July/August 2019 183JON FINER is Adjunct Senior Fellow for U.S.
Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign
Relations and served as Chief of Sta and
Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. Depart-
ment of State during the Obama administration.The Last War—
and the Next?
Learning the Wrong Lessons
From IraqJon Finer
The U.S. Army in the Iraq War. Vol. 1,
Invasion, Insurgency, Civil War, 2003–
2006, and vol. 2, Surge and Withdrawal,
2007–2011
EDITED BY JOEL D. RAYBURN AND
FRANK K. SOBCHAK. Strategic
Studies Institute and the U.S. Army
War College Press, 2019, 742 and 716 pp.E
arlier this year, the U.S. Army
published two volumes that
amount to the most comprehen-
sive ocial history o the Iraq war.
They cover the conÁict’s most impor-
tant episodes: the U.S. invasion in
2003, the death spiral into civil war that
took shape in the aftermath, the more
hopeful period that began with the
surge o U.S. forces in 2007, and the
withdrawal that saw the last U.S. forces
leave Iraq at the end o 2011.
Blandly titled The U.S. Army in the
Iraq War and based on 30,000 pages o
newly declassiÃed documents, the study
recounts a litany o familiar but still
infuriating blunders on Washington’spart: failing to prepare for the invasion’s
aftermath, misunderstanding Iraqi
culture and politics and sidelining or
ignoring genuine experts, disbanding
the Iraqi army and evicting Baath Party
members from the government, ignor-
ing and even denying the rise o sectar-
ian violence, and sapping momentum
by rotating troops too frequently.
Years in the making and admirably
candid, the study has largely been ignored
by the media and the policy community.
That may be because o its daunting
length and dry, “just the facts” narrative.
Or because some understandably prefer
independent accounts to authorized
after-action reports. Or because, com-
pared with other major conÁicts in U.S.
history, so few Americans experienced
this one Ãrsthand. Or because the study
declines to focus on more timely and
contested questions, such as whether it
was ever in the realm o possibility to
invade a large and diverse Middle Eastern
country—one that posed no direct threat
to the United States—at an acceptable
cost. But the study also comes at a time
when many o the supposed lessons o
Iraq are increasingly contested, with
signiÃcant implications for a debate that
is raging between and within both major
political parties over the most consequen-
tial foreign policy choice any country
faces: when and how to use military force.
In this critical debate, the Iraq study
does seem to take a side, intentionally or
otherwise. For that reason, and to better
understand what the institution charged
with Ãghting the controversial war
believes it has learned, two o the study’s
claims are worthy o further reÁection,
particularly for those who believed that
the Iraq debacle would lead to an era o
American military restraint. The ÃrstReturn to Table of Contents