Refighting the War

 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

War-Making and the Machines of War

 n recent years, the term “revolution in military affairs” (RMA) has come to be applied to the vast change that computerized intelligence and globalization have brought to the conduct of war. This catchy sobriquet, however, is only a new name for something very old. In fact, radical transformations in military practice have marked Western history at least since Sparta and Athens squared off in the Peloponnesian war in the 5th century B.C.E.

Such RMA's are also the focus of new books by two of our most accomplished commentators on military affairs: Frederick W. Kagan in Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy
¹ and Max Boot in War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today.
² Both of these scholars are wise enough not to be taken in by the notion that today's technological breakthroughs in satellite communications, computers, and miniaturization have altered the nature of war itself rather than merely the present face of battle, much less that they can by themselves win wars outright. Both also share a keen interest in the contemporary “war against terrorism,” and in their articles (Kagan) and columns (Boot) have responded in similar ways to America's purportedly erratic progress in that war. Early and vocal supporters of the invasion of Iraq, each became harshly critical of our postwar efforts at counterinsurgency; each, furthermore, has at various times called for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Such zeal is periodic in Boot's work, more overt and constant in Kagan's, but it informs their shared concern over a Pentagon leadership that has supposedly put too much reliance on high-tech weaponry and organizational principles borrowed from business and thereby contributed to the growing fragility of America's current position of military superiority.

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Kagan's book, more contemporary in its frame of reference than Boot's, centers on three revolutions in the American military since the Vietnam war: the rise of the volunteer army with its high-tech equipment and weaponry, the appearance in the 1980's of precision-guided munitions, and the adoption of information technology. To Kagan's mind, these often welcome developments and their consequences in policy have gone hand in hand with a decidedly unwelcome failure of American military and strategic thinking.

No country, he writes, has a more diverse and effective arsenal than America's. At the same time, however, no nation is so bogged down fighting wars in a manner it would prefer not to. His bipartisan indictment fingers two primary culprits: Bill Clinton, who dismantled crucial elements of the cold-war military establishment, and George W. Bush, who, not understanding the larger political purposes of war, has lacked the necessary vision to reap the advantage of our vast conventional power.

Kagan is scornful of faddish concepts like “network-centric warfare” and of the idea that the American military needs to embrace the spirit and the tactics of successful American corporations—downsizing, seeking greater efficiencies through new technologies and on-demand supply trains, and overwhelming rivals with pyrotechnics. In his view, all such cookie-cutter notions miss the point of how best to defeat multifarious enemies. Old-fashioned armored divisions with tanks and massive artillery, with their expensive manpower costs, may not achieve as much bang for the buck, but they remain often better suited to war's proper aim: bringing about long-term political settlements favorable to the United States. “War is not just about killing people and blowing things up,” he writes. “It is purposeful violence to achieve a political goal.”

Afghanistan and Iraq are his object lessons. In both places, having put the military cart before the strategic horse, the U.S. easily toppled oppressive regimes only to find itself hard-pressed to replace them with something both lasting and better. To what advantage is all our high-tech weaponry, Kagan asks, if, after lightning-quick victories over the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, our soldiers are still, years later, falling prey to crude improvised explosive devices and primitive suicide bombers?

Kagan's advice is that the U.S. military undergo something of a counterrevolution. We need, he insists, not more gadgets, but more human know-how. In practical terms, this means providing military officers with the resources and training—especially in cultural awareness and languages—that they need to serve as proconsuls in postwar landscapes. The victories of the future will be won and will endure, he argues, only when we have sufficient boots on the ground, filled by soldiers sophisticated in the ways of diverse enemies.

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Max Boot's War Made New is a rather different creature, both in its temporal scope and in its methodology. A universal history of military transformation since 1500, it deals with four great upheavals: the gunpowder revolution that began in the late 16th century; the first industrial revolution in the late 19th century, which brought rapid communications, large-scale transportation, and the internal-combustion engine; the second and more radical industrial revolution in the early-and mid-20th century, which led to the mass production of sophisticated ships, planes, and tanks; and, finally, our own information revolution of satellites, computers, and instant wireless communications.

For each of his four eras, Boot provides graphic accounts of three representative battles and a chapter on “consequences.” His section on the second industrial revolution, for instance, opens with the 1940 Nazi blitzkrieg in France before moving on to the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor and then the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945. Throughout, Boot provides a vivid and engaging mix of historical narrative and analysis, showing the bloody real-world results of abstract decision-making about the nature and degree of a country's military preparedness. His twelve case studies, stretching from the defeat of the Spanish Armada to the current situation in Iraq, point to a variety of disparate lessons but some themes that are surprisingly constant over time and space.

The most important of these is that sheer numbers do not always ensure victory. In the Sudan in 1898, Kitchener's redcoats defeated a Mahdi army that enjoyed as much as a three-to-one advantage in manpower over the English. As Boot argues, modern military success has depended less on bulk (or firepower) than on the broader capacities possessed by nations that are “intellectually curious and technologically innovative.” The dynamism of imperial Britain gave Kitchener the expertise, organization, and capital to build a railroad across a bend in the Nile, thus enabling his expeditionary force to arrive near Khartoum intact, with plenty of artillery and machine guns and better supplied than its native adversaries. A similar intellectual dynamism, illustrated in another of Boot's accounts, enabled the innovative Japanese navy to achieve its astonishing victory over the Russian fleet in 1905 in the battle of Tsushima.

By the 20th century, modern-looking regimes, often statist like Japan, were ostensibly best positioned to harness the natural resources and industrial labor demanded by modern warfare. They also appeared most adept at raising the mass-conscript armies that would distinguish the two world wars to come. But, as Boot demonstrates, their seeming advantages proved transitory. In World War II, the American bomber plant at Willow Run, Michigan—a mammoth 3.5-million-square-foot structure that, by August 1944, was producing one B-24 every hour—ultimately counted much more heavily toward the outcome of the conflict than the innovation and craftsmanship that had given the Nazis V-2 missiles and a few hundred advanced ME-262 jet fighters. The initial battlefield successes of the Axis powers were made possible by surprise and a head start in rearming; but this was eventually reversed by the wartime defense bureaucracies of the Soviet Union, Britain, and the United States, all three of which, in their various ways, proved better at mastering the principles of interchangeable parts, the assembly line, and the fielding of millions of conscripts.

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Concluding his survey with the present revolution in information systems, Boot sketches the ironies inherent in our own recent experience. Today's battlefield, in the Middle East as elsewhere, tends to favor decentralized and unconventional forces. In a globalized and interconnected world, terrorists underwritten by the petrodollars of despots can buy weaponry off the shelf and have it Fed-Exed to Beirut or Damascus, giving them near-parity in this respect with Western militaries that, for a variety of practical and ethical reasons, appear restrained from bringing their full array of advantages to the conflict. For our part, as ever more American dollars have been invested in ever fewer high-end military “platforms”—that is, advanced computerized ships and planes—we have seen our attenuated forces in the field becoming increasingly vulnerable and risk-averse. Who would want to send even a single B-2 bomber over terrorist enclaves when a cheap shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile might take out a half-billion-dollar investment?

Still, Boot warns against too single-minded a focus on asymmetrical warfare and its vulnerabilities. When it comes to blasting away at terrorists a few feet from American troops in the Hindu Kush, the cannons of an old A-10 Warthog will indeed do a better job than the new F-22 Raptor, which may be the most expensive and sophisticated jet in the world. But should the Chinese decide to storm Taiwan—hardly a fanciful possibility—it would be better to have that F-22 in the skies to ensure our strategic air superiority.

What this flexibility suggests is the need to avoid complacency—of any kind. In this fine book, Boot sees the 500-year history he reviews as a warning. The rise and fall of past militaries remind us that the United States is not foreordained to maintain its present edge. Therefore, we must recognize and replenish the font of our power by continuing to incorporate unconventional ideas and approaches into our military operations—remaining aware all the while that the category of the newly “unconventional” can still include some old-fashioned and allegedly outmoded ideas.

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In the great debate over military transformation, we are fortunate to have clear-headed analysts like Kagan and Boot, who turn to history rather than technology to provide answers for the future. In fact, an even longer historical perspective than theirs can help put our present situation, including our mistakes, in a clarifying context, and perhaps help to ameliorate their own tendency (Kagan's significantly stronger than Boot's) toward pessimism.

As I mentioned at the outset, there have always been unexpected and abrupt changes in the way men fight—even in pre-industrial times. Military practice is most often turned upside down during wars of great savagery, in which states in breakneck fashion invest their human and material capital in trying to stave off annihilation. During most of the early 5th century B.C.E., the Hellenic city-states preferred to settle their border disputes by means of conventional collisions between phalanxes of hoplites (heavily armored and armed infantrymen). But during the almost three-decades-long cauldron of the Peloponnesian war (431-404), such traditional warfare fell by the way. Both conservative, landlocked Sparta and imperial, maritime Athens turned to other