Boots on the ground

The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq began with "shock and awe" from the air, but also included a ground invasion by two divisions of the U.S. military: one Marine, and one Army, commanded by James Mattis and David Petraeus. Perhaps you've heard of them.

The U.S. forces fought their way north, each division keeping to its own side of the Tigris river, to Baghdad, which quickly fell. Statues of Saddam toppled. Celebrations erupted, in the U.S. and in Iraq. George W. Bush proclaimed "Mission Accomplished."

But the mission was not accomplished. An insurgency soon took hold and grew in fury over the years. Americans became intimately acquainted with the concept of the "improvised explosive device," or IED. Brutal battles were fought in Fallujah and, thirteen years after the initial invasion, Mosul. The U.S. administration that ruled the country hunkered down in the highly fortified "Green Zone" in Baghdad. U.S. forces were dying there, and elsewhere.

In August 2005 I wrote:

Taking stock of our unwanted property is discouraging: The constitution writing process in Iraq is in shambles, with the Shiites and Kurds unwilling to compromise with the Sunnis. The U.S. death toll nears the 2000 mark. The insurgency is well entrenched and more deadly than ever. Shiite militias rule the south. The U.S. military is stretched almost to the breaking point and desperately wants to begin a discrete exit, but still needs to appear resolute. President Bush says that as Iraqi forces are able to stand up, U.S. forces will stand down, but the number of Iraqi forces able to fight without U.S. assistance is dismally low. The President's approval ratings are in the toilet, and Americans are drawing parallels between Iraq and Vietnam.

Meanwhile the people of Iraq are caught in a violent maelstrom of bombings, assassinations and instability. The electricity won't stay on and the oil won't flow. More than two years after Bush's strutting about under a "Mission Accomplished" banner, Iraq is in chaos. In 2004 the CIA described three possible scenarios for the future of Iraq; one of them was that the country would descend into civil war. That outcome seems as likely as ever.

This is the place that we broke and now own.

The U.S. invasion led to the emergence of the insurgency group Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Despite Bush administration lies before the invasion, Al-Qaeda hadn't previously been active in Iraq. Now it was. The invasion and insurgency also gave later birth to the Islamic State, which Iraqi and U.S. forces fought to expel from Mosul in 2016. The Islamic State also captured portions of Syria, and the U.S. fought it there, as recently as this year.

Perhaps most significantly with respect to current events, the U.S. invasion of Iraq profoundly altered the balance of power in the region, thereby causing a substantial elevation in the power and influence of Iran as a noxious force in the Middle East. Talk of unintended consequences. Everything is connected.

It's oft and truly said that air power alone can only accomplish so much: To effect real change there need to be "boots on the ground." In 2003 the U.S. supplied boots in large numbers, but even that was not nearly sufficient to ensure a desirable or predictable outcome. No wonder the title of one book on the Iraq war was Hubris. Another was Fiasco.

More than 4,000 U.S. forces died in the Iraq war. The number of civilian deaths is likely in the hundreds of thousands.

Here we are, more than a week after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran. The lessons from Iraq loom large, or should. What will be the unintended consequences this time? How far into the future will those unintended consequences stretch? Iraq showed that substantial military power alone cannot subdue and control a country, or make it what we want it to be.

The U.S. action now seems far less thought out than even the Iraq invasion. There has never been a coherent explanation to the Congress or the country about objectives or endgame. Iran is a far larger country than Iraq, both geographically and in population. The Islamic regime that has ruled the country for decades is well entrenched and deep. Decapitating it from above will not destroy it. The regime-hating populace is large but weak and unorganized. Saying that the people of Iran should take control of their government, as Trump did, is absurdly naive.

U.S. leaders are presently relishing the violence that comes with unchallenged control of the skies. A seemingly giddy Pete Hegseth reveled in "death and destruction from the sky all day long." Where will all that death and destruction lead? One lesson from Iraq is that boots on the ground might be necessary but not sufficient. These are early days. What misery will follow in the weeks, months, and years ahead is not at all clear. The dice have been rolled, all without the consent of the American people or their elected representatives.

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved 

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