If a Powell-Gates-Petraeus trio ran the show from the beginning...

[King]

Let's say Bush appoints Gates as SoD in 2001 instead of Rumsfeld, Powell is still SoS at the time, and David Petraeus becomes the guy in command when we invade Iraq in 2003.  How does the "War on Terror" look today?

[JSojourner]

Let's say Bush appoints Gates as SoD in 2001 instead of Rumsfeld, Powell is still SoS at the time, and David Petraeus becomes the guy in command when we invade Iraq in 2003.  How does the "War on Terror" look today?

Less of a clusterphuck but still pretty awful. 

[YRABNNRM]

Is Cheney still VP?

[Lief 🗽]

Let's say Bush appoints Gates as SoD in 2001 instead of Rumsfeld, Powell is still SoS at the time, and David Petraeus becomes the guy in command when we invade Iraq in 2003.  How does the "War on Terror" look today?

Less of a clusterphuck but still pretty awful. 

^^^^^

Iraq is still a disaster, Osama bin Laden still hasn't been captured.

[Frodo]

We would be much better off than we are today.  Even if Iraq were still invaded, its subsequent reconstruction would be less likely to be fu##ed up had we had the leadership of the above trio. 

[Kaine for Senate '18]

We'd be much better off.  We'd still have some issues, but the war would be going better; instead of a disaster, it would just be harder than we had thought.

[cannonia]

Maybe better?

The real problem is what we see at the beginning of every war, the peacetime army.  So many parts of the system, from promotion boards to procurement policies to "up or out", hurt the morale or effectiveness of the armed forces (usually to the benefit of someone on the inside).

Gates would have spent his first few years doing the same thing that Rumsfeld did: fighting with generals while trying to modernize the military.  During peacetime, generals get their jobs because they are good politicians, not because they have real military experience.

Rumsfeld's ideas for the military were great for Afghanistan: small elite units working with the locals to achieve results.  The introduction of "regular army" tactics and bureaucracy screwed things up there immensely.

Petraeus knows counterinsurgency.  That would have been a boon to have from the start of the Iraq war.  Also, having one commander throughout the operation would have helped tremendously.  Tommy Franks caused a lot of the problems in Iraq by setting his retirement date and not planning for anything past that day.  But would Petraeus have had the clout to fix what was broken in this scenario?  As is, we've been blooded and Petraeus was put there to make things better.  Had he been there from the beginning, could he have achieved the same results?

[12th Doctor]

It depends.

The biggest mistake we made in Iraq was not destroying the Republican Guard when we had the chance.  Avoiding the fight might have cost us a fewer casualties back in 2003, but we payed for it with how ever many deaths later on, and the missed opportunity at as much as a year and a half of stability we could have had to prepare for the arrival of Islamic extremists.

Obviously, the Pentagon forgot something that we learned long ago... wars are won by destroying the enemies forces, not by capturing symbolic targets.  The rush to Baghdad might have looked better on TV, but it was horrible, from a strategic perspective.

[Middle-aged Europe]

Another (minor?) detail: Paul Bremer should have been administrator of Iraq right from the beginning instead of Jay Garner. Garner was in charge only a very short period of time, but this period was perhaps the most critical one.

And while we're at it... why not Colin Powell as Secretary of Defense from January 2001 on? And McCain as VP.

[The Duke]

Powell would still have been a disloyal, self-serving, duplicitous prick and would have been waging a bureacratic war on Gates/Petraeus instead of Rumsfeld/Franks.

I think the military situation on the ground would have been much better.

Another (minor?) detail: Paul Bremer should have been administrator of Iraq right from the beginning instead of Jay Garner. Garner was in charge only a very short period of time, but this period was perhaps the most critical one.

And while we're at it... why not Colin Powell as Secretary of Defense from January 2001 on? And McCain as VP.

Jay Garner was only there for a month or so anyway.  Paul Bremer was a disaster and should never have been sent at all.

There should not have been an American adminisrator at all.  We should have put together an Iraqi government before even invading and installed them as the new government from day one.

