On The Impossible Mission: The Office of Security Cooperation and the U.S. Forces Drawdown in Iraq

Robert L. Caslen Jr., DBA, and Katelyn K. Tietzen-Wisdom, PhD

 

In this episode of Conversations on Strategy, retired Lieutenant General Robert L. Caslen Jr. and historian Dr. Katelyn K. Tietzen-Wisdom discuss Caslen’s 2025 book, The Impossible Mission: The Office of Security Cooperation and the US Forces Drawdown in Iraq. The conversation explores the strategic challenges of the 2011 US drawdown in Iraq. The discussion highlights the complexities of war termination, highlighting the need to learn from the gap between policy expectations and on-the-ground reality.

Keywords: War Termination, Iraq Drawdown, Military Strategy, Security Cooperation, Robert Caslen

Listen Here.

Stephanie Crider (Host)
You are listening to Conversations on Strategy. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.
I’m talking remotely with Lieutenant General Robert L. Caslen Jr. (US Army, retired) and Dr. Katelyn K. Tietzen-Wisdom.
Caslen is a United States Military Academy honor graduate, a veteran of 43 years, and the author of The Impossible Mission: The Office of Security Cooperation and the U.S. Forces Drawdown in Iraq, published by Outskirts Press Incorporated in 2025.
Tietzen-Wisdom is a historian at the US Army Center of Military History in Washington, DC. She wrote a Parameters book review about The Impossible Mission.
Welcome to Conversations on Strategy, General Caslen and Dr. Tietzen-Wisdom.

Robert L. Caslen Jr.
Alright. Thank you.

Katelyn K. Tietzen-Wisdom
Thanks for having us.

Host
General Caslen, what inspired you to write this book?

Caslen
Well, you know, first of all, for the over 8,000 men and women from the United States military that gave their life for the country of Iraq and for its development and for what it potentially can be in the middle of a very hostile area in the Middle East, you know, we owe it to their service and their sacrifice. That’s number one.
Number two, I think there’s just tremendous opportunity for what Iraq can become and its impact, not only in its own country, but also for the Middle East. And it’s a very rocky road to get there. And, we talk about going to war, and there’s a lot of books written about going to war and more, but there’s not that much written about terminating a war, and the challenges—not only the policy decisions, but the challenges to develop the right strategies based on what the policies are and how to get congruence across different United States government departments, you know,  because everybody has their own vision. So, who’s got the responsibility to bring it together to get a unified vision of how that drawdown proceeds?
And then, it just doesn’t happen by leaving. People think that leaving a war terminates a war, and there’s so much complication. And, those that remain to kind of pick up the tasks that are still outstanding—like foreign military sales—they rely on authorities to be there and immunities to be there that come from Congress and from elsewhere. And, all of that has got to be put together. Someone’s got to put that strategy together across departments of the United States government, and it didn’t happen. So, we were the ones that experienced it during the drawdown and the aftermath. I ended up staying there for 22 months. So, it was a huge challenge, but there were so many significant lessons, strategic lessons, that needed to be learned so that when we go to the next war termination, we can do it properly.
Afghanistan was the next one, and you can just look back on recent history [and assess] whether we learned anything from Iraq or not, but there’s still a lot to be learned. So, that’s why the book was written.

Tietzen-Wisdom
And, if I can jump in, as a historian, I’m eternally grateful that General Caslen wrote this book because, like he said, this time period is kind of overlooked. There’s the invasion, the insurgency, civil war, and then it’s “boop!”—the US Army is out of Iraq, and we’re back into Afghanistan. And this book, for historians, is just treasure. Having this primary source from somebody who is not only there—multiple times in Iraq—but there at a pretty decisive point, it’ll help advance the scholarship of the Iraq War and not only honor those veterans and the servicemembers, but [it] will help inform future policy and strategy.

Host
Let’s start by talking about where things went wrong. Where do you think the mission truly became impossible and were the obstacles structural, political, or self-inflicted by the system?

