must read.
*National Review*
*SEPTEMBER 11, 2006** **VOL. LVII, NO. 16*
*Bing West on Thomas Ricks's **/Fiasco/*
/Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq/,/ /by Thomas E.
Ricks (Penguin, 416 pp., $27.95)
*Iraq: Phase One*
/(Mr. West, who served in the Marine infantry in Vietnam and later
as assistant secretary of defense, is the award-winning author of
several military histories, including The Village: A Combined Action
Platoon in Vietnam and No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the
Battle for Fallujah. He has been to Iraq nine times, accompanying
over 20 battalions on operations.)/
Tom Ricks, who has a keen eye and a depth of contacts in the
military, believes the likely outcome in Iraq will be a net loss for
America. “There is a small chance the Bush administration’s
inflexible optimism will be rewarded,” he writes, and “a greater
chance that Iraq [will offer] a new haven for terrorists.”
Ricks builds a devastating case, with a focus exclusively upon the
military aspects of Iraq. He portrays systemic failures of
political-military leadership, of a kind not seen since World War I.
The scale is vastly different, of course, but there are undeniable
similarities—both in the initial unwillingness to adapt and in the
unswerving loyalty accorded to self-assured incompetents. At the end
of 2004, President Bush presented the Medal of Freedom to Gen. Tommy
Franks and Amb. L. Paul Bremer. Ricks does not mince words about his
opinion of those three men: “The U.S.-led invasion was launched
recklessly (Bush), with a flawed plan for war (Franks) and a worse
approach to occupation (Bremer).”
Ricks’s premise is that invading Iraq turned into a military mess
that could have been avoided. The first portion of the book
addresses the run-up to the war, the swift seizure of Baghdad, and
the chaotic aftermath in May 2003. Numerous books and articles have
examined this period, and Ricks presents findings similar to theirs:
President Bush had Saddam in his sights since 9/11; deputy secretary
of defense Paul Wolfowitz pushed an idealistic dream of transforming
the Middle East by establishing an enlightened democracy in Iraq;
the influential Iraqi expatriate Ahmed Chalabi was untrustworthy;
secretary of state Colin Powell opposed invading but was
outmaneuvered; etc. This familiar catalogue is enlivened by a
portrayal of Franks, then head of Central Command, as abusive and
impatient, “a cunning man, but not a deep thinker,” who “ran an
extremely unhappy headquarters.” Franks, according to the author,
had no plan for the occupation, and no intention of remaining the
commander responsible for implementing it.
In the middle section of the book, Ricks explains in detail how the
U.S. military, once confronted with an insurgency, responded in 2003
and 2004 with sweeps, raids, and arrests that only inflamed the
opposition. He lays the blame on three factors. The first was the
appointment of Paul Bremer as the president’s proconsul. Bremer
wielded his wide-ranging powers decisively but not judiciously. His
key failure was to disband the Iraqi army, an error the American
military did not appeal to secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld to
overturn. The second mistake was the appointment by Central Command
of Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez as commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq.
Sanchez was out of his depth, at loggerheads with Bremer, and
incapable of developing a comprehensive campaign plan. This led to
the third error: unilateral American offensive operations.
U.S. land forces had fought two successful campaigns in Iraq (in
1991 and April 2003) based on swift, aggressive mounted maneuver. As
the insurgency gained steam in late 2003, most of the American
divisions in Iraq responded with armored sweeps and cordons. Senior
commanders were demanding more “actionable intelligence”—which
generated an attitude of “us versus them,” resulting in tens of
thousands of peremptory searches and thousands of questionable
arrests, leading in turn to an overflow at the prisons, subsequent
poor standards, and finally to the disaster at Abu Ghraib.
Ricks indicts what can best be termed the “General Officers’
Protective Society.” He describes how division commanders inculcated
a command climate of aggressive tactics inappropriate to winning the
support of the resentful Sunni population. Gen. Tony Zinni is quoted
time and again, damning the civilians for geopolitical naïveté, but
Ricks does not let the generals escape criticism: He points out that
it was not Rumsfeld but rather the Joint Chiefs and Central Command
who dismissed Zinni’s operational plans as half-baked.
While Ricks lays into some generals with a verbal broadsword, he
compliments others —in particular, Gen. George W. Casey and Lt.
Gens. David Petraeus and James Mattis. Ricks explains why these
three generals understood the nature of the war. The last third of
the book deals with the faltering steps to implement the
counterinsurgency campaign championed by Casey, who took over
command in July 2004.
Ricks shows how Casey was hampered by two bizarre events. The first
was the protective mantle the Shiite leadership cast over the
dangerous demagogue Moqtada al-Sadr. Sadr had ordered his Shiite
militia to revolt in April 2004; when he was cornered, the U.S. high
command, importuned by Shiite leaders, let him go free. In August
2004, Sadr revolted a second time. Casey rushed to Najaf as U.S.
troops again cornered Sadr; but again the Shiite leadership
negotiated his freedom. Today, Sadr is busy creating the equivalent
of Hezbollah in Iraq; fresh battles between the Iraqi army and
Sadr’s militia are inevitable.
The second stumbling block in Ricks' narrative was the imprudent
interference of senior U.S. officials that extended and confused the
battle for Fallujah. Prior to Casey’s arrival, the White House and
Bremer could not decide on a consistent course of action toward
Fallujah, the stronghold of the insurgency and the lair of terrorist
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The Marines were first ordered to seize the
city, then not to seize it, then to invest it while the insurgents
grew stronger. Ricks believes this wishy-washy strategy encouraged
the insurgents and diverted the Marines from Casey's sensible plan.
