( Reflections on Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks, longtime Pentagon correspondent of the Washington Post. News and History )
It's not so much that Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Tommy Franks and team didn't plan for Iraq and its aftermath, because we read about plans galore, days of war games to test consequences, and reports and critiques -- all the things that you'd guess military planners would do.
The main problem, according to Ricks, is the scant thought given to "strategy." How could this be? There are a couple of answers suggested in Ricks.
The first one is that the theorists who pushed for this war long before Mr. Bush did were, in Ricks' formulation, like 60s radicals. To them, what mattered was to put on notice all middle east dictators and nominal democracies that the USA could and would take out an unfriendly middle east dictator. If Saddam's fall brought in another dictator, or a theocracy, fine; if democracy could arise, so much the better; just so long as we break up the status quo in a region that has been a stagnant breeding ground for terrorists. So, strategy, shmategy.
The second one has to do with the personalities of the leaders who pushed for this war and carried through its first year. The planners, including Rumsfeld and Franks and Paul Wolfowitz, are said to be "smart" and "educated" but not "wise." We are led to believe that their planning for "Phase IV" (what would follow Saddam's surrender) was summarized in a power-point slide (supplied by Ricks) that outlines how "divisions of the people" along ethnic, tribal and religious lines will gradually be resolved by the military's "aimed pressure to achieve end state over time" until we reach little eggs labeled "ethnic, tribal, religious" safely ensconced together in one big egg called "strategic success." In between, there are stars listed labeled "mayors' meetings," "Joint meetings," "elections," and, listed first, "stability."
But officers are quoted again and again saying that "tactically" we're winning every battle, but "strategically" we're a mess. Our plans carried assumptions that contradicted what we actually did -- that Saddam's army and Baath officials would be converted to help our efforts within days of his defeat, for example. Yet almost immediately we disbanded the army and shortly afterward "de-Baathified" civil leadership. We bypassed large Saddam-loyal communities in the "Sunni Triangle" en route to Baghdad, where armed forces were waiting for battle, and declared victory when Saddam fell -- leaving dangerous forces all around the city. We assumed civilians' welcome of the US and then did much to ensure their enmity (outlined in chapters called "How to Create an Insurgency." It's Abu Ghraib, of course (a marine is quoted at the moment he sees the story on CNN: "Some a------ just lost the war for us"), but much more.
[Detour, here: Painful as is the section on soldiers' abuse of detainees and indignities inflicted on the people we're supposed to be helping, it wasn't the first time. Cruelty against Philippinos created a public uproar for awhile when we fought an insurgency there following our War with Spain in 1899. Just today, a news article reports on the recent release of classified data showing widespread cruelty, casual murders, and recreational mistreatment of suspects in Vietnam - including baseball bats and electric shocks that were news to us at Abu Gharib in Iraq. But George Washington's orders demanding dignified treatment of prisoners during our Revolution purposefully to differentiate us from our enemies establishes a baseline. Some have laughed at liberals for wringing their hands over prisoners in Gitmo who've been chained into uncomfortable positions - "That's not torture," scoffed an evangelical friend of mine, "and they don't have the rights of American citizens." Well, sure it is, and I believe our whole society is based on certain "self-evident" truths that "all men are created equal," a phrase explicitly made to cover citizens of the world.]
After the new wave of leaders come in, the story changes (Chapter 18). In Ricks' telling, General Casey (Chief in DC), Abizaid (Commander in Iraq), Mattis (Marine units, Fallujah), McMaster (Tall Afar), Petraeus (takes over training Iraqis from private contractors), and ambassador Negroponte all have made us proud. They all have in common a mastery of history and our language, plus an openness to discussion and change of their own views. Casey has a group of officers with PhD's prepare a plan for putting down the insurgency. They call themselves "Doctors without Orders" and produce a paper culling lessons learned from insurgencies of the past century. They start doing the right things and stop doing the wrong things, totally reversing practice in Iraq up to then.
A favorite example: McMaster works with Sunni leaders before his attack on Tall Afar, saying humbly, "When the Americans first came, we were in a dark room, stumbling around, breaking china. But now Iraqi leaders are turning on the lights." Then he adds: the time for resistance is therefore over. "This in fact was a threat, stated as politely as possible," comments Ricks. Then McMaster takes his officers and Iraqi officers out to tour the battlefield where Alexander the Great met the Persian Army, to give his American colleagues more perspective on the ancient pride of their Iraqi colleagues. (p. 422) In Tall Afar, the humvees that were driven pell-mell through streets to avoid attacks -- scaring citizens and looking out of control -- were replaced by 15 m.p.h. drives that gave Americans time to see where they were going, respond to developments, look calm. Instead of one big army base at Tall Afar, the Americans and Iraqis embedded themselves in 29 spread out bases to maximize flexibility and awareness.
But events within Iraq seem to have spiraled out of control. US presence is less an issue now that Sunni - Shiite rivalry and revenge have become, by Abizaid's admission, "civil war."
Almost absent from the book is George W. Bush. The caricature of him as a dumb puppet of Republican neo-conservatives got a big blow when Bob Woodward published Bush at War in 2004. From September 11 on, Bush appears to have been skeptical, determined to act decisively, and demanding of clear information. In this book, he appears to be willing to take time with Iraq, agreeing with Sec. of State Colin Powell that "Iraq isn't going anywhere." It seems in this account that Cheney got way ahead, saying that Weapons of Mass Destruction were known to exist in Iraq, etc. etc. etc. Bush is reported to have been surprised by that. He and Powell are both convinced, and Powell convinces others. Ricks allows us to think that the ones pushing for war (including Judith Miller of the NY Times) filtered the info that Bush saw, and showed him info that just wasn't true -- he was misled, and then he made the tough decisions and helped to sell the policy.
Late in the book, (p. 407) Bush is reportedly shocked to hear that the war isn't going well. This is following his reelection in 2004. He sharply questions the Pentagon briefer, while other Pentagon officials present try to downplay the critique. Bush keeps the information to himself a few more weeks before letting on of a change in public, and then starts to work the more realistic assessments into his speeches.
Ricks lays out scenarios for what could happen, finally. The best one is the Philippines model - we stay for years, but with cooperation and mutual respect and eventual independence. The worst ones look like World War I with Iran and Shiites v. Syrian Sunnis, with Kurds seizing oil fields and getting help from Iran when Turkey attacks them -- and everyone attacks Israel, I guess.
One interesting aside: Besides Ricks' interviews with Pentagon and DoD sources, he had access to the Internet, where he read thousands of pages of postings by soldiers in the field, reporters in the Green Zone, Iraqi civilians... their advice, their complaints, their observations. Has any war historian ever had such a range and multitude of sources available instantaneously?
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