Snuffysmith
Jul 31 2006, 04:35 PM
Books of The Times
From Planning to Warfare to Occupation, How Iraq Went Wrong
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/25/books/25....html?ref=booksBy MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: July 25, 2006
The title of this devastating new book about the American war in Iraq says it all: “Fiasco.” That is the judgment that Thomas E. Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post, passes on the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq and its management of the war and the occupation. And he serves up his portrait of that war as a misguided exercise in hubris, incompetence and folly with a wealth of detail and evidence that is both staggeringly vivid and persuasive.
FIASCO
The American Military Adventure in Iraq
By Thomas E. Ricks
By virtue of the author’s wealth of sources within the American military and the book’s comprehensive timeline (beginning with the administration’s inflammatory statements about Saddam Hussein in the wake of 9/11, through the invasion and occupation, to the escalating religious and ethnic strife that afflicts the country today), “Fiasco” is absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how the United States came to go to war in Iraq, how a bungled occupation fed a ballooning insurgency and how these events will affect the future of the American military. Though other books have depicted aspects of the Iraq war in more intimate and harrowing detail, though other books have broken more news about aspects of the war, this volume gives the reader a lucid, tough-minded overview of this tragic enterprise that stands apart from earlier assessments in terms of simple coherence and scope.
“President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 ultimately may come to be seen as one of the most profligate actions in the history of American foreign policy,” Mr. Ricks writes. “The consequences of his choice won’t be clear for decades, but it already is abundantly apparent in mid-2006 that the U.S. government went to war in Iraq with scant solid international support and on the basis of incorrect information — about weapons of mass destruction and a supposed nexus between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda’s terrorism — and then occupied the country negligently. Thousands of U.S. troops and an untold number of Iraqis have died. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent, many of them squandered. Democracy may yet come to Iraq and the region, but so too may civil war or a regional conflagration, which in turn could lead to spiraling oil prices and a global economic shock.”
Much of the material dealing with the time just before the war has been chronicled in earlier books (not to mention an outpouring of newspaper and magazine articles), but Mr. Ricks provides a succinct narrative that emphasizes how this period “laid the shaky foundation for the derelict occupation that followed.” He reminds us that when it came to the threat posed by Mr. Hussein, the administration consistently emphasized “worst-case scenarios” even as it was “ ‘best-casing’ the subsequent cost and difficulty of occupying the country.” And he shows how this blinkered outlook resulted in a failure to plan for the realities of the occupation and a failure to allocate sufficient manpower and resources.
Mr. Ricks’s narrative is based on hundreds of interviews and more than 37,000 pages of documents, and many of the book’s most scorching assessments of the White House and Pentagon’s conduct of the war come from members of the uniformed military and official military reports.
An after-action review from the Third Infantry Division underscores the Pentagon’s paucity of postwar planning, stating that “there was no guidance for restoring order in Baghdad, creating an interim government, hiring government and essential services employees, and ensuring that the judicial system was operational.” And an end-of-tour report by a colonel assigned to the Coalition Provisional Authority memorably summarized his office’s work as “pasting feathers together, hoping for a duck.”
Mr. Ricks writes in these pages as both a reporter and an analyst, and many of his findings amplify observations made by other journalists and former insiders in earlier books: namely that the Bush White House routinely ignored the advice of experts (be they military, diplomatic or Middle East experts); that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s determination to conduct the war with a light, fast force had crippling consequences for the American military’s ability to restore law and order in post-invasion Iraq; and that infighting between the State and Defense Departments, between civilians at the Pentagon and the uniformed military, and between the military and the Coalition Provisional Authority severely hampered the making and execution of United States policy.
“Fiasco” does not possess the dramatic combat details of “Cobra II” by Michael R. Gordon (chief military correspondent for The New York Times) and Bernard E. Trainor (a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general and former military correspondent for The Times), but unlike that book, which basically ends in the summer of 2003, it goes on to chronicle America’s flailing efforts to contain a metastasizing insurgency over the next three years.