After the August battle against Sadr, Casey turned his attention to
Fallujah; a November 2004 assault drove out the jihadists and
leveled half the city.
It was not until 2005 that Casey could begin a comprehensive
campaign to clear and hold a string of Sunni cities. Ricks points
out that this counterinsurgency mission has been slow in gathering
momentum. The fastest means of developing an indigenous security
force is to embed them with American soldiers, along the lines of
the KATUSA program in Korea and the Special Forces A teams and
Combined Action Platoons in Vietnam. In 1968, one Marine division
combined infantry squads with local militia platoons in more than 80
villages. When the CAP was suggested for Iraq, according to Ricks, a
general firmly advised against it—because the squads would suffer
casualties.
Iraq marked a sea change in the American way of war. “Force
Protection”meant minimizing casualties—so that over three years,
there were fewer fatalities than in that one awful day of 9/11. Mess
halls morphed into “dining facilities” offering salad bars, pizza
bars, fast-food counters, Middle East cuisine, or good,
old-fashioned steak and lobster, followed by ice cream, at a cost of
about $34 a meal. Soldiers slept in air-conditioned rooms, chatted
on the Internet, and played video games. We chose to fight a war
that a veteran of Vietnam would not recognize. (Thrown into the
cauldron of Fallujah, though, U.S. soldiers and Marines displayed
courage and aggressiveness equal to any American generation.)
Somewhere between 1966 and 2006, the conditions of war and the
acceptability of misery and friendly casualties had changed. We
didn’t have enough troops in Iraq partly because of how we chose to
fight the war; Ricks blames this on shortcomings in military
doctrine, but it may be equally attributable to the current mores of
American society.
Like a prosecuting attorney, Ricks weaves together a narrative to
make his case, with a focus mainly on 2003 and 2004. He does not
attempt to provide a comprehensive history. Indeed, his “Cast of
Characters” includes fewer than 70 men. He searched for general
trends, rather than for what each division did or did not do. His
chief pedagogical technique is to limn a crucial event, contrasting
what occurred with what someone said about it later, or recalled
saying at the time. Since we are all proficient quarterbacks on
Monday, this technique tends to produce paeans such as /Band of
Brothers /after a successful war, or condemnations such as /Paths of
Glory/ after a futile war.
Will a new set of authors revise what Ricks has written? I doubt
that his view will be seriously challenged. He makes a solid case
for each of his indictments.
One shortcoming of the book is that Ricks introduces the reader to
no Iraqis, enemy or friendly, and highlights no interaction between
Iraq’s politicians and the war effort. This might seem like a
slight, but Iraq’s political elite has not led; the country’s
“leaders” have been simply terrible. The fundamental flaw in Iraq,
in fact, was not American military missteps but a dearth of Iraqi
leadership. The major intelligence failure was the lack of a warning
that Iraq had fallen apart as a society. True, the U.S. military had
no doctrine for dealing with the killings between Shiites and Sunnis
and the virulence of tribal religiosity. But it is hard to win
hearts and minds when the Sunni imams are preaching opposition to
the infidel crusaders who have brought the accursed Shiites to power
and Shiite militia hide behind the Ministry of Interior while
killing Sunnis.
Secretary Rumsfeld has said repeatedly that the U.S. military does
not do nation-building. He is mistaken. In Iraq, building a nation
is exactly what Gen. Casey and his subordinates are trying to do. It
is the only way to succeed. The U.S. military has undertaken that
staggering task because the rest of the U.S. government did not show
up for this war.
If, in the end, Iraq emerges intact and moderate, it will not be
because of its political leaders. It will be because the Iraqi army,
modeling its behavior to live up to the standards of the American
army, is able to defeat both the Sunni insurgents and the Shiite
militia. Of course there will be all kinds of political deals; and
underlying each of them will be the cold calculus of who will
prevail in a fight. The Iraqi Army - not its national assembly or
its police or its religious and political personages - is the last,
best hope for Iraq.
While acknowledging that the U.S. military is beginning to get it
right, Ricks concludes by asking whether it is too late to head off
a low-level civil war that will result in a fragmentation of Iraq
equivalent to that of Lebanon in the mid-1980s (or perhaps today).
Ricks’s pessimism rests on his doubt that America will sustain its
effort. That happened in Vietnam after the Tet offensive in 1968;
although battlefield conditions markedly improved over the next two
years, attitudes had hardened against the war and against our South
Vietnamese allies.
The danger comes when people make up their minds on political
grounds and become impervious to facts. Ricks quotes Casey as saying
that the average insurgency lasts for nine years. President Bush has
16 months to put Iraq on a trajectory that will be sustained by
either a Republican or a Democratic administration.
Throughout /Fiasco, /Ricks is hard on the U.S. military; but he
left me with more hope than he expressed, precisely because he
approved of Casey and the other generals now in charge, and because
it was, after all, our military that gave him the access, documents,
and insights that went into the writing of this book. As both Victor
Davis Hanson (/Carnage and Culture) /and Max Boot (/War Made New/)
have exhaustively documented, the martial superiority of the West is
anchored in self-criticism leading to battlefield adaptation.
With the critique offered in /Fiasco, /Ricks makes a solid
contribution to our shared understanding.
