Second guessing the generals

The Belmont Club:

The New Republic has second thoughts about blaming Donald Rumsfeld after discovering that individual Generals also made "mistakes" in fighting the counterinsurgency. Spencer Ackerman uses the difference between the Marine, the 82nd Airborne and 101st Airborne methods in Iraq to discredit the criticisms of General Swannack.

OK, General Swannack. I understand you want to oust Donald Rumsfeld from the Pentagon ... Secretary Kettle, meet General Pot. When Swannack commanded the 82nd Airborne in Iraq in 2003--which had responsibility for the western part of what was then called the Sunni Triangle--the discriminating application of force that marks counterinsurgency wasn't exactly his calling card. Perhaps most significantly, in April 2003, the 82nd handled a protest in Falluja by firing into the crowd, and while the situation was by all accounts a tremendously confusing one for well-intentioned U.S. soldiers, Fallujan sympathy for the then-nascent insurgency immediately took root. In March 2004, the Marines took responsibility for Anbar Province and set to work reversing Swannack's force-over-politics approach.

Ackerman implies that Swannack used too heavy-handed an approach. He quotes author George Packer (who wrote a feature article in the New Yorker praising success at Tal-Afar) to contrast the 82nd not only from the Marines but also from its sister Army unit, the 101st.

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... The men who judge what works in their area of operations are the Commanders. Sometimes they will be wrong and sometimes get it right. The only demand one can make of command going up the line is to learn from their subordinates' experience and reflect it downward in changed guidance. The failure to adapt is the ultimate command failure. Stupidity was not sending men into the face of machine gun fire in August 1914 when that weapon was encountered in large numbers for the first time. What was stupid was to keep doing it even in the Somme in 1916. For that reason the New Republic's article, though slightly off-base puts its finger on the most disturbing aspect of the debate over the War. The press has made consistency in the prosecution of war a virtue; just as it has made the "failure" to live up to the initial plan the ultimate sin. In consequence so much of the debate consists of archaeology. What George Bush said to Tony Blair in Downing Street. What Joe Wilson heard in Darfur. Yet consistency in war is often not virtue but vice. The hobgoblin of small minds.

There is much between the ...'s. Local Iraqi politics should also not be ignored when spreading blame for some of the initial failures to deal wih Fallujah. One of the biggest mistakes of the war was pulling the Marines back in their initial battle in that city. The Iraqi political dithering wasted not only a good effort by the Marines , but one of the better psyops of the war. The Marines were playing a prayer like recording in Arabic which translated roughly, "May the ambulances of Fallujah have enough gas to pick up all the dead mujihadean."