Not really. I don't think the objective of the War in Iraq was ever to "save innocent Iraqis from being killed" whatever the media and politicians might have said. It was about stabilising an increasingly unstable regime in the middle of a very unstable region.
Likewise, it's not necessary to kill innocent Iraqis in order to stabilise Iraq, but rather it should be acknowledged (and should have been factored into pre-war decision making) that it was practically inescapable that despite best efforts many innocent Iraqis would be killed, and that this would have a rather significant impact on the country's progress towards stability.
This is the fundamental contradiction of counterinsurgency: our mission can only succeed if we have the population on our side, but in order to bring security innocent people will collaterally die. The trick, according to Patraeus, is to limit those deaths so the population doesn't turn against them.
I continue to think that the shooting in the Wikileaks video was an unjustified expression of confirmation bias, but that's to be expected in a war zone. What's especially offensive about that video, that none of the defenders have tried to explain, is why they laugh heartily when the vehicle runs over the dead body. Or why they're saying, "pick it up, just pick it up," to a guy bleeding to death and crawling around on the ground.
That's not the attitude soldiers involved an a counterinsurgency should have, according to Patraeus.
Based on what I have read, I think the US could have actually succeeded in stabilising Iraq, but it all came down to how they operated in the weeks (not months, weeks!) immediately after the fall of Saddam's regime. Fact is they could have won the war right then, if they'd done everything right. If they'd even done some things right they would have improved the odds. Instead, almost inexplicibly, they did virtually everything wrong.
I agree with that, with the caveat, of course, that it could have gone to hell, anyway, and whenever we leave Civil War is a possibility.
No one really saw the Czechoslovakia mess coming, and all of those factions had a much longer history of peaceful co-existence that Sunni-Shia-Kurd.
But overall, I think you're right. This is one of the reasons why the Wikileaks were illustrative, if for no other reason that to confirm suspicion. We thought the war would be cake-walk, and when it wasn't, the military/political leadership lied about for a number of years. Wikileaks shows pretty conclusively that they were lying, and not just making mistakes.
Afghanistan was, of course, a whole different kettle of fish. The objective there was much simpler - to neutralise Al Qaeda's ability to operate in the country and use it as a safe haven. I think they actually succeeded in that admiraly, problem is they either didn't factor in, or drastically underestimated Al Qaeda's ability to operate elsewhere. I think, in part, that mistake was due to a false presumption that Al Qaeda was a heavily regimented entity with a centralised control structure.
It was simple to destroy the Taliban and run Al Qaeda out of town. Establishing civilized society where none has existed for thousands of years has proven to be a bit trickier.
Instead it's more of a training operation that lets its graduates loose in the world to do their own thing. While we've shut down their high quality training operations, and that's of benefit, the fact is we still have a good couple of decades of graduates loose in the world, of varying levels of competence and with varying agendas, and plenty of those graduates are capable of setting up their own decentralised training regimes.
We haven't so much defeated Al Qaeda as diluted it. While it might not be capable of staging these flashy multi-pronged explosive attacks any more, that's unlikely to be much comfort to the victims of Islamic terrorism who die unreported and unremarked every year.
I just don't think a military will ever be able to deal with groups like Al Qaeda by invading countries. Again, 9-11 was a crime commited by Saudis, planned in Europe, and executed in America. Faisal Shahzad was just a dude from Connecticut. This latest Somali guy was living in the US.
We've spent trillions of dollars fighting foreign wars and all it takes is for a disgruntled barbarian living in Omaha to walk into the new Harry Potter movie with some explosives and terrorism escaped the scope of our military campaign.
