Elusive victory

John Keegan:

The mystery of the Iraq War is to explain how a brilliantly executed invasion turned into a messy counterinsurgency struggle. Part of the explanation, at least, is a lack of troops, a fault for which the Defense Department has been responsible. The current policy has its roots in the desire of Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, to wean the Army away from its decades of indulgence, when it routinely planned to win conflicts by confronting enemies with mass--masses of soldiers, masses of equipment (particularly tanks and armored vehicles) and masses of ground-attack aircraft.

Mr. Rumsfeld disliked the concept of mass because it carried huge financial costs but also because it locked the Army into a style of war-making that sought victory through firepower rather than through speedy maneuver. He had supporters in the civilian side of the Pentagon, notably his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and a man the rank below, Douglas Feith. Both also wanted to slim the Army down.

The result of their efforts to do so led to the expeditionary force sent to Iraq in 2003 being considerably weaker than that which had fought the Gulf War of 1991. The initial outcome, though, was similar: the rapid collapse of Iraqi resistance at only slight cost in American lives, a result that seemed to justify Mr. Rumsfeld's force policies and his belief that "speed kills."

For several months the second Iraq War seemed a triumph. Then the American army of occupation, whose continuing presence was dedicated to the political transformation of the country, began to come under low-grade attack by Iraqi guerrillas. American soldiers began to die, and attempts to create a successor regime, organized on democratic principles, failed to take root. Political instability was accompanied by rising military difficulty, until by 2005 a full-scale insurgency was in swing, with dozens of American soldiers dying every month and the numbers of insurgents growing proportionately.

In "Fiasco," Thomas Ricks traces this familiar history and attempts to explain its reasons, interviewing various military experts and reporting from the fighting in Iraq itself. He has severely critical views of Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Wolfowitz and Mr. Feith, but he does not heap all the blame on their preinvasion policy. He also points to the mistakes made by American leaders of the postwar administration in Iraq, notably Paul Bremer, who became head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in May 2003.

Mr. Bremer's prime mistakes, according to Mr. Ricks, were to disband the Iraqi army and to bar former members of the Baath party from positions in government. Disbanding the army released tens of thousands of trained fighters into unemployment; barring Baathists from administrative positions robbed the new governing coalition of the service of the very people it needed to restore order and good government. These mistakes, Mr. Ricks thinks, ensured that the initial failure of the occupation would persist and worsen.

Few would disagree with the analysis in "Fiasco." It is not, however, a complete explanation of what went wrong. Mr. Ricks makes several convincing points about what underlay the insurgency, notably the supreme importance of the value of respect for personal dignity in Arab society. He notes how, at least in the early stages of the occupation, American forces too often showed unconcern for Iraqi dignity--by performing too many tasks and conducting too many operations unilaterally. But he does not take account of what may underlie the whole insurgency, which is the rise of Islamic militancy across the Muslim world.

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Whether trying to reconsistute the Iraqi army that had disbanded itself during the war would have made a difference is speculation at best. I think Ricks' weakest point is that US military policy created the insurgency. It may have created a few recruits, but the core of teh insurgency was made up of al Qaeda operatives, many of whom were already in Iraq, like Zarqawi and former regime elements and their fedayeen foreighn fighters who also worked with al Qaeda.

Keegan is right about the original plan for the invasion of Iraq and his analysis actually conflicts with Ricks who desribes it as a awful plan. The real mistake was made by the military in its early response and adaptation to the enemy insurgency when it refused to ask for more troops to increase the force to space in order to cut off the enemy movement and instead attempted to make do by attempting to get more and better intelligence. Its attempt to do this were heavy handed in some cases and ineffectual. The real intelligence increase came as the new Iraqi forces came on line and the support of the people increased the actionalble intelligence called in on the tip lines as well as direct contact witht he Iraqi troops.

I will have more on this when I do my own review of Ricks' Fiasco.