Lowy Institute: What if the Iraq war never happened?
What if the Iraq war never happened?
By Michael Ware - 20 March 2013 11:26AM
This post is part of a debate - click here to see how this debate started and developed.
Michael Ware was a war correspondent for TIME Magazine and CNN. He spent six years in Iraq.
Not the invasion, that's something else. That was three weeks of aggressive warfare executed, by and large, with stunning effect, scattering a half-million-man army in its wake. The tenth anniversary retrospective haze makes the whole affair seem almost dreamlike, a flicker of blistering success before the years of horror set in.
So no, I don't mean that. But what of the war that followed, made up as it was of so many smaller wars? Different battles waged against the Americans, against Iraq's new security forces, even among the Iraqis themselves in bitter civil war. But none more than the largest war and the one most targeted against Coalition troops, the Sunni insurgency. What if that had never come to pass? What if we missed means to better, exponentially better, exploit our military supremacy? Not just once. Or twice. But incessantly, for something like four years.
UPDATE: The column is also on TDB’s site. I thought he was doing two different columns, that was my error. But please do go to TDB’s site, click through each page, and if you are a FB/Twitterer, post them and like them and all that. News sites pay attention to how many clicks an article gets and how often it gets posted to social media sites, so post it to your timeline and tweet it up, and do it from TDB’s site! And if your friends won’t strangle you, do it from Lowy’s site as well. The more clicks/Likes/tweets they can measure from their sites, the better!