There was no Paul Bremer type figure in Afghanistan, we went straight to an Afghan government and it has worked out much better.

[Albus Dumbledore]

The Iraq war was pointless and a waste of money.

[Stranger in a strange land]

Things would be bad, but not as bad as they are now. I doubt Petraeus would have disbanded the Iraqi Army or allowed the orgy of looting to continue for weeks before doing anything about it. He would definately have paid greater attention to cultural sensativity and relations with local leaders, clerics, and tribal sheiks.

[The Duke]

Things would be bad, but not as bad as they are now. I doubt Petraeus would have disbanded the Iraqi Army or allowed the orgy of looting to continue for weeks before doing anything about it. He would definately have paid greater attention to cultural sensativity and relations with local leaders, clerics, and tribal sheiks.

Disbanding the Iraqi Army was the right thing to do.

First of all, the Army had already disbanded itself.  There is no reason to think Shi'ite soldiers conscripted into service by Saddam would have heeded an order to serve in an Army they never wanted to be a part of to begin with.

Second, making the recreation of the main tool by which Saddam oppressed his people our first act as occupiers of Iraq would have poisoned our image in the eyes of the Iraqi people.

Third, the Saddam-era security services we did keep proved to be more a harm than a help in post-war Iraq.  We did keep the Saddam era police forces intact and they proved to be brutish and disloyal and were hated by the population.  We had to later disband this force and start a new police force fro scratch.  We also reconstituted part of the Army in the form of the Fallujah Brigade, and it turned out to be one of our worst mistakes of the occupation.

[AltWorlder]

What if Condi was SoS instead of Powell?

[Albus Dumbledore]

Iraq would be better run and the dems don't have congress.

[Orser67]

What if we hadn't decided to ban the B'aath party?  And how about if we had had UN support?

[Albus Dumbledore]

Wouldn't work. The UN more or less exists soley to constrain the first world's freedom of action. If it's not something that's meaningless to first world interests or actively against it he UN will block it.

[dead0man]

History is going to slaughter Rumsfeld.  He is the reason the first 2 years of Iraq were as mucked up as they were.  Granted Bush put the dumbass there and then backed him while he proved himself repeatedly to be unable to complete the job, so he deserves and will get his fair share of abuse from history.  But Rummy might reach Nero* levels of historical incompetency.





*Nero doesn't really deserve the abuse he gets.

[Stranger in a strange land]

Wouldn't work. The UN more or less exists soley to constrain the first world's freedom of action. If it's not something that's meaningless to first world interests or actively against it he UN will block it.

untrue: the General Assembly has little real power. Of the Permanent 5 Members of the UN security Council, 3 are 1st World, one is 2nd World, and the other is somewhere between 2nd and 3rd World.

What if we hadn't decided to ban the B'aath party?  And how about if we had had UN support?

If France and Russia had gone along, or at least not been actively opposed, things would probably have gone better. Granted, there still would have been huge problems. Bush might not have gotten a Western-style Iraqi Democracy, but seeing as he didn't get it anyway, things wouldn't have been any worse.

[The Mikado]

Wouldn't work. The UN more or less exists soley to constrain the first world's freedom of action. If it's not something that's meaningless to first world interests or actively against it he UN will block it.

untrue: the General Assembly has little real power. Of the Permanent 5 Members of the UN security Council, 3 are 1st World, one is 2nd World, and the other is somewhere between 2nd and 3rd World.

What if we hadn't decided to ban the B'aath party?  And how about if we had had UN support?

If France and Russia had gone along, or at least not been actively opposed, things would probably have gone better. Granted, there still would have been huge problems. Bush might not have gotten a Western-style Iraqi Democracy, but seeing as he didn't get it anyway, things wouldn't have been any worse.

What definition are you using of "First World/Second World/Third World?"  I always thought that the First World was the US and its rich capitalist allies, the Second World the Soviet Union and its Communist allies, and the Third World the countries that the two sides feuded over, mostly decolonized states in Africa, the Middle East, and Southern/Southeast Asia, as well as Latin America.  I don't see how those terms are relevant to anything since 1991.