Gordon and Trainer's rewrite of the Iraq wars

Victor Davis Hanson:

Ten years ago, Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times and the retired General Bernard Trainor wrote a critically acclaimed revisionist history of the first Gulf war. Challenging the rosy consensus view of that four-day victory on the ground, The Generals’ War (1995) set out to show that the abrupt removal of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait could be explained as much by Iraqi impotence as by American competence. Nor was that the authors’ sole point of contention. At war’s end, they charged, civilian overseers in the Pentagon and at the State Department had failed to translate tactical military success into lasting strategic advantage. Instead, the murderous Iraqi dictator was left in power, and with him a geopolitical stalemate: though weakened, Saddam was still capable of paralyzing American Middle East policy for years to come.

Now, in Cobra II,* the same authors have returned with an account of the three-week war of 2003 and its aftermath. The sense of déjà vu extends even to the dramatis personae. Here, in the celebrity role played earlier by General Norman Schwarzkopf, is General Tommy Franks—no less blustering and imperious, and at critical junctures no less deaf to the advice of more informed subordinates. If, in 1991, no real direction had come from Washington, thus allowing Saddam’s defeated generals to proceed pretty much as they pleased against the postwar Shiite and Kurdish resistance, so, too, we learn here, no plan to speak of existed for the aftermath of victory in 2003. Colin Powell, portrayed in The Generals’ War as nonchalantly allowing Saddam to persist in power, appears a decade later nonchalantly allowing the neoconservatives to pursue their trumped-up war.

Three interpretive themes, outlined in the opening chapters, dominate the narrative of Cobra II. First, after September 11, George Bush rather abruptly decided to go to war with Iraq, whether or not the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was as imminent or as dire as the President, in his misplaced obsession with Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, insisted. Yet the administration was also woefully unprepared to fight such a war, being reluctant either to devote sufficient military resources to the enterprise or to mobilize the nation for the struggle that lay ahead. Hence, for Gordon and Trainor, there arose from the beginning a fatal “disparity of ends and means.”

Second, Gordon and Trainor hammer Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for not listening to his generals, who wanted far more troops to fight the war itself. Rumsfeld envisioned Iraq as a testing ground for his personal theories of military transformation, according to which lighter, more mobile forces would do the work once performed by massive deployments of heavy infantry. He therefore approached the issue of numbers “with the ruthless efficiency of a businessman for whom excess inventory was to be avoided at all cost.”

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Third, Gordon and Trainor charge that the administration did not plan properly for reconstruction, wrongly thinking that Iraq would turn out to be a rapid success story like Afghanistan, or that an American proconsul and provisional government could quickly establish a transition to democratic rule. When, on May 1, 2003, George Bush landed on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln to declare that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended,” he had little idea that 2,000 combat dead, billions of dollars, and three Iraqi elections later, the country would still not be secure.

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For all their fault-finding, moreover, Gordon and Trainor convey an invaluable impression of tens of thousands of American soldiers hell-bent for Baghdad from their far distant starting point in Kuwait and miraculously deposing Saddam Hussein in three weeks’ time. Rumsfeld’s idea of a “rolling start” often took literal form: for the first time in U.S. military history, a mechanized unit flew nonstop from a base in the United States to enemy country, landed near the battlefield, and then drove right off to the fight. Even American psychological operations, an often over-hyped element of war-fighting, worked well: when American planes showered leaflets on it, an entire Iraqi division guarding Baghdad more or less melted away, leaving behind only 2,000 of its original 13,000 combatants.

From postbellum interviews of Iraqi leaders, the authors are able to reveal that Saddam’s own generals did not realize that Iraq’s arsenals of weapons of mass destruction were mere fantasies, or had become so by the time the war began. Meanwhile, however, our own intelligence concerning Saddam’s whereabouts was dismal, leading to a series of much publicized strikes that never came close to killing either him or members of his family. As the war progressed, fedayeen in SUV’s outfitted with machine guns and in pick-up trucks with RPG’s, though capable of offering little or no resistance to our rapid advance, were already learning how to take advantage of the restrictive rules of American engagement and of our reluctance to alienate Iraqi public opinion. Once the lethal Americans had passed by, or returned in the role of benign peacekeepers, the fedayeen easily regrouped and reemerged as nationalist guerrillas.

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There is much more. The discussion of the fedayeen is one of the books weaknesses. Centcom developed a very effective way of dealing with the fedayeen. They observed that they "puddled" around Baath Parth headquarters or Iraqi intelligences offices in the towns along the invasion route. When the puddle reached a maximum level, precision bombing was brought to bear on the building effectively wiping out the fedayeen. They never resurfaced as an effective fighting force in the area along the invasion route. The problem was, tht Anbar provice was not on the invasion route, but Saddam thought that the primary invasion would come through Anbar. It was the feayeen in that area that made up the bulk of the insugency. If the $th ID had been allowed to come through Turkey, the "puddling" fedayeen in Anbar would have been destroyed too.

Hanson finds much to criticize in the book:

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We have learned from Bob Woodward that, in Washington, he who talks often gets to adjudicate whose story is heard and with what degree of authorial deference it will be put forward. Cobra II is a critical take on the administration’s entire conduct of the war, yet the authors did not interview the major architects: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, L. Paul Bremer III, General Richard B. Myers, or General Tommy Franks. They did, however, draw heavily on these men’s critics, both early and late: Brent Scowcroft, General Jay Garner, Paul Pillar, Lawrence Wilkerson, General Anthony Zinni, and others.

Have the courage and good sense of Generals David McKiernan and William S. Wallace been enhanced in the telling by the fact that Michael Gordon was embedded with the staff of the former and enjoyed almost unlimited access to the corps officers of the latter? To what degree were these officers consciously aware that their special guest was monitoring their behavior for his book? For that matter, how is it that Douglas Feith, the former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, who is frequently scapegoated as the prime culprit for what went wrong after April 2003, is treated so charitably by the usually hypercritical Gordon and Trainor? The endnotes, not surprisingly, reveal that Feith, almost alone in the administration, chose to give his side to the authors.

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Instead of dwelling so much on troop levels, Gordon and Trainor might have done better to ask other, more relevant questions. To what degree did the inability of the 4th Infantry division to head south from Turkey mean not merely that the Sunni Triangle was not immediately attacked but that it never really became a theater of war whose Iraqi combatants would learn the hard wages of fighting Americans? Given the rapid American victory and the directive to avoid killing not merely civilians but enemy soldiers as well, was there, perhaps, an inescapable Catch-22 in Iraq—as if an enemy humiliated and fleeing, but never really conquered, could ever make an easy subject for radical reconstruction? Iraq, after all, was supposed to be less like World War II Germany than like World War II Italy—liberated from an unpopular dictator, rather than punished and made to suffer the wages of its aggression.

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There is much more in this important criticism of the book. While I have not finished it, from what I have read so far, Hanson is on the money. It is a valuable essay and worth reading in whole.