Mr. Ricks argues that the invasion of Iraq “was based on perhaps the worst war plan in American history,” an incomplete plan that “confused removing Iraq’s regime with the far more difficult task of changing the entire country.” The result of going in with too few troops and no larger strategic plan, he says, was “that the U.S. effort resembled a banana republic coup d’état more than a full-scale war plan that reflected the ambition of a great power to alter the politics of a crucial region of the world.”
This was partly a byproduct of the Pollyannaish optimism of hawks like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, who slapped down the estimate by the Army’s chief of staff, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, that several hundred thousand soldiers would be required to secure Iraq. And it was partly a byproduct of a conviction shared by Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen. Tommy Franks that speed, in Mr. Ricks’s words, “could be substituted for mass in military operations.”
Mr. Rumsfeld’s stubborn reluctance to acknowledge a growing insurgency and his resistance to making adjustments, Mr. Ricks says, contributed further to the military’s problems on the ground. A continuing shortage of troops meant that borders could not be sealed, armament caches could not be secured, and security and basic services could not be restored. As a consequence support for the occupation rapidly dwindled among the Iraqis.
To make matters worse, Mr. Ricks adds, the Army seemed to have “forgotten almost everything it had learned in the Vietnam War about counterinsurgency.” During 2003 and much of 2004 effective counterinsurgency measures aimed at winning the political support of the Iraqi people were not being employed; instead, an emphasis was put on “the use of force, on powerful retaliation and on protecting U.S. troops at all costs.”
There were mass roundups of Iraqis (many of them bystanders caught up in the sweeps), and some of those detainees were harshly treated by American troops who had not been “trained or mentally prepared for the mission” they faced in postwar Iraq. Mr. Ricks sees the Abu Ghraib scandal not as an anomalous incident but as “the logical and predictable outcome of a series of panicky decisions made by senior commanders, which in turn had resulted from the divided, troop-poor approach devised months earlier by Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen. Franks.”
Mr. Ricks notes that the Bush administration has tended “to dismiss critics as ‘Monday morning quarterbacks,’ ” but he points out that that phrase “conveniently disregarded the fact that many of the critics had expressed their worries before the war even began.” His book is replete with warnings from Middle East experts and military veterans (like Gen. Anthony C. Zinni and Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf), who presciently cautioned that the invasion and its aftermath would not be as simple or as fast as many in the administration predicted.
In late 2002, Mr. Ricks reports, 70 national security experts and Mideast scholars met at the National Defense University to discuss the looming war and concluded that occupying Iraq would “be the most daunting and complex task the U.S. and the international community will have undertaken since the end of World War II.” The group’s emphasis on the importance of “maintaining a secure environment” in post-invasion Iraq and its recommendation against a swift dissolution of the Iraqi military would be ignored in the ensuing months.
“It isn’t clear that a large and persistent insurgency was inevitable,” Mr. Ricks concludes, adding that “the U.S. approach, both in occupation policy and military tactics, helped spur the insurgency and made it broader than it might have been.” Among the crucial post-invasion missteps made by the Bush administration, he suggests, were the decision, after the fall of Baghdad, not to send two additional divisions of troops immediately, which might have helped keep the lid on the insurgency, and the orders issued by the head of the American occupation, L. Paul Bremer III, disbanding the old Iraqi army and banning thousands of Baath Party officials from returning to their government jobs.
The failure to contain the insurgency would have dire consequences as the war dragged on. While the occupation of Iraq (which Mr. Wolfowitz had predicted would basically pay for itself through oil revenue) was costing American taxpayers an estimated $5 billion a month in 2004 and 2005, the chaos-ridden country was replacing Afghanistan as a training ground for a new generation of terrorists. Meanwhile, writes Mr. Ricks, the United States Army found itself in a strategic position that “painfully resembled that of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the early 1980’s.”
Not only had the war “stressed the U.S. Army to the breaking point,” a study published by the Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute declared, but it had also turned out to be “an unnecessary preventive war of choice” that “created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland” against further attacks from Al Qaeda. The war “was not integral” to the global war on terrorism, the report concluded, but was a costly “detour from it.”
