WASHINGTON -- The sudden collapse of Iraqi forces in the face of armed insurgents has catalyzed a debate within the U.S. military about a war that, just a few years ago, seemed on the brink of going down in history as a success.
Some military officers believe the war could and should have been won. They blame civilian leaders -- chief among them President Barack Obama -- for failing to press harder for a political agreement that would have allowed the military to remain on the ground long enough to secure victory.
"Anyone who was there during the surge came away very encouraged about the future of the country if we had continued to stay engaged," said retired Col. Peter Mansoor, who served as a top adviser to Gen. David Petraeus in Baghdad and wrote a history of the latter years of the war.
That argument is deeply reminiscent of the aftermath of the Vietnam War, when the Army blamed its defeat on President Lyndon Johnson and other civilian leaders who put restrictions on the military's use of firepower and chose bombing targets from the White House.
It's countered by others who witnessed the chaos of the war up close. On his Facebook page, Maj. Andrew Rohrer, who served in Iraq as a junior officer, blamed feuding Iraqi politicians for the country's collapse, calling the war "an Iraqi problem that we never could have fixed in a hundred years."
Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Wednesday acknowledged both arguments. The Iraqi army and police needed a longer-term U.S. military advisory presence to help with planning and logistics, he said, but a few thousand U.S. advisers wouldn't have prevented the chaos caused by the Iraqi political leaders' sectarian behavior.
"The problem today is that the [Iraqi] government hasn't acted responsibly," Dempsey said in Senate testimony.
How the U.S. military resolves the internal debate could determine whether the military of the future will be a big, conventional force or a smaller military that relies more heavily on precision firepower, technology and advisers to support local fighters and minimize America's losses.
The outcome of the debate could also influence the advice top generals give regarding future conflicts, analysts said.
"Iraq has become a proxy for the debate about Afghanistan, Syria and Iran," said Peter Feaver, a Duke University political scientist and former National Security Council official.
The danger of the military's debate over Iraq is that it fails to take into account the military's own failings, said Eliot Cohen, who served as a senior State Department official during the last years of the George W. Bush administration. Officers in the early days of the war were slow to recognize that they were fighting an insurgency. U.S. troops often alienated the Iraqi people with heavy-handed tactics and struggled to fashion effective Iraqi security forces.
Cohen is among those who believe that Iraq was on a "fragile trajectory toward success" before the U.S. withdrawal. In recent days, he said, he has detected "real anger at the Obama administration" among senior members of the military for not pressing the Iraqis harder to accept a long-term U.S. presence.
But he worried that the military's impulse to blame Iraq's problems on Obama or Iraqi political leaders would prevent the Army from undertaking a "sober institutional stock-taking" of its own failures.
"Actually, the Army is doing a much worse job of taking a hard look at itself than it did after Vietnam," Cohen said.
The military's post-Vietnam narrative, which pinned the blame for its loss on the Johnson administration, largely absolved the Army of its own mistakes during the Vietnam War. This view held for years and eventually gave rise to a muscular U.S. military force that smashed Saddam Hussein's forces in two wars but was ill-prepared for long guerrilla wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Today, most Iraq War veterans feel tremendous pride in their service, mixed with a deep cynicism regarding the Iraq War's goals and its outcome.
Those somewhat contradictory feelings have grown more intense in recent days. As the president weighed his military options in Iraq, Col. Steve Miska -- who spent 40 months in the country -- contacted his brother -- who is also a veteran of multiple Iraqi tours.
The war had consumed much of the two brothers' lives since the 2003 invasion. Now the two career soldiers -- one an officer, the other a sergeant major -- were on the verge of retirement.
"What a mess," Miska texted his brother as militants pressed toward Baghdad last week.
"Hopefully all our guys that gave their lives didn't do it for nothing," his brother replied.
The two then spoke on the phone. Miska insisted that their service -- especially during the 2007 surge -- had made a difference in Iraq. At that point in the war, Sunni and Shiite death squads had taken hold of the capital.
"I have no doubt that we helped stop a civil war," Miska recalled telling his brother. "I have no doubt we saved thousands of Iraqi lives."
Miska returned to Iraq for the last time in 2009 to command a battalion of about 800 soldiers. By then, much of the fighting had subsided. His troops, who occupied a desert base south of Baghdad, were mostly bored.
He left Iraq that last time hopeful that its feuding Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds would take advantage of the period of relative calm to make the kinds of political compromises that would result in a lasting peace.
For him, the current mess in Iraq defies any simple explanation.
"I don't think the military lost in Iraq," Miska said. "We created a window of opportunity. It just didn't break the Iraqis' way."
A Section on 06/20/2014