Book excerpt: Eliot Cohen reflects on the costs of America’s post-9/11 wars

The controversies surrounding wars, and in particular, the Iraq war, will swirl into the old age of those who launched and conducted them. The partisan acrimony, and the regret many Americans feel at having wasted blood and treasure in the Middle East, makes it difficult to judge them accurately. Two of the wars — against al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan — were unavoidable. As for Iraq, no one can know what the Middle East would have looked like absent the 2003 war — whether Saddam Hussein would have resumed a quest for biological and nuclear weapons, whether the upheavals in the Arab world would have taken the course they did. It is also entirely conceivable that Saddam’s regime could have collapsed in a different way, perhaps in the context of another war with an Iran eager to repay old scores.

Still, the Iraq war was a mistake. The publicly articulated premise of an active and dangerous Iraqi weapons of massive destruction program was false; the credibility of the United States government took a severe blow from that alone. The war strained alliance relationships in many ways — with France, for example, which opposed the war, and no less, in some ways, with Great Britain, which supported and participated in it. The British population turned even more fiercely against the conflict and the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair that had launched it. As corrosive as the war was for American civil-military relations, it was far worse in the United Kingdom, whose overstretched army faltered in both Iraq and Afghanistan, losing domestic support, American trust, and perhaps even some self-respect as it did so. This weakening of what had been America’s most important global partner was a cost of the war that counted for little with the American public perhaps, but was enormously consequential.

The conduct of the war in Afghanistan went better in some ways, but as of 2015 the successes achieved there seemed fragile, as President Obama reluctantly agreed to a continuing combat role for American forces into the last year of his term in office. Endemic corruption, a resilient enemy based in neighboring Pakistan, and the country’s fragile politics meant that success, if it came in Afghanistan at all, would take years and most likely decades. Whether Americans would have the patience to stick it out was unclear.

Even the morally unambiguous war against al-Qaeda brought its share of woes. The waterboarding of prisoners undoubtedly did damage to America’s good name, whether or not it yielded actionable intelligence. The protracted targeted killing campaign in South Asia excited its share of animus against the United States, even if it went on with the tacit consent of some governments. And its very successes, which were real, may have lulled the U.S. government in 2011 and 2012 to thinking that it had Islamist terror on the run, when it was about to break forth in new, and possibly more virulent, forms.

These dismal conclusions must be balanced by an awareness of the real successes as well. By bringing down Saddam Hussein the United States eliminated one of the most brutal regimes in the Middle East. By overthrowing the Taliban it made possible a better life for millions of Afghans, particularly young women, millions of whom finally gained access to education no matter how rudimentary. And by conducting more than a decade of relentless attacks on Islamist terrorists the United States may have saved the world an even worse set of attacks by movements that, as we shall see in a later chapter, are deeply rooted and unlikely to disappear any time soon.

Wars must be judged by what they helped avoid as well as by what they produced. Those who direct them should be judged by what they knew and could have known, as well as what the underlying facts actually were. Once a war has been launched, even in error, one must judge how well or poorly it was waged, because it is possible to recover from a misconceived conflict. On all of these points, the wars of 2001 to the present offer a mixed and unsettling record.

Historians will almost surely frame these wars differently than contemporaries have, looking back more deeply into their roots in the 1970s and 1980s rather than with the foreshortened perspective of the day. They will see more contingency, and more of a mixed record, and almost certainly more complicated pictures of both presidents who directed them and the subordinates who waged them. For now, the best one can conclude is that the United States came out of this period with a tougher military but a more ambivalent political culture; a wiser sense of its own limits, perhaps, but possibly less resolution; a continued, if subdued, sense of its own uniqueness as a great power; and a desire to accommodate rather than confront rivals; but increasingly, an awareness that new challenges were rising and that in one way or another, force would be needed to meet them.

It is essential to reflect on these fifteen years of war. It will be equally important not to be overwhelmed by these experiences, or to read too much into them. To draw conclusions exclusively from them would be to misunderstand America’s strategic challenges, and the strengths which America can bring to bear on them. The threat posed by the enemies of the early twenty-first century is but one of multiple problems facing American leaders. Before examining in detail what those problems are, however, one more step remains: to review the American hand — the collection of resources, aptitudes, and capabilities relevant to hard power that the United States brings to its foreign policy.

Excerpted with permission from The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force, by Eliot A. Cohen. Copyright 2017. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, a division of PBG Publishing, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.