At least a learning ground

I will state my position, I think:

• we were lied to, to go fight Iraq.
• the invasion of Iraq was a master piece of military planning and execution.
• that the post invasion follow up has been militarily well done.
• that the effort in Iraq has spared Iran and North Korea similar fates.
• that who ever it was in the War College that didn't brief the National Security Advisor that there would be problems with the politics of Iraq should be shot.
• Rummy has done an good job (This opine will get me in more trouble than the rest!)

What we take away from Iraq has to be learnt by the Politicians as much as the Generals, if not far more so. We don't have a war time army anymore, it's a volunteer army. We wanted this type of Army so that we could hit an enemy between the eyes in a way they had never been seen before, by highly trained professionals, not a crowd of folk that wanted to be elsewhere - and it has worked. The downside is we don't have 2 million troops to sit around like we did in Germany and Japan in 1945; we don't have the bodies in depth needed to police a conquered State. Our future political thinking has to be coloured by this. The military option is certainly a powerful deterrent, but while the teeth are sharp and the jaws powerful, there is no tail, there is no ability to hang out long anywhere except Grenada - and it won't get crowded even there!

Military thinking may be swayed by the borderless vagabonds we see today, but this state of affairs will not last. We see in Palestine the growth of a much hated organization into a maturing governing body with all that entails. We may not like what we see, but it is a legitimate entity, one desired by the people - who also want schools, jobs and hospitals - and a place in the world. Real enemies may be hard to come by for a time, but they will arise, economics guarantees it.

We have developed net-centric warfare to a fine art thanks to Messrs Hussein and Co. But by developing it we have given the rest of the world a means to also develop similar skills. We need to look at how the Iraqi 'insurgents' are working and see how they are evolving to deny us information, and use that so we can enter the next skirmish well prepared to go up against a net-centric power and defeat them as they use our tools against us.

There is a lot to learn from Iraq. Let us hope the military can extricate itself in due course, hopefully after things have settled down, and that politicians will be less brazen about sending young men in Blue and Green out to do the dirty work of foreign diplomacy.