddam Hussein's gratitude and dependency did not last very long. If it comes to open civil war in Iraq, the Shia would win, and would do so more expediently were we to actively support them. This would not sit well with our Sunni allies in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Kurdistan, however.

At times we have let indigenous peoples decide for themselves the governance they would choose. Plebiscites following World Wars I and II offer cases in point. More recently, through Partnership for Peace, we have followed up on the disintegrations of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union to ease transitions from multiethnic states held together by force to nations ethnically homogenous enough to achieve a sense of community—and to move beyond bloodlines as their dominant political issue. In Bosnia and Kosovo we found peace was best achieved when unfriendly ethnicities were separated. This suggests a model for Iraq. Ethnic states could police themselves, and we could focus on establishing lines of demarcation, resettlement, external defense and the diplomacy necessary to achieve acceptance of the new regimes. All of these tacks would be challenging and demanding, but none would expose our soldiers to the risks they now face on Iraqi streets.

History offers no clear blueprint for Iraq. It does suggest approaches that might work, and even more capably identifies approaches that will not work. Our national interests are oil that flows, indigenous states that do not threaten their neighbors and keeping faith with the Kurds to encourage others who cast their lot with us. It would be nice if the resultant states were stable democracies, but they can evolve in that direction if they do not get there right away. Their good governance is more in the interests of their own citizens than it is of ours, so their own soldiers should police their streets. Insofar as deterring bad behavior, the fact that we can destroy regimes is a powerful deterrent, even if we cannot as readily rebuild them. However the present surge strategy turns out, it is now time to debate the next steps. We should do a better job of taking historical precedent into account.