Snuffysmith
Sep 13 2006, 09:28 AM
Readers may be interested in the following article which looks at the military co-responsibility for Iraq. It is written by Joseph Galloway, a former military correspondent for Knight Ridder newspapers and author of "We Were Soldiers Once". The article reviews Thomas Ricks' new book Fiasco.
Uniform Disaster
In blowing the Iraq war, Bush and Rumsfeld have had plenty of help—from the
generals.
Joseph Galloway, WashingtonMonthly 10/06
Unless the Visigoths are knocking at your gate and darkness threatens to
consume the civilized world, wars are generally a mistake—a confession of a
government’s failure to find some other way of settling disputes short of
sending out 19-year-olds with rifles to kill other 19-year-olds.
And even the most righteous of wars throughout history are riddled with
errors large and small, strategic and tactical, that are paid for with the
blood of soldiers and civilians. All of it falls under the term “fog of war”
. The only righteous major war of the 20th century, which consumed some 60
million lives, was rife with bloody mistakes.
Even so, the current and ongoing war in Iraq may yet be written in history
as the only war that was a total mistake from beginning to end, where
virtually every decision taken both by the civilian leadership, which began
it on false pretenses and an overdose of arrogance and ignorance, and the
military leadership, which bungled and bumbled and knuckled under, was
wrong, wrong, wrong.
When those future historians begin their search for how such a thing could
happen, Washington Post veteran military correspondent Tom Ricks’s most
aptly titled book Fiasco will be an invaluable starting point. Ricks pulls
it all together—how the Bush administration, prodded by its neoconservative
handmaidens, took us into an unnecessary war in a tinderbox country and
region, and then screwed it up big time.
The dedication of Fiasco is simple: “For the war dead.” This is followed by
a simple quotation from fourth-century B.C. military strategist Sun Tzu:
“Know your enemy, know yourself, one-hundred battles, one-hundred
victories.”
The confluence of arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence is stunning—and by
now familiar to even the most casual consumer of the news. Ricks rightly
notes that the fault lies foremost with President Bush, but he declares that
“it takes more than one person to make a mess as big as Iraq.” The failures
were systemic: major lapses within the national-security bureaucracy, from a
weak National Security Council to an overweening Pentagon and a confused
intelligence apparatus, coupled with the almost complete lack of oversight
by Congress and the media.
All of this combined to create a haunting, costly and deadly debacle whose
ending has yet to be written three and a half years, 2,550 dead American
soldiers, and $300 billion of taxpayer money later.
But what sets Fiasco apart from other histories of the Iraq war is Ricks’s
account of the inadequacy of the military leadership. Ricks, who interviewed
more than a hundred senior military officers and sifted through some 30,000
pages of official documents, is withering: “While the Bush
administration—and especially Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and L. Paul
Bremer III—bear much of the responsibility for the mishandling of the
occupation in 2003 and early 2004,” he writes, “blame must also rest with
the leadership of the U.S. military, who didn’t prepare the U.S. Army for
the challenge it faced, and then wasted a year by using counter-productive
tactics that were employed in unprofessional ignorance of the basic tenets
of counter-insurgency warfare.” Ricks notes that in that long, desolate
post-Vietnam period when the Army was rebuilding itself, it had deliberately
thrown away all the lessons in counter-insurgency warfare learned at so high
a price in that bitter decade-long war.
Formal Pentagon consideration of how to attack Iraq began in November of
2001 when, in the wake of 9/11, Under Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz’s
decade-long, wrong-headed obsession with overthrowing Saddam Hussein gained
currency in the administration. Wolfowitz, whose extended family had
perished under the Nazis, saw the Iraq conflict as he did most geopolitics,
through the prism of the Holocaust. But it was a flawed analogy: as the
former head of Central Command (CENTCOM) Gen. Anthony Zinni pointed out,
Saddam was less Adolf Hitler than Tony Soprano. But to Wolfowitz containment
smacked of appeasement. And so the push to persuade the higher-ups to go to
war began.
