Nobody plans for a quagmire

Behind every military disaster is an honest mistake.

Smoke and flames rise at the site of airstrikes on an oil depot in Tehran on March 7, 2026. (Photo by SASAN)

They say that defeat is an orphan while victory has a thousand fathers.

So even though the invasion of Iraq was extremely popular in 2003, you rarely meet someone who’ll own up to having supported it at the time. Both that war and the one in Afghanistan shook out so badly that their architects have been retrospectively cast as a team of buffoons.

At the time, though, Colin Powell was the most popular public figure in the United States. Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were old policy hands with long and wide-ranging track records. Their actions were widely embraced by knowledgeable elites, including top former officials from the Bill Clinton administration.

Which is not to say that the ideas of these members of the George W. Bush administration were good or that their policies worked (clearly they were not and did not), just that it’s not right to think of what happened in the early aughts as “a bunch of clowns took over and wrecked things with their clowning.”

The danger of this line of thought is made clear, I think, by the way that Donald Trump seems to have talked himself into a new round of military adventurism in the Middle East. If the problem with the Bushies was that a bunch of morons got the United States sucked into “forever wars” through their obsession with nation-building, then the solution is to build a team that’s not made up of morons, a team that is relentlessly focused on lethality. They put their ideas to the test with a smaller-scale strike on Iran last year. Then again in Venezuela. And it worked, so why not try it again?

My son is 11 and he sometimes likes to play Risk, but he is psychologically resistant to the mathematical logic of the game, which says that anytime you outnumber your opponent even slightly you should attack with maximum aggression.

Trump is a guy who’s more comfortable with the idea of pressing the advantage.

He learned to love economic coercion via tariffs and other measures in his first term, and, though it did not get a lot of attention, he also greatly increased the pace of American drone strikes in countries around the world. In term two, he started dabbling in overt attacks and realized he’s not an idiot like the Bushies, so his wars are going to be quick and clean and get things done.

What all this misses is that this is exactly what the Bush administration thought they were doing.

In the 2000 campaign, Bush denounced nation-building and peacekeeping missions as a waste of time. His team contained many believers in a Revolution in Military Affairs involving (to quote a 2002 article) the “use of smart machines that allow networked, integrated forces to become more lethal at the same time they become more agile.”

Which is just to say that they didn’t intend to get bogged down in simultaneous counterinsurgency missions. It’s not like someone was sitting around the Pentagon saying that it would be a good idea to engineer a situation where, years after the invasion, Marines were engaged in intense house-to-house fighting in Anbar province, and years after that, isolated garrisons were trying to secure American interests in a country whose politics are dominated by pro-Iranian political parties.

Quagmires happen by mistake.

War is full of contingency and downside risk

Someone asked me the other day why I’m so obsessed with World War I, and it’s because it strikes me as the best-known and clearest example of major historical trends being driven by fairly contingent events.