en 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,
1
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.”
This, the
authors argue, proved almost catastrophic on the ground. Troops
insufficiently massed and prepared were plopped directly down on the
battlefield. Long, vulnerable supply lines stretched perilously from
Kuwait hundreds of miles to the south to beyond Baghdad in the north.
With no margin of reserves behind them, armored spearheads were forced
to bypass rather than to occupy and hold conquered ground. That, in
turn, explains why the insurrection could not be immediately put down in
the war's aftermath:
Instead of making plans to fight a counterinsurgency, the President
and his team drew up plans to bring the troops home and all but declared
the war won. There is a direct link between the way the Iraq war was
planned and the bitter insurgency the American-led coalition
subsequently confronted.
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.
Here once again the authors place a
large share of the blame on Rumsfeld, who allegedly browbeat Franks into
declaring that thousands of American soldiers could be withdrawn almost
immediately after the initial cessation of hostilities. From the
military's point of view, write Gordon and Trainor, civilian leadership
could be forgiven for having geopolitical considerations that
necessitated saving reserves for other contingencies. What was
unpardonable was the idea that, on principle, there should be
only a limited number of troops available. The price of this operational
madness was paid by officers in the field. It was they who had to lead
their inadequate forces into battle, and who subsequently lacked the
manpower to rectify the critical postwar lapses.
_____________
As a book, Cobra II
reads well, reflecting both Gordon's brave battle reporting under fire
and Trainor's long familiarity with military operations and invaluable
contacts with ranking officers. Writing a book like this involves
burdensome travel, real danger, and an ability to navigate one's way
through participants' personal, and often hidden, agendas. Both authors
spent time interviewing hundreds of subjects, here and in the Middle
East; clearly, it was not easy to forge a synthesis when so much of the
evidence they gathered was either fragmentary or contradictory.
For
all their fault-finding, moreover, Gordon and Trainor convey an
invaluable impression of tens of thousands of American soldiers hellbent
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.
For reporting all this well and vividly, Cobra II
has much to recommend it. Beyond that, however, all is questionable, to
say the least. The book announces itself as an insider's history, but
one distinguished by the scholarly rigor lacking in such purely
journalistic accounts as Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack (2004).
Yet, despite its over 400 endnotes, almost 40 pages of internal
documents, and some explanation of the source materials on which it is
based, a Woodwardian flavor pervades the whole.
There is, for
example, no bibliography—a telling fault in the absence of evidence that
the authors, if only for purposes of gaining perspective, have drawn on
many prior military histories or studies of the Middle East. The index
is poor, consisting mostly of names and places; long entries are not
broken down into subsections, and important topics and themes (e.g.,
“weapons of mass destruction,” “Shiite,” etc.) are missing entirely. A
book whose subtitle promises a history not only of the three-week
invasion but also of the years-long occupation has but one index
reference to Muqtadr al-Sadr.
Far more disturbingly, sources are
often cited only as “Interview, former senior military officer,”
“Interview, former senior officer,” “Interview, former Centcom planner,”
“Interview, Pentagon Officials,” “Interview, U.S. State Department
Official,” or the like, and in some cases simply as “Notes of a
participant.” The veracity of these multiple, anonymous, and often
hostile sources can never be checked.
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.
_____________
If such selectivity in itself is insufficient to raise doubt over the reliability of key parts of Cobra II, there are the authors' three major themes to consider.
Was,
for instance, the decision to go to war taken abruptly and without real
cause? Gordon and Trainor do not even inquire whether the ties between
al Qaeda and Saddam's intelligence agencies, which had prompted formal
condemnation from both the Clinton administration and the Senate, might
not have been a worthy casus belli in a post-September 11
world. Although they do mention the Senate's October 11, 2002
resolution, passed overwhelmingly, which authorized war against Iraq on
23 counts, what they emphasize is that John Kerry, who voted yes, had
been given off-the-record and soon-to-be broken assurances by Colin
Powell that force would be a last resort.
In fact, Senate speeches
of the time reveal something else: a strong bipartisan desire to
complete the goal of regime change that had been authorized four years
earlier during the Clinton administration. Nothing abrupt there. At
war's end, moreover, Democratic legislators and 70 percent of the public
wholeheartedly applauded the removal of Saddam Hussein; subsequent
objections would center not on the three-week victory that many were
happy to claim as their own but the messy three-year peace they became
only too eager to attribute to others.
Nor do Gordon and Trainor credit the still more telling fact that, following the Afghanistan campaign in the fall of 2001, some fifteen months
of national and worldwide discussion ensued concerning Iraq, including
the excruciatingly drawn-out United Nations debate. Rarely, in truth,
has the United States conducted so prolonged and so public a discussion
about its intentions in the run-up to any war.
The authors are
more on target in dwelling on the administration's preoccupation with
weapons of mass destruction at the expense of other, more compelling
writs for action. As they point out, the WMD issue warped the public
presentation of the war and later diverted some resources away from
reconstruction to numerous wild-goose chases after nonexistent or no
longer existent arsenals. Yet even here there is a disconnect in their
version of the WMD issue—attributable, no doubt, to the selectivity of
their sources. While suggesting deceit on the part of an administration
bent on overplaying a fanciful danger, they do not question the
sincerity of General Franks's frantic efforts to warn his commanders
about the impending threat of chemical and biological attack.
