Creative Execution: What Great Leaders Do to Unleash Bold Thinking and Innovation

Reversal: Iraqi Freedom

For 10 years following the coalition victory in Desert Storm, Iraq and the United States fell into an on/off version of the phony war between France and Germany in 1939. Saddam Hussein slowly rebuilt the shattered Republican Guard divisions that had escaped destruction by the XVIII and VII Corps’s massive left hook, while the United States enforced a no-fly zone over the southern part of the country and imposed trade restrictions against Iraq. Oil could only be exported under the UN’s Oil-for-Food program, which yielded more than $30 billion by the year 2000. Despite its conclusive military outcome, Desert Storm failed to root out the main causes of Iraq’s unstable society: entrenched ethnic groups that could be held together ...