From the outset, there was tension between the uniformed military
leadership and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld over two issues: whether to invade
Iraq at all and, if so, how many troops would be needed. Army leadership
rightly wanted to maintain focus on finishing the job in Afghanistan where
the Taliban regime had just fallen, and where al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden
were on the run.
U.S. Central Command, which had responsibility for 32 nations in the Middle
East and the Horn of Africa including Iraq, was caught between Army caution
and Rumsfeld’s impatience, according to Ricks. Zinni’s replacement as
CENTCOM commander, Army Gen. Tommy Franks, began shuttling between his
headquarters in Tampa and Washington. Franks—described by Ricks as “a
cunning man, but not a deep thinker”—would become the fulcrum in planning
for the war and eventually would buy into Rumsfeld’s vision of a
technological revolution in warfare that would allow the U.S. military to do
far more with less. Moreover, Franks was a disaster as a commander: He was
tyrannical and routinely abusive to his subordinates. This not only
contributed to low morale but tended to ensure that no bad news would travel
up to him. “You would find out you can’t tell the truth,” said one officer
who worked for Franks.
The Iraq war plan Franks had inherited from Zinni called for any invasion
force to number some 350,000 troops including three heavy-armor divisions.
That plan was swiftly discarded by Rumsfeld in the spring of 2002. Instead
he threw on the table as a bargaining chip one retired general’s idea that
Iraq could be invaded with a force no larger than 10,000 troops, and made
the military planners fight for every increase over that.
That we were going to invade Iraq was no longer a question by the summer of
2002. The head of Britain’s MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, returned from
conferences with the CIA and other American agencies, and on July 23 told
top British officials “[m]ilitary action was now seen as inevitable. Bush
wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the
conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were now
being fixed around the policy…There was little discussion in Washington of
the aftermath after military action.”
The planning pushed ahead with very few inside the loop, Ricks writes,
beyond Franks and Rumsfeld and occasionally Vice President Cheney and
President Bush. The focus was almost totally on taking down Baghdad and
Saddam Hussein, with little or no thinking on what the military calls Phase
IV operations, or postwar stability and reconstruction.
By late that summer, several voices of reason were trying to be heard—not
least of them former NSC director and Bush family friend Brent Scowcroft,
who wrote an op-ed piece calling into question the reasons for attacking
Iraq, and predicting that any “military campaign very likely would have to
be followed by a large-scale, long-term military occupation.” In August,
Secretary of State Colin Powell, a retired four-star general who had two
combat tours in Vietnam, launched a final effort to slow the run-up to war,
sitting down with Bush in his residence and quietly telling him: “You are
going to be the proud owner of twenty-five million people,” Powell said.
“You will own all their hopes, aspirations and problems…This will become the
first term.”
First Cheney, then Rumsfeld, choked off any possibility of debate over the
wisdom of action against Iraq, both declaring flatly that there was no
question that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, active programs
including nuclear weapons research, that were a threat to us and our few
friends in a bad neighborhood. The intelligence to support such assertions,
hampered by a near-total lack of human intelligence, was massaged at every
level up the chain to make it seem more solid than it was. People like
Douglas Feith, who ran a freelance intelligence shop inside the office of
the Secretary of Defense, provided Rumsfeld and the administration
ever-harder “evidence” of the threat, much of it uncorroborated rumors or
outright fabrications previously discarded by other intelligence agencies,
and often coming from defectors provided by Ahmad Chalabi.
Later the official administration line would become that no one really
foresaw the difficulties of postwar Iraq, Ricks writes, but that was hardly
true. On Sept. 4, 2002, Rep. Ike Skelton and 17 other congressional leaders
met with Bush to discuss Iraq. At the meeting’s end Skelton and Bush had a
quick private exchange in which Skelton asked the president: “What are you
going to do once you get it?” That afternoon, Skelton wrote Bush a letter
again putting his questions about the costs and duration of a U.S.
occupation of Iraq. He quoted Karl von Clausewitz about the requirement in
war “not to take the first step without considering the last,” and followed
that with another prescient quote from the old Chinese strategy wizard Sun
Tzu: “To win victory is easy; to preserve its fruits, difficult.”
