war lessons they never learnt - vietnam and iraq

Not only did they not learn the right lessons from the Vietnam War, they  actually  learnt the wrong lessons that lessons were applied to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Richard Falk
Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Visiting Distinguished Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.

Lessons to be learnt from the Iraq War

The War was a serious setback for international law, the UN and world order, writes Falk.

After a decade of combat, casualties, massive displacement, persisting violence, enhanced sectarian tension and violence between Shias and Sunnis, periodic suicide bombings and autocratic governance, a negative assessment of the Iraq War as a strategic move by the United States, the United Kingdom and a few of their secondary allies, including Japan, seems unavoidable. 

Not only the regionally destabilising outcome - including the blowback effect of perversely adding weight to Iran's overall diplomatic influence - but the reputational costs in the Middle East associated with an imprudent, destructive and failed military intervention make the Iraq War the worst American foreign policy disaster since its defeat in Vietnam in the 1970s. 

Such geopolitical accounting does not even consider the damage to the United Nations and international law arising from an aggressive use of force in flagrant violation of the UN Charter, embarked upon without any legitimating authorisation as to the use of force by the Security Council. 

The UN hurt its image when it failed to reinforce its refusal to grant authorisation to the US and its coalition, despite great pressure from the US, to launch the attack. This post-attack failure was compounded by the fact that the UN lent support to the unlawful American-led occupation that followed. 

In other words, not only was the Iraq War a disaster from the perspective of American and British foreign policy and the peace and stability of the Middle East region, but it was also a serious setback for international law, the UN and world order. 

In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the US was supposedly burdened by what policymakers came to call "the Vietnam Syndrome". This was a Washington shorthand for the psychological inhibitions to engage in military interventions in the non-Western world due to the negative attitudes toward such imperial undertakings that were supposed to exist among the American public and in the government, especially among the military who were widely blamed for the outcome in Vietnam.

The Iraq War was a war of aggression from its inception, being an unprovoked use of armed force against a sovereign state in a situation other than self-defence. The Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals convened after World War II had declared such aggressive warfare to be a "crime against peace" and prosecuted and punished surviving political and military leaders of Germany and Japan as war criminals. 

We can ask why have George W Bush and Tony Blair not been investigated, indicted and prosecuted for their roles in planning and prosecuting the Iraq War. As folk singer Bob Dylan instructed us long ago, the answer is "blowin' in the wind", or in more straightforward language, the reasons for such impunity conferred upon the American and British leaders is a crude display of geopolitics - their countries were not defeated and occupied, their governments never surrendered, and such strategic failures (or successes) are exempted from legal scrutiny. 

These are the double standards that make international criminal justice more a matter of power politics than global justice. 

There is also the question of complicity of countries that supported the war with troop deployments, such as Japan, which dispatched 1,000 members of its self-defence units to Iraq in July 2003 to help with non-combat dimensions of the occupation. Such a role is a clear breach of international law and morality. 

Are there lessons to be drawn from the Iraq War? I believe there are. The overwhelming lesson is that in this historical period interventions by the West in the non-West, especially when not authorised by the UN Security Council, can rarely succeed in attaining their stated goals. 

More broadly, counterinsurgency warfare involving a core encounter between Western invading and occupying forces and a national resistance movement will not be decided on the basis of hard power military superiority. But rather by the dynamics of self-determination associated with the party that has the more credible nationalist credentials, which include the will to persist in the struggle for as long as it takes, and the capacity to capture the high moral ground in the ongoing struggle for domestic and international public support. 

It is only when we witness the dismantling of many of America's 700-plus acknowledged foreign military bases spread around the world, and see the end of repeated US military intervention globally, that we can have some hope that the correct lessons of the Iraq War are finally being learned. 

Until then, there will be further attempts by the US government to correct the tactical mistakes that it claims explain past failures in Iraq (and Afghanistan), and new interventions will undoubtedly be proposed in coming years, most probably leading to costly new failures, and further controversies as to "why?" we fought and why we lost. 

American leaders will remain unlikely to acknowledge that the most basic mistake is militarism itself, at least until challenged by robust anti-militarist political forces not currently on the political scene.   

  

Richard Falk is Albert G Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Visiting Distinguished Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/03/2013361029140182.html