Jamie Tobias Neely: Time to admit Iraq War errors

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to any television viewer with even a passing acquaintance with Showtime’s “Homeland.” The leader of the Islamic State, speculated to have been killed or injured in U.S. airstrikes last week, appeared to emerge unscathed on Thursday.

Of course, the top target, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is not dead. How else does this story’s plotline stay alive?

Al-Baghdadi’s voice appeared to be recorded this week, commenting on President Barack Obama’s decision to send an additional 1,500 American troops to Iraq and calling his followers to “erupt volcanoes of jihad” against its enemies. If that weren’t enough to swing the fictional Carrie Mathison into orbit, it certainly must have jolted her real-life counterparts.

Veterans of the Iraq War listen closely these days to the developments in that country, as the Islamic State exerts bloody control of much of the country’s north and central regions. Spokane’s Col. Darel Maxfield says, “It breaks my heart.” A retired lieutenant general, Daniel P. Bolger, writing in the New York Times this week, describes the Iraq War as a failure and calls for a nonpartisan, nonmilitary investigation of the war.

American generals weren’t prepared for the complicated nature of the opposition in Iraq or the deep skepticism of the Iraqi people, Bolger writes. He argues that the surge in U.S. troops wasn’t a success; rather, it only delayed the inevitable stalemate. U.S. generals owe the military members who served there a public accounting of that war, similar to the 9/11 Commission.

Maxfield argues that the war can’t be counted as a failure because the Iraqi people still have an elected government. He recalls his troops ferrying an Iraqi boy, born with his intestines outside his body, to life-giving surgery, and knows he made a lasting difference in that young man’s life. He believes the U.S. made “a horrible mistake” by ending the war without leaving U.S. military advisers behind.

Americans usually frame the conflicts in Iraq along religious lines, but Maxfield points out that tribal groups hold more power there than religious ones. Family lines go back centuries, and so do their grudges, their memories and their traditions of revenge. The Islamic State has found ways to appeal to tribal groups in Anbar Province, which the last Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, did not.

Maxfield agrees with Bolger that a public accounting of the Iraq War should take place, but he worries that the result would be drowned out by politics. He looks back and blames former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who insisted on going to war with far fewer troops than military experts recommended.

A Harvard Kennedy School study estimates that wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will ultimately cost the U.S. $4 trillion to $6 trillion. The Iraq War resulted in 4,476 deaths of American troops and 32,237 U.S. military members wounded in action, according to the U.S. Department of Defense. Estimates of Iraqi deaths vary wildly; some of the most conservative top 100,000.

This war was ill-planned from the beginning. It’s difficult now to see it as anything other than a mistake. A CBS-New York Times poll found in June that 75 percent of Americans surveyed had concluded that the war was not worth the loss of American lives and its other costs. Bolger writes that he realizes now that it would take decades of fighting to finally win a war in Iraq, and there’s no way the American public would ever have that kind of patience.

Instead, he calls for an unglamorous, limited campaign to fight Islamic State leaders selectively and for Americans to play a budget-minded “long game” that can contain them wherever they emerge. It’s not the stuff of heart-stopping battle narratives, but it’s preferable to defeat.

Maxfield agrees with that strategy. Each time the Islamic State leaders pop up, U.S. forces should help swat them back down.

It’s time for a game, he says, of “Whac-A-Mole.”