There was no White House response. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld were going to
take America to war in Iraq, no matter what. On the eve of the war, the
Pentagon sent down a brief classified memo declaring that the invasion of
Iraq was to be considered an integral part of the global war on terrorism.
Ricks reports that when some senior officers questioned that rationale, Lt.
Gen. George Casey, director of the Joint Staff, told them it was not open to
debate. Indeed, the military intelligence community had gotten the message:
“The feeling was...this thing is going to happen,” said one senior official.
“[I]t wasn’t our place to raise a ruckus.”
Rumsfeld would whittle down the force even as the invasion was beginning,
cutting out one heavy Army division, the 1st Cavalry Division, and delaying
the arrival of another, the 1st Armored Division. One of those divisions was
earmarked to move into Anbar Province astride the routes to and from Syria.
The most likely place for big trouble would, instead, be left to Special
Forces teams and so-called economy of force missions. We were going to war
in Iraq with about 100,000 fewer troops than the ground commanders believed
were needed. We were going without a coherent plan for postwar security. Our
political leadership ignored the warnings, choosing to believe the best-case
scenario in every case. The rose-colored glasses were firmly affixed to
their noses.
Paul Wolfowitz told senior Army officers he thought that within a few
months of the invasion, by summer of 2003, American troop levels in Iraq
would have been drawn down to only 34,000. This at a time when then-Army
chief of staff Gen. Eric Shinseki told a Senate hearing, when pressed, that
it would take “several hundred thousand troops” to successfully occupy Iraq.
Wolfowitz followed Shinseki to Capitol Hill two days later and derided the
general’s estimate as “outlandish,” adding “I am reasonably certain that
they will greet us as liberators and that will help keep our requirements
down.”
In Ricks’s judgment, and that of many other senior officers, there was a
total failure of strategic vision in the war plan—a failure partly blamed on
Centcom’s Gen. Franks, but for the most part tied to Don Rumsfeld’s
coattails. “In war, strategy is the searchlight that illuminates the way
ahead,” Ricks concludes. “In its absence, the U.S. military would fight hard
and well but blindly, and the noble sacrifices of soldiers would be undercut
by the lack of thoughtful leadership at the top.”
In the three-week drive that culminated in the triumphant fall of Baghdad,
the lack of sufficient forces was swiftly revealed, as Iraqi irregulars
surfaced to harass the main force columns, making the bypassed cities and
towns a death trap for support units like the maintenance unit ambushed in
Nasiriyah. Those who had begged for an armored cavalry regiment and 20
companies of military police to safeguard the long supply lines had been
batted down by civilian leaders who had never known combat. The price would
be paid in American blood along that route and in the streets of Baghdad.
A week into the fight, Lt. Gen. William Wallace put his finger on another
problem that would haunt the American Army forces long after Baghdad had
fallen: “The enemy we’re fighting is different from the one we’d war-gamed
against.” Both civilian and military leaders were convinced that with the
fall of Baghdad and the Saddam regime, the job was done. But the world was
soon treated to scenes of Iraqis looting every government building, every
army barracks, every police station and every hospital and power generation
station. Secretary Rumsfeld dismissed the images with two words: “Stuff
happens!”
In April of 2003 stuff was starting to happen elsewhere in the Sunni
heartland, in cities like Fallujah and Saddam’s hometown Tikrit, as American
occupying forces moved in. On May 1, President Bush flew out to the U.S.S.
Abraham Lincoln off California and, under that big “Mission Accomplished”
banner, declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq.