Caslen
Well, interestingly enough, General Lloyd Austin was the MNF (Multi-National Force) commander on termination, and he’s the one that departed. He hired RAND Corporation to come in to try to capture some of the historical narratives of the war termination of what took place within MNF-I (National Force-Iraq).
As RAND was thinking about what was going to happen next with the OSCI (Office of Security Cooperation in Iraq) coming in, which I was the commander of, they knew that there were so many areas that still had to be resourced that were not. And, their comment of it, not mine—I didn’t come up with the name or anything like that—their comment in their book was, “What Caslen inherited, it was impossible. And he has an impossible mission.” And that was a perfect title for the book, I thought. So, not Mission Impossible or whatever. It’s The Impossible Mission, and it’s not something I came up with but something I felt very closely, you know, trying to bang my head against the wall because there were some impossible things that were going on out there. But RAND Corporation was the one that came up with that name, and having lived it and experienced it, it really was, if not impossible, about as close as you can get to being impossible.

Tietzen-Wisdom
I think, important for this time period, too, is that the US is facing a deadline that was imposed three years earlier, if we’re talking about towards the end of 2011 with the Status (of Forces Agreement), the SOFA agreement, as it was colloquially referred to as a security agreement and a cooperation agreement. But, the US has to withdraw all forces no later than 31 December 2011. And there was questions of whether the US would be able to stay or not.
Whether this was an impossible mission, I think there’s multiple layers to it, but one of the driving factors for why General Caslen was facing all of these headaches was, in my opinion, I think the United States underestimated the Iraqi political sphere that, for many Iraqis, US forces, no matter [their] intentions after, were seen as occupiers, and there was a US occupation. And so, any Iraqi politician that was willing to sign off on an extension that would have allowed US forces to stay beyond 2011, that was pretty politically fraught to contend with.
I also would argue that a lot of Americans, both in Iraq and in the Pentagon or in [the] State Department, believed that the Iraqis would ask for an extension, and there was this kind of complacency [implying,] “Oh, well, this will happen.” And General Caslen talks about in his book, he arrives in Iraq in September 2011, and he’s told by some pretty powerful policymakers on the ground that “Oh, yeah, this will work.”
And I think, too, that Iraq, in general, kind of gets caught up in this new change. There’s a new administration in [Washington,] DC. They’re shifting priorities to Afghanistan, and it’s almost like Iraq kind of became on the back burner. And General Caslen and his team are left trying to put these pieces together as there’s changing personnel, [changing] focus, there’s Iraqi politics [that] is becoming more and more independent and assertive. And so, I don’t know if there’s one specific issue that made it impossible, but there was just a lot that General Caslen’s team had to contend with.

