In 2002, there was no clear or present danger to U.S. security from Iraq. The mission was therefore ambiguous: Initially, it was to seize Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, a dubious claim. When they weren’t found, the mission became democracy, and when that failed, it evolved to stability. Without a concrete endgame, there were no benchmarks to measure progress toward a goal. As a result, the mission kept changing and the cost-benefit gap kept expanding.
I felt similarly about our intervention in Libya last year: What was the endgame? How would we measure our mission? The continued chaos in Libya today begs the question of whether it was thought through.
But this time in Iraq, our mission can be limited, with progress measured to determine whether the costs are worth the security benefits. That’s because the primary mission is not the removal and reconstruction of the Iraqi government; our real undertaking is to stop the radical terrorist group, ISIS (also known as Islamist State), from having a safe haven in Iraq… (more)
