Decades later in Afghanistan, U.S. officials marveled at their own ingenuity — special forces on horseback, precision bombs and a regime toppled in mere weeks. Yet it was only days before the bombing started that Bush asked “who will run the country” once the Taliban was toppled — a fair question no one thought to ask before fueling the B-52s. The men on horseback were brilliant, but there was no theory as to what came next. Moreover, al Qaeda’s longtime leader Osama bin Laden remained at large.
Then came Iraq, with the war’s architects predicting a cakewalk in which U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators. But the occupation disbanded the Iraqi army, sending hundreds of thousands of armed, humiliated men into the streets with no jobs or prospects. The insurgency that followed should have surprised no one, and yet it surprised everyone.
The logic collapsed even faster in Iran. The strategy, such as it was, amounted to this: Kill the country’s supreme leader and hope for a more moderate successor. According to the New York Times, the U.S. and Israel pinned their hopes on former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — no moderate himself — filling the vacuum. But they had no plan for how to install him, no plan for what to do in case of failure, and no plan to prevent Tehran from doing what everyone knew it would: close the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping other than its own.
At this point, America’s repeated failures are too numerous, committed across too many decades by too many different leaders — Republican and Democrat alike — to be dismissed as coincidences. They reflect a deeper flaw in the American way of war.
So, what does a better way look like?
The starting point must be more humility and less hubris. Yes, the U.S. military is extraordinary — as the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January underscored. No other intelligence service could have found bin Laden, and no other military could have snatched him from deep inside Pakistan without anyone noticing. But these astounding capabilities are not a substitute for clear thinking and sound strategy.