Caslen
You know, as I was doing my research getting ready to deploy to try to find what my mission and my responsibilities were going to be, the national security objectives that General Austin had in MNF-I (Multi-National Forces-Iraq) were the exact same national security objectives that I inherited. General Austin had 50,000 soldiers. I had 157. So, when you just stop and look at the math based on your national security objectives that were given to you, how in the heck are you going to accomplish the same national security objectives that 50,000 soldiers had a hard time accomplishing, and now you’re going to do it for 157? And, that’s when RAND (Corporation) looked at that thing and said, “This is impossible,” you know?
But, there was a there was a lot of thinking in Washington, DC, that there was going to be a significant residual force—similar to what took place in Korea after the 1953 [armistice] out there in South Korea. You know, they had a couple divisions that stayed there, and they still have a division headquarters over there, you know, even to this day, some 60 some years later. So, a lot of people thought that if you’re going to secure those national objectives and continue them that you’re going to have to have some sort of residual force.
But, there were some people that were arguing in support of it. There were even people in Iraq that were arguing in support of it, but the conditions that were set by the United States government was that you had to have a security agreement and a SOFA agreement—two separate agreements—where the security agreement allows you to be there, and the SOFA agreement gives you immunities. And both of them expired on the 31st of December at war termination. And, there was a big argument whether we should continue to pursue to get the security agreement and the SOFA agreement or not.
We then threw it on top of Iraq’s legislature that they had to pass a law. We were underneath the United Nations law before that, but now that it expired, it was going to have to be Iraq that gave us the authority to be there and the authority for a SOFA for immunities. The most important one to our government was the SOFA for the immunities. And then behind the scenes—not behind the scenes, but very publicly, as Kate had said—we had just gone through a presidential election. And the president that came in, President (Barack) Obama said, “I’m going to tell you how we’re going to terminate war.”
He made this big speech about war termination and how, I mean, I could almost quote [him], he said, “Let me tell you how we’re going to terminate the Iraq war.” And, that was part of his campaign, you know. So, lo and behold, he’s elected. Now we’re in the middle of trying to see whether there’s going to be a security agreement and an extension of some type of residual force.
And then, I’m getting ready to go over there and I get a phone call from my West Point classmate, who’s the Deputy National Security Advisor, Lieutenant General and Ambassador Doug Lute. And Doug says, “Bob, come on over here. I want to talk to you.”
So, I said, “Yeah, I’d be happy to come over to the White House.” You know, [it was] my first time in the White House, there in the West Wing.
And he says, “I gotta tell you, you know, I know you guys are talking about putting a residual force together, but you got to remember what President Obama said about this.”
And I go, “Doug, I don’t remember what he said.”
He said, “You gotta remember. It’s important that you understand what he said.”
And I said, “Doug, I don’t know what he said.”
I said, “Doug, what did he say?”
He said, “This [was] at the Camp Lejeune speech. He said, ‘We are going to be out of Iraq at the end of our security agreement. That’s it. Period. We’re going to—there will not be a residual force.’ ”
I said, “Doug, there’s all kinds of people telling me that I gotta prepare this residual force. As a matter of fact, the Department of Defense put the 3rd Infantry Division commander to do his reconnaissance as a residual force.”
And when I was over there doing my reconnaissance, you know, I ran into him. I said, “What are you going to be here for?”
He goes, “I’m your, I’m going to work for you, sir. I’m going to be your security force.” So, the two-star headquarters as part of the residual force.
Of course, pending all of that, had to be on the Iraq side, a security agreement and an approved SOFA of which, as Kate so keenly reminds us, there was no intention whatsoever on any Iraqi legislature to approve a security agreement to extend United States forces in Iraq. They want it, now it’s their turn to live with it and to make it happen, and they wanted us to go home. And, that was pretty clear.
So, I’m stuck in the middle of whether there’s going to be a residual force or not. And, I kept saying, “What are our national security objectives? What is the strategy to achieve them? What are the resources to implement that strategy?”
And, that’s what we were trying to determine—whether or not we can make that happen. And in the end, Iraq failed to pass the legislation.
President Obama said, “That’s fine with me because that’s what was my political objection and what I was voted to office for—to terminate the war—and therefore, Office of Security Cooperation, you, and your 157 soldiers that will do the Foreign Military Sales program, are on your own. Good luck.”
I said, “Got it.”
Those are the circumstances that led to not having any residual force and just 157 military on the ground. And 700 contractors, too, by the way.

Tietzen-Wisdom
And, I think it’s a testament to how powerful domestic politics or domestic considerations impact military or operational standards or practices and that, [in] the United States, the Iraq war is unpopular. There is a global recession that is impacting the economy. For the new administration, Iraq is not in the forefront. In Iraq, the Iraqis will not let up on immunities. They do not want to grant immunities to US soldiers and part of that is a legacy of US misconduct in Iraq. [There are] numerous examples—Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Yusufiyah, and Nisour Square. And, like I wrote in the review, some, not all of those individuals faced some sort of justice, but for Iraqis, they were never tried in Iraqi court or [never] faced Iraqi punishment.
And, that was just something that they could not let go. Even if an Iraqi politician wanted US forces to stay behind, he could not publicly come out and say, “We can move past this.”
Even US detention operations—our officers who work in detention operations are constantly reminded of Abu Ghraib. And, that happened in 2003. This is 2011. That legacy is important both domestically for Iraqis and then, also, just any residual force to them, would just be a continuation of that quote unquote occupation. And, I don’t know if [the] United States wholesale acknowledged that or gave it enough credence as they probably should have.

