Learning the right lessons from Iraq.

• Author: Friedman, Benjamin H.

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FOREIGN POLICY specialists and analysts are misreading the lessons of the war in Iraq. The emerging conventional wisdom holds that success could have been achieved with more troops and cooperation among U.S. government agencies, as well as a better counterinsurgency doctrine. To those who share these views, Iraq is not an example of what not to do, but of how not to do it. Their policy proposals aim to reform the national security bureaucracy so that the U.S. will get it right the next time.

The near-consensus view is wrong and dangerous. What Iraq demonstrates is a need for a new national security strategy, not better tactics and tools to serve the current one. By insisting that Iraq was the West's to remake, were it not for the Bush Administration's mismanagement, we ignore the limits on U.S. power that the war exposes and, in the process, risk repeating the same mistakes. The popular contention that the Bush Administration's failures and errors in judgment can be attributed to poor planning also is false. There was ample planning for the war, but it conflicted with the President's expectations. To the extent that planning failed, therefore, the lesson to draw is not that the U.S. national security establishment needs better planning, but that it needs better leaders. That problem is solved by elections, not bureaucratic tinkering.

The military gives the U.S. the power to conquer foreign countries, but not the power to run them. Because there are few good reasons to take on missions meant to resuscitate failed governments, terrorism notwithstanding, the most important lesson from the war in Iraq should be a newfound appreciation for the limits of U.S. power. Instead, the experts fear that Iraq will sour Americans on future interventions--that an "Iraq syndrome" will prevent the U.S. from embarking on future state-building missions. To most experts, this syndrome would be dangerous. For even if Iraq is lost, the consensus view says, the war on terrorism will require the U.S. to repair failed states, lest they spawn terrorism.

To analysts who share these views, Iraq is an experiment that teaches Americans lessons about how to manage foreign populations. Based in part on these lessons, Washington is reforming the national security bureaucracy to make it a better servant of a strategy that requires military occupations, state-building, and counterinsurgency operations-what the military calls reconstruction and stabilization. To that end, the President and Congress have agreed to expand the size of our ground forces in the hope that our next intervention will not fall short of troops. Think tanks across the ideological spectrum are busying themselves with plans to improve the coordination of national security agencies for the next occupation and to prepare diplomats l soldiers, and bureaucrats to staff it. A new state-building office in the State Department draws up plans for ordering various failed or unruly states, An array of defense specialists offer advice on counterinsurgency doctrine and insist that the military services embrace it. The services indicate that they already have done so. Next time, U.S. leaders are forecasting, the Administration will have a national security bureaucracy capable of implementing American policies; in other words, next time the U.S. will get it right.

Deposing Saddam Hussein was relatively simple. Creating a new state to rule Iraq nearly was impossible, at least at a reasonable cost. What prevents stability in Iraq is not American policy, but the absence of a political solution to the communal and sectarian divisions there. The U.S. invasion exposed those rifts, but their repair is beyond America's power. Maybe the U.S. can improve its ability to manage occupations, but the principal lesson Iraq teaches is to avoid them. Not all state-building missions pose the challenges Iraq does, but most of these missions fail, are extremely costly, and corrode American power.

Perhaps the most common complaint about the occupation of Iraq is that it was undermanned. The idea is that the U.S. military stripped Saddam's Baathist regime of its monopoly on force in Iraq, but failed to fill the resulting power vacuum on account of a lack of troops and willingness to police the country. The result was anarchy. Iraq's tribes and factions within its various ethnic groups armed themselves and became pseudo governments. Some attacked American troops, and some attacked each other. Disputes broke out over real estate, and the prospect of being manhandled by rival militias brought still more insecurity, defensive arming, and attacks meant to serve as self-defense. Beset by violence, the state collapsed, and the idea of a unified, multi-ethnic country faded.

To avoid these outcomes, analysts say, the U.S. should have sent a far larger occupation force than the 150,000 it had in Iraq when Baghdad fell. A better plan would have two or three times that number, at a ratio of 20 security personnel per thousand of the population. Those figures come from a series of studies published by the Rand Corporation, which arrived at a rule-of-thumb for force ratios needed to maintain order based on a historical survey of past occupations.

The idea that more troops could have saved Iraq from violent discord is flawed on several accounts. First, as David Hendrickson and Robert Tucker argue in a paper prepared for the...