The opportunity to grasp the situation slipped through American fingers
during April and May, and the initiative was lost. The Iraqi insurgency was
taking shape, the Syrian border was wide open, munitions and arms dumps with
over a million tons of weapons and ammunition were left unguarded and the
American forces on the ground, far from beginning to adapt to the changes
around them, were already thinking about going home. By April 24, the
original U.S. civilian administrator, retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, and
his small staff, had already been ruled failures, undercut by Ahmad Chalabi
and his dreams of taking over Iraq. That day, Rumsfeld called Garner to tell
him he was being replaced by former ambassador L. Paul Bremer III.
Bremer would almost immediately make critical decisions—some say at the
behest of Chalabi—that would feed and fuel the insurgency and unrest. First,
Bremer ordered the firings of as many as 85,000 Baath Party members in every
government ministry, corporation, university, and hospital. The very people
who knew how to run everything were gone. Then he ordered dissolution of the
Iraqi Army and police, throwing another 400,000 armed and angry men out of
work and disrupting plans by Garner to make use of many of the lower-ranking
men for reconstruction work.
Ricks writes that the CIA station chief in Baghdad, as well as Garner and
most other members of the U.S. civilian team, objected strongly to Bremer’s
de-Baathification order, saying it would cripple efforts to rebuild the
infrastructure and disenfranchise the only people who knew how to run the
country. Bremer said his orders came from the highest levels—something Ricks
indicates was not true. Both Rumsfeld and Bush were puzzled by that order as
well as the one dissolving the Iraqi army.
Meanwhile, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz steadfastly denied, over and over, that
there was a war still going on in Iraq, or that there was an insurgency. In
their eyes the growing violence was just the work of “remnants of the old
regime.” President Bush made his foolish declaration: “Bring ‘em on! We’ve
got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.”
Some American division commanders would do very well that first year,
especially Maj. Gen. David Petraeus and the 101st Airmobile Division he
commanded in Mosul. Others, Ricks writes, would do less well, as they
pursued heavy-handed raids, kicking in doors and rounding up and hauling
away large numbers of military-aged males to Abu Ghraib prison. Those who
were not sympathetic to the insurgency before that experience certainly were
afterward. Ricks focuses much of that criticism on the Army’s 4th Division
and its commander, then-Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno.
Meanwhile, the thousands of Iraqi detainees swept up in raids were dumped
on Abu Ghraib and into the care of poorly trained American Army Reservist
guards and interrogators whose guidelines crossed the line of abuse. Ricks
discloses that an email sent on Aug. 14, 2003 by Capt. William Ponce, an
Army intelligence officer in Baghdad, stated that “the gloves are coming
off” and asked colleagues for a “wish list” of interrogation techniques.
“Back-handed blows to the midsection from a distance of about 18 inches,”
suggested the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. The 4th Infantry Division was
even harsher, calling for “low-voltage electrocution.” But an officer in the
1st Armored Division objected, reminding the others that they were American
soldiers.
Leadership on the ground in Iraq was roiled and drifting as Rumsfeld
ordered the large headquarters of Lt. Gen. Dave McKiernan, who had commanded
the charge to Baghdad, to stand down and replaced it with the much smaller
and less experienced V Corps staff from Germany, and a brand new corps
commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez. Ricks lays the strategic and tactical
drift of that crucial first year in Iraq at the feet of Sanchez. The general
was at odds with Ambassador Bremer and struggling to do his job with a staff
that was less than a quarter of the number needed to run what was in essence
a four-star headquarters in wartime. But he compounded a bad situation by
never really understanding the nature of the insurgency faced by the United
States. Counter-insurgency tactics call for less presence of the occupiers,
less use of brute force and a deeper understanding of the culture and mores
of the civilian population you wish to swing to your side. Every rule was
ignored or broken that first year and, the American missteps strengthened
the enemy.
The enemy was proving to be ever more adaptable and swift to change tactics
to meet changed circumstances even as the Americans seemed to drift
aimlessly and the casualty toll for our troops and innocent Iraqis climbed.
