Middle East Strategy at Harvard

MESH invites selected authors to offer original first-person statements on their new books—why and how they wrote them, and what impact they hope and expect to achieve. Steven Metz is chairman of the Regional Strategy and Planning Department and research professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute. His forthcoming book is Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy.

From Steven Metz

Like most Americans, I thought little about Iraq before the summer of 1990. Having spent my entire adult life teaching and writing about national security I could not, of course, ignore it entirely. But I remained immersed in other regions, other issues, other problems. Iraq was peripheral, best left for Middle East experts (which I am not). Then for the second time in a decade, Iraq invaded a neighboring state, bullying its way to the attention of the world. As Operation Desert Storm unfolded, I was on the faculty of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. Not only did CNN make the war unusually vivid—I remember working in my garage, listening to play-by-play combat coverage on the radio as if it were a sporting event—the fact that some of my former students and current friends were in harm’s way also made it personal. For a few months, at least, Iraq mattered greatly to me. But afterwards, it faded again. I returned to other projects.

As another major war between the United States and Iraq approached in the late winter of 2003, I joined a study team from the U.S. Army War College. Our mission was to enter Iraq as soon as possible after combat subsided and undertake an initial strategic assessment. For a career academic, being issued military gear, fitted for uniforms (to the extent that the word “fitted” applies to the way the Army issues clothing), trained on chemical protection equipment, and inoculated against anthrax and a slew of other nasty things was strange but exciting. Our team established a base in Kuwait then made five trips into Iraq. It was electrifying to see the country that had so dominated the headlines for the previous year, experience the immediate aftermath of a major war, and talk to military leaders and soldiers from both sides while their memories were fresh. The sight of exhausted U.S. soldiers, the jumble of feelings from relief to smoldering hatred on the part of Iraqis, nights spent in looted palaces, high-speed drives through liberated (or conquered) cities with no public order or security, and, in general, traversing a landscape littered with the detritus of war, much still smoking, was something few scholars experience.

My role in the study team was to analyze what was then called the “post-conflict” period. This was an afterthought to our project, added by a senior Army general after approving the study. Little did he or anyone else know that there would be more conflict in the “post-conflict” period than in the conventional war. As events in Iraq unfolded, the complexity of the project exploded beyond control. I worked frenetically just to keep abreast of breaking developments. My office filled with notes, articles, maps, briefing slides, reports, and transcripts. I could not finalize the report. Each draft was obsolete before I could distribute it.

Still, this was the right issue for me at the right time: I was one of a handful of scholars or analysts who studied insurgency and counterinsurgency during the previous decade. This served me well as the insurgency in Iraq grew. But the idea that that I would spend a few months on the Iraq project and then return to my normal research and management concerns collapsed under the onslaught of events. Iraq became my life. From the spring of 2003 until now I have worked on it nearly full time, collecting tens of thousands of pages of material. Clearly it was time to capture this in a comprehensive format.

Dozens of books and hundred of articles have been written about America’s conflict with Iraq, the bulk since 2003. These cover a range of topics from policymaking to military tactics. But almost all share one feature: they concentrate on what the conflict has done to Iraq rather than what it has done to America. That realization inspired this book. The conflict with Iraq has changed us. A part of what we are, how we see the world, and how we define our role in the global security environment was born in this conflict. We must understand how and why. We must know whether Iraq has changed us for better or worse. We must use Iraq as a portal for introspection, use it to learn about the American approach to strategy.

In Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy I use the long, simmering conflict to trace changes in American strategy. Rather than speculate on the future of America’s involvement in Iraq, I end with conclusions about the process of selecting, interpreting and using paradigms to drive American strategy, including an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of this process and some ideas on how to make it more effective.

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