The
authors' second and third themes—supposedly critical mistakes in troop
levels and troop deployment both during and after the war—are in essence
one. When it comes to them, little analysis, let alone counterargument,
is on offer. Why did a deployment strategy that had worked in
Afghanistan fail—if it did fail—in Iraq? After all, there had been even
less planning in the case of the former campaign, and American planners
had good reason to believe that Iraq's restive Shiites and Kurds were
just as anxious for regime change as embattled warlords in Afghanistan.
As
for troop levels, were these predicated entirely on Rumsfeld's pet
theories, as Gordon and Trainor maintain, or rather on a more general
acknowledgement of limited U.S. resources after the vast cutbacks in
conventional forces of the 1990's, coupled with newfound worries of
possible additional commitments cropping up unexpectedly in Syria, North
Korea, and Iran? No one disputed, furthermore, that the recent
technological revolution in smart air and ground weapons had translated
into greater lethality per soldier or airman. Did that dictate a need
for fewer, more, or about the same number of on-the-ground shooters as
in the 1990's?
And what about the supposed lessons of Vietnam,
which purportedly worked against Rumsfeld's views? In fact, the massive
U.S. troop presence on the ground in Vietnam in the late 1960's, with
its enormous bureaucratic and logistical support, had not always
conduced to a safer environment for American forces or a more viable
South Vietnamese defense establishment than did the far smaller
footprint we maintained there after 1971, when Vietnamization, fewer
ground troops, and more audacious air support proved more effective
against the North Vietnamese.
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.
_____________
As
a journalistic account of the three-week war, this book is of
undeniable value. Interviews with dozens of officers below the rank of
one-star general lend the story a gritty, ground-eye vantage point.
There are also firsthand interviews with the rank-and-file that will be
of lasting archival use to future historians.
But, despite the
promise of the subtitle, we do not get a judicious assessment of the
origins of the Iraqi war, the immediate causes that led up to the
hostilities, or the complex and ongoing issues of the occupation.
Indeed, the chapters devoted to the period after April 2003 take up only
about 50 of the book's 500 or so pages of text, as if appended as an
afterthought. And even the pages on the war itself are focused
disproportionately, as we have seen, on American ignorance and
arrogance. For two such veteran observers of combat, there is an oddly
utopian strain in this presentation—as if going 7,000 miles into the
heart of the ancient caliphate, taking out a mass murderer in three
weeks, and then birthing three elections at the cost of 2,300 American
fatalities might not be considered successful in the long and tragic
annals of military history.
Like the invasion of Iraq itself, Cobra II
takes its title from the American breakout in Normandy that commenced
on July 25, 1944 with several days of strategic and tactical bombing
designed to blast a hole through German lines and free General Omar
Bradley's forces from a bloody six-week stalemate in the hedgerows. By
way of explaining their choice of title, the authors note that General
McKiernan's thrust to Baghdad emulated George S. Patton's explosive
drive south and then east across France. But they might have reminded
their readers that the sum total of all the errors committed by American
planners and generals in Iraq pales in comparison with the tragic
inauguration of the original Cobra campaign. Then, poor planning and
execution led to two accidental American airstrikes on friendly troops,
resulting in 111 dead and 490 wounded, plus the (covered-up) death of
Lieutenant General Leslie J. McNair, the highest ranking American
fatality in the entire European theater.
That is indicative of the way in which Cobra II,
despite its allusion to Patton, is not really history. We never learn
which benchmarks of the past, if any, are useful in assessing the race
to Baghdad and what followed, to what degree the errors we committed
were normal or exceptional in wars of this magnitude, or whether the
authors' preferred solutions might not themselves pose just as many
problems, if not worse ones.
Gordon and Trainor close on a trite
note: “The price for the American and allied troops, and for the Iraqis
themselves . . . was higher than it need have been: chaos, suffering,
and a future that is still vexed.” Vexed? Yes, of course—but this
tossed-off banality is true for the aftermath of almost all of America's
much bloodier and more error-prone conflicts, from the failed
post-Civil War reconstruction and the fiasco that ensued from not
occupying Germany after World War I to the loss of Eastern Europe in
1946 and the stalemate that was Korea. The present war, so roundly
criticized in Cobra II, developed from a past strategic
error—leaving Saddam in power. That decision was rightly criticized in
the authors' earlier book. But if it was wrong to leave Saddam in power
then, why was it even worse to have taken him out later?
The
authors' failure to notice this irony suggests an underlying blind spot:
what interests them is not policy—in this case, whether and how to deal
with the menace of Saddam Hussein—but rather the supposedly inept and
out-of-touch decision-making of those in authority in Washington. Thus,
the troop-level controversy, which frames the entire book, is presented
as a divide between, on the one hand, pie-in-the-sky civilian theorists
and toadying careerists and, on the other, hardheaded veteran middling
officers. Throughout, their criticisms are advanced in the name of these
officers: angry majors, colonels, and subordinate generals who feel
they were talked down to by the obsequious and politically-minded
four-star brass, and who then had to hide the truth from their own men
and the public at large.
Relying on the partial (in every sense)
testimony of these men, Gordon and Trainor assure us that “the bitter
insurgency American and British forces confront today was not
preordained. There were lost opportunities, military and political,
along the way.” How do they know this? “The commanders and troops who
fought the war explained them to us.” All honor to those commanders and
troops whom the authors chose to talk to; but the essential task of the
historian is otherwise, and these pages hardly begin to address it.