Is there no good news at all? Of course there is, and Ricks lays that out
as well. At every step of the way there were bright American officers who
recognized what was happening, what was going wrong, and wrote and spoke and
pleaded passionately for doing the right thing. During 2005 and early 2006,
one of the brightest warrior-scholars in the Army, Col. H.R. McMaster, would
be sent to Iraq as commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry. After leaving the
Syrian border open for two long years while foreign terrorists crossed into
Iraq to become suicide bombers or to be trained in killing Americans, the
3rd ACR was ordered west to shut down the border and clean out towns that
had long been under control of the enemy. Now the Americans, at least in
this critical area, would begin clearing and holding the area and provide
ongoing reliable security to Iraqi citizens. It took a lot of boots on the
ground and clever tactics, but a small success was achieved before the
Cavalrymen rotated home in March of 2006 and were replaced by another
American brigade.
In an afterword titled “Betting Against History,” Ricks lays out the
possible outcomes in a war now in its fourth year with no foreseeable end in
sight. Even the rosiest possible result is hardly anything to cheer, and the
worst-case scenarios are chilling, if improbable. An American withdrawal, a
breakup of Iraq into three separate countries, the spread of war and
instability to the entire region are not the worst possible outcomes in the
author’s view. He thinks that would be the emergence of a new Iraqi
strongman, a Saladin who could lead the rise of a new pan-Arab caliphate,
fueling the rise of a new generation of terrorists.
Whatever the outcome, Ricks says, Iraq will dominate American foreign
policy, and our position in the world, for years to come. Going to war for
faulty reasons undercuts everything that follows, especially when those who
made the mistakes stubbornly refuse to acknowledge them. America’s
credibility has suffered greatly among our allies, as our decision-making
ability appears almost fatally flawed under this administration. Worse yet,
those who have refused to strengthen our military and locked it into
unending deployments in Iraq are creating a sense of weakness that is
emboldening our adversaries to act. Does anyone doubt that this was taken
into account by Iran’s crackpot leaders before ordering their puppet
Hezbollah to go on the offensive against Israel? Or by North Korea’s Kim
Jong Il before he ordered the testing of those middle and long-range
missiles?
It’s a brutal and foolish mess they’ve gotten us into, Ollie.
Snuffysmith
Sep 14 2006, 09:41 AM
I have received the following powerful comments from General Bill Odom on
Joseph Galloway's piece and FIASCO.
"I know Galloway casually and respect him highly as a man of unusual courage
and integrity, but he is simply missing the central truths on this issue.
The army has plenty of background expertise for such a mission. It was
ORDERED not to do the civil affairs preparation that is SOP for every ops
order I have ever seen in practice or in staff college where the civ affairs
and occupation operations annex is normally a standard inclosure.
It is true, however, that beginning under Clinton, civ affairs and
post-conflict operations were treated with disdain. Shinseki was the Army
G-3 at the time, and he bought the Clinton line that we no longer take that
mission seriously. Still, a prep course in Germany was run for every unit
rotating through Kosovo and Bosnia. My son's unit in Vicenza, Italy,
rotated companies in and out during his duty with the 173d Airborne Brigade,
2000-2003. They made the transition, learned not to be trigger happy, how
to deal with local police, how different the intelligence requirements are,
etc., and had considerable success in finding hidden weapons
caches,reassuring local citizens, solving their problems, etc.
When they returned to Italy, however, they never got praise from the DoD
level. In fact, they got the contrary.
The next important point is that Army combat units can be adapted rapidly
for a wide range of missions. Thus the kind of hues and cries for a
different force structure, and a fundamentally new Army to perform this
mission is grossly misplaced. It comes from officers and others who simply
have not had that much experience with it. Krepinevich is an example. He is
a brilliant analyst whom I have long respected and who was an assistant
professor in my department at West Point. As a former air defense officer,
however, he apparently never was schooled in the elmentary aspects of civ
affairs as were combat branch officers of my generation and even after.
The third point is that Ricks, Gordon, Trainor, and others still assume that
had the Army "done it right" in Iraq, we could have achieved something of
significance, a respectable success if not a clear "victory."