Caslen
I would say it’s important for us in the military to understand the politics and then, we just can’t pretend they’re not there. We have to make sure that we understand what the politics were. And, of course, that led to the policy that that we were going to withdraw.
I’m not condemning or criticizing the politics, but the politics are what really led to the decision by the president of the United States for 100 percent withdrawal and not to have a residual force. And, we need to understand that. And then, you got to go through the strategic planning of what’s our goals? What’s our national objectives? What are the programs that will get us there in accordance with the policy that was stated by our commander in chief? And what are the resources for that?
And, a lot of those resources are authorities and SOFA agreements that come out of Congress. So, it’s not just a physical resource like a gun or something. It’s also the privileges and the authorities that only Congress can provide to get you there and to give you the authority to be there.

Tietzen-Wisdom
And, I’m sure it was beyond frustrating for US officers on the ground who are being told by the Iraqi counterparts, “We want you here. We want you here.” And then publicly, they won’t say that. But then on the flip side for President Obama, it would have been a political nightmare if US forces decided to stay post-2011 without a SOFA agreement and US soldiers were detained by Iraqi forces.
And, I think it would have cast a whole shadow on the nature of the strategic relationship between Iraq and the United States. If you’re allied forces are arresting your soldiers, how does one navigate that, both if you’re the ground commander and if you’re the politicians in DC? I think for any, anyone who advocates, [saying,] “Oh, it would have been easy if they just stayed behind,” or “No, they could have us operate without a SOFA,” there’s significant nuance there that you cannot overlook.

Host
What roles did Titles 10 and 22 play?

Caslen
Well, the proponent for Title 22 is [the] State Department, the proponent for Title 10 is [the] Department of Defense, now the Department of War. If you go back to what our mission statement said, and then, if you look at and kind of draw the line between what you were doing and where your authority came from with what you were doing [you can tell the difference].
So, for example, we were doing security cooperation. Security cooperation, by definition, is a Title 10 [function], but security cooperation includes security assistance. Security assistance is a foreign military sales [function], and security assistance is training to operate the equipment. That is, by law, a State Department proponency, or a Title 22 proponency. That’s the law—a Title 22.
But, there’s so much more that had to take place that was Title 10. We had to do negotiations with the Kurds and the Arabs. That was going on. We had to do collective training. We had to do exercise programs. We had to build up their doctrine, instill doctrinal programs. And, we were still helping them with a lot of the maintenance programs that were going on. All of those are Title 10 responsibilities. So, we, in the Office of Security Cooperation, had Title 10 responsibilities and Title 22 responsibilities. And the problem was, I had to get my authorities from CENTCOM (Central Command) for my Title 10 responsibilities, and the Department of Defense, and I had to get my Title 22 authorities through the ambassador to this Department of State.
Interestingly enough, all the way up until withdrawal, the primary—or the principal— department of the United States government in Iraq was Department of Defense. After withdrawal, [the] Department of State assumed those responsibilities.
So, [the] Department of State was telling me, “We don’t want you to do any more Title 10 whatsoever.”
I said, “Sir, there’s a lot of negotiation that’s gotta take place. There’s a lot of exercises that need to occur. We want Iraq to be a prominent contributor to defense, collectively, in the Middle East, and also, for their own internal threats. And that requires Title 10 tasks, some of which I just mentioned.”
And [the Department of] State said, “You are Title 22, you are not Title 10. You’re prohibited from doing those tasks.”
And then on the same time, I’m going from the Department of Defense, and they’re saying “No! You need to do this. This is important. We’re going to build a national objective, a military that can not only deal with its internal threats, but also its external threats, and to be a partner within the greater community, a contributing partner—which means they’re going to do exercises—there’s going to be Title 10 tasks and responsibilities that that are necessary.”
And, I don’t know why, but there was so much friction between Title 22/State and Title 10/Defense. We’re caught in the middle of it, and we knew we had the Title 22 Foreign Military Sales. But [for] all the other stuff that needed to happen, our hands were tied. And we were not able to do it because the principal department after transition was State, and State trumped Defense, just because by design that’s the way it was. And I don’t know [why]. My feeling, you know, because Defense had been in charge for eight and a half years. I think now [that] the State was in charge, they wanted to make sure that [the Department of Defense] knew that they were in charge. I mean, that’s kind of the impression we all got.