That, too, is simply a strategic misreading of the situation. Nobody,
including the British in Malaysia, has invaded country and installed Liberal
political institutions in a muslim society, even over a long period, not to
mention the short time lines anticipated in Iraq.
Ricks' books shows that Odierno was very irresponsible in that he encouraged
brutalization of the Iraqis while Petraes did not. But Petreas' success
has proven fleeting, and Odierno probably should have been relieved.
Stories coming back from Iraq at the time paint a far worse picture of his
support of willfully brutal treatment of Iraqis, combatants and
noncombatants than does Ricks’ book. Neither, however, was directed or even
allowed to do the months of planning and preparation beforehand. And the
army doctrine and manuals exist for that task.... many were written at the
JFK school in Fort Bragg for Vietnam. (I spent a year on the planning staff
of MACV CORDS, the pacification programs, in Vietnam, and I know a great
deal about the doctrine, policies, practices, etc., from first hand
observations country-wide and from compiling assessments of program results,
advising the GVN, its ARVN, RF/PF, and other uniformed forces. It seems
today that every one has amnesia about this experience. Otherwise, all the
utter nonsense being talked on all sides about it should not occur. And by
the way, the Army has built a rather remarkable training system for dealing
with keeping order in Iraq today. Battalions preparing to deploy there
spend a month at Fort Polk in exercising where hundreds of American Arabs
role-play parts as Iraqis in urban and rural settings. The Army has adapted
at that tactical level. It cannot change the mentality or the competences at
the strategic level. There, Bush and Rumsfeld rule.)
Finally, given the command environment under Rumsfeld in the Pentagon, and
given the neocons screaming against the generals on FOX news when we said in
advance, during, and afterwards, that there was no real preparation for the
occupation, not to mention too few troops in the initial invasion, including
open charges of an "cabal of army generals" preparing a revolt against the
"legitimate civilian leadership," as Dan Goure charged in my presence on
Larry King Live in 2003, given this climate, I don't blame the generals for
anything. They did not have a chance to screw it up. They well might have,
but that is an "if" case, not an indictable offense.
The mood within the army officer ranks, including at West Point, produced
by Bush's "preventive war" doctrine, the sniveling behaviour of the previous
and present Chairman/JCS on TV, has been much worse than anything I recall
during the Vietnam War. After reading both Cobra II and Fiasco, I am
impressed that the Army -- and some of the Marine units -- were able to
knock down the Iraqi forces and regime as effectively as they did. The
shear distances, scale of operations, and coordination were as demanding for
a few weeks as any other campaign I know of. And they succeeded in spite of
Rumsfeld's gross interference in the planning and his devastating impact on
the operation from inception throughout its execution. That Tommy Franks
was allowed to remain in command when it was painfully clear to most anyone
who cared to notice that he was in far over his head, that in itself so
indicts Rumsfeld and Bush as to absolve the rest of the military entirely.
By comparison, both General Abizaid and General Casey have been remarkably
adept in avoiding head-on conflicts with Rumsfeld and at the same time
giving a far more accurate and assessment of the situation in Iraq. I
suspect that behind the scenes they both are telling the Sec Def things he
does not want to hear and that he realizes their credibility makes them too
dangerous for him to remove. There is, therefore, some evidence of
surviving genuine military professionalism at the top where it has been
ruthlessly deracinated since 2001. At the lower ranks, it can be found in
abundance.
It will take some time to get this war in perspective, but recent
reporting, books, and public commentary strikes me as horribly misguided and
destructive. WE have a serious and dangerous climate in the army today in
my view. The army will survive. In fact, its system has been so effective
that even Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al., have been spared vastly greater
embarrassment. The Army got to Baghdad in spite of them. And it has chewed
up and spit out tens of thousands of soldiers and officers in the process --
needlessly.
I wonder what Galloway would have done had he been in uniform at the general
officer level through this campaign. I think probably what most of the
people he criticizes did. He would have sucked in his gut and answered,
"Yes sir!" to Rummy et al.
Bill Odom