Tietzen-Wisdom
I agree, I agree. I mean, the Department of Defense had been in charge of Iraq since 2003, and then, it’s almost like it’s a marriage that was on the rocks. And then in 2009, things start getting, like, really, really tense. And then by the end of 2011, 2012, it’s divorce, if you will.
But, there were warning signs that went back to 2009. And I know, General Caslen, you were up in northern Iraq at this time. But, with the new administration coming in, there were already signals that the Department of State was going to be taking more of the lead as the US government wanted to transition out of Iraq, focus on Afghanistan, and also kind of put the State Department front and center.
And so, there was a lot of tension. There was tension between the Pentagon and [the Department of] State. There was tension on the ground between maneuver elements and the provincial reconstruction teams that are often led by State Department officials. And I think, like your book and your experience, is like—when people talk about tension between then–Department of Defense and Department of State, here is an actual example of what happens when this tension is so palpable, and what happens to an officer like yourself, General Caslen, where you’re stuck in the middle of this.
To me, it was interesting. In your book, you describe how there are instances where, like, the Department of State wants nothing to do with you, and then CENTCOM or the Pentagon is also like . . .  there are moments where it’s like, “Wait, you’re over there?” Like, “Who are you again?” Like, very last-minute consideration from the Department of Defense to its own element in Iraq. And, I think the fact that these warning signs were there in 2009, ’10, ’11, [but] come ’12, it’s out in the open. And, this leaves the last US military element in Iraq kind of caught in the middle, and it has to navigate the super bureaucratic process while also working with the Iraqis. That’s quite a tall order.

Caslen
Yeah. It even got personal because they started rumors that General Caslen is not able to get along with the ambassador, and they’re fighting internally inside of Baghdad. And that’s going on in Washington.

Host
 Wow.

Tietzen-Wisdom
Oh, boy.

Caslen
Well, I got a phone call, you know, from the Joint Staff saying, “What’s this, you’re not getting along with the ambassador?”
I said, “What are you talking about?”
You know, so I went to the ambassador, I said, “Sir, have you heard this? You know?”
And he goes, “I have not heard anything.” And, he says “We’ve got to put a stop to this.”
But that’s some of the personal stuff that was going on back in Washington that, you know, you get fingers pointed in your chest and [end up] being accused of stuff that’s not even [happening, that you are] not even thinking about, never mind being accused of.

Host
Let’s talk about ISIS. Do you think ISIS would have come into being if the US had left sooner?

Caslen
The United States returned and then, for the most part, defeated ISIS, at least in Iraq. What had taken place with US forces withdrawal is you want to keep a democratic government democratic. And the US forces presence was not so much to provide security for Iraq and to protect it from external/internal threats, but it was to keep the government democratic, so you don’t have authoritative motions coming back in that they’ve been used to for generations.
ISIS is radical Sunni, you know, and you have to keep that in the back of your mind and that’s kind of their ideology and where they come from. And [al-Qaeda leaders Ayman al-Zawahiri] and (Osama) bin Laden were tied to the same ideology, both of them from a Sunni perspective. And Iraq is majority Shia—and it’s like 65 percent Shia and about 25 percent Sunni. And, Saddam (Hussein) was a Sunni, as a minority ruling over, authoritatively, a Shia majority country. Now you have the Shias in charge because they are the majority, and then you got the ISIS that’s coming on board. But what created the ISIS—I just watched it day by day by day. You know, when we left, we had all of the radical leadership that we had collected over eight years in Camp Bucca, so that they had to all be returned to Iraq.
And [the] Iraq judicial system said, “We don’t have any evidence that we should hold them.”
So, they were released. So, you immediately had a surge on the withdrawal of US forces of eight-and-a-half years of radical leadership being surged back into the country and into the community.
Then you have what’s going on over in Syria, which is a Sunni-majority country, and a lot of them are foot soldiers. And then you had the disenfranchisement of the Sunnis via Prime Minister (Nouri) al-Maliki. Prime Minister Maliki, as soon as US forces left, he arrested his deputy prime minister. He arrested his deputy, his vice president. He arrested his most prominent and, well, popular Sunni parliament member, the finance minister. And then, that just polarized all the Sunnis. And they wanted to do what the Kurds did. [They] wanted to have their own separate country—similar to what the Kurds were trying to accomplish—or at least being semi-autonomous. But what they did is all the sheikhs that were up there—that owned all the lands and the properties up there in northern Iraq—they welcomed all of the returning foot soldiers that left Iraq during the surge into Syria. And then, they left Syria and come back into Iraq. So, you had the perfect trifecta. You had radical leadership. You had safe haven provided by the sheikhs, and you had foot soldiers.
And that was the birth of the ISIS ideology. Then you have the leadership that brought the ideology to fruition, and they created the caliphate up there. You started seeing the falls of the cities. And that’s about when I transitioned out to (Lieutenant General Mick) Bednarek. And then, you had the rest of what took place that required US forces to return, and they finally agreed to do that. And, there’s some drama behind who wanted them to return to help or not and whether or not the United States was going to come back anyway.
They did come back, but it was after I had left and transitioned over to Mickey Bednarek. But, those conditions that I just described, in my opinion, created the conditions that were necessary for the rebirth of ISIS. I call it the rebirth because they were pretty much defeated and flat on the ground and, all of a sudden, now they had new energy with the leadership coming back in there and the safe haven, and then the foot soldiers returning to do all the work that was necessary.
And you still had an ideology that had not been defeated. And as a result, you had the rebirth of ISIS. And then, you know, you saw ISIS becoming pretty significant. And Iraq took necessary provisions bringing US forces back in to defeat it and put it where it needed to be put. That’s a significant, historical piece there that I personally witnessed that I wanted to pass on and include in my book.

Tietzen-Wisdom
And, I think it’s kind of forgotten sometimes that the US is leaving right in the midst of the Arab Spring, which that kicked off—really started—like, December 2010, but really spread across the Middle East in spring of 2011. And there was—because of the rise of, like, Facebook and other social media—younger Arabs are asking why. They’re asking questions about their authoritative government.
So, there’s already this pervasive challenge to state legitimacy and authorities in the Middle East, and then you had the Syrian Civil War erupt. And, I think this is critical that those who say like, “Oh, if the US hadn’t left, there wouldn’t have been ISIS, or if they had stayed behind they would have been able [to] prevent it,” the Islamic State of Iraq had been severely, like General Caslen said, had been severely degraded over eight years of war in Iraq.
ISIS does not emerge without the fighters and the funding that are because of the Syrian Civil War. That just opened up a total hole in the Middle East in terms of in the eastern parts of Syria, northwestern parts of Iraq, along the border with Türkiye, you have fighters coming in from not only other parts of the Middle East and the Islamic world, but you have fighters coming from Europe or elsewhere. And, that really reinvigorates the Sunni insurgency. Like General Caslen said, some of Prime Minister Maliki’s actions do not help, and he is no angel whatsoever. And it’s ironic, the sense of, like, the United States in 2011 is saying they want Iraq to be a strategic partner, think long term, be prepared for external threats. Meanwhile, the greatest threat comes from internal.
But, I think to say to blame the United States withdrawal as for why ISIS emerges is [that] it ignores all of the work and sacrifice that the Americans are part of in degrading the Sunni insurgency. But, I don’t think ISIS would have been as successful as it was without the Syrian Civil War. And, I think that gets overlooked, that this really had nothing to do with the Americans. I don’t know if the Americans had been there, [if] say the Syrian Civil War kicked off in 2013—and this is completely hypothetical—and the Americans are there, they may not have been as successful. We obviously will never know that, but ISIS never would have been what it became without that conflict right next door. I think that that gets overlooked quite a bit.

Caslen
Can I just add one quick alibi.

Host
Sure. Yes.

Caslen
In dealing with these different groups that are out there, it’s really important to understand the ideology. Because you can kill a lot of people, but unless you kill the ideology, that ideology is going to rebirth itself over and over again. And our strategies have really got to address not only the military aspect of it by destroying something, but they’ve got to also address the mindset and the philosophical underpinnings that motivate these people to do what they’re doing, and that’s their ideology. And we have to have ways to, really, to deal with the ideologies—at least these radical ideologies are a threat—not only as an internal threat to these governments, but also external threats, as well.

Host
We have a few minutes. Do you want to share any concluding thoughts?

Caslen
I have a chapter in my book called “Is Iraq Worth the Investment?” You know, we went to war for eight-and-a-half years. We lost so many of our great Americans, men and women, both military and civilian, and was Iraq worth the investment of what we actually did and why we went to war in Iraq? You know, after 9/11, we went to war in Afghanistan to defeat the terrorist organization that had global capability and governments that provide a safe haven like the Taliban. We went to war in Iraq, according to those that were in the meetings that made the decision with the president to go to Iraq, to keep the world’s most dangerous weapons out of the hands of the world’s most dangerous people.
And, it was a preemptive war. And we—I’m not sure in the history of the United States that we had ever executed a preemptive war before. Normally, our wars are a reaction to activities against us. You know, think of Pearl Harbor and stuff like that. So, that’s a huge change. And then, [we must consider] the number of casualties that we have—that we’ve experienced. But, then you’ve got a representative government in the middle of the Middle East that, for generations, no one had ever seen that. Then you had transition from authoritative means of governance.
And, if it really works, and if Iraq is democratic and can remain democratic—without corruption, without some degree of corruption—you know, you are going to set an example and a spotlight in the middle of the Middle East for other nations to also follow in a similar manner. Not to mention that Iraq also has the fifth largest world reserves of oil supply, you know, for energy, for the nations, for the world.
But, the real big answer is whether or not Iraq can keep a democratic government democratic. When we left Iraq, it was a democratic representative government, but it quickly became authoritative. Over the following years, it slowly has gone back to representative. And, if they can really—matter of fact, I had someone tell me Prime Minister Maliki might have become the prime minister again.

Tietzen-Wisdom
He’s still around.

Caslen
Well, hallelujah, you know.  So, if they can really become representative and they can buy into it and protect it—those democratic nature foundings—then I think there’s a lot of potential for Iraq and for what we have done to Iraq to create those conditions.

Tietzen-Wisdom
And, if I can use General Caslen’s book as a shameless plug, as a historian, I get excited when I see servicemembers and veterans write about their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. It really helps my job as a historian [to] bring this conflict, this war, to the general audience to add that human element to it. And, in an era with backlog and declassifying documents and that bureaucratic headache, reading books like this—these primary sources—they are so important to tell these stories. And I just would hope—again, shameless plug—I hope that anyone listening to this that was also a veteran or servicemember looks at General Caslen’s book and goes, “I can do this. I’ve got my diaries and my green notebooks. I’ve got my notes.”
We will read them. We will talk about them. And, I encourage anyone who’s listening to this to do the same because General Caslen’s book is the first book that I can think of that talks about this time period in as much detail as it does, outside of [the] RAND study and other formal studies. But, to have that first-person account, it brings the history alive, and I can’t thank him enough for writing a book like this.

Host
Well, I just want to thank you both. I wish we had more time. This was a very interesting conversation, and I know we glossed over a lot of details but thank you for making time to speak with me today.

Tietzen-Wisdom
Thank you.

Host
Listeners, you can read the review at https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters_bookshelf/. For more Army War College podcasts, check out Conversations on Strategy, SSI Live, CLSC Dialogues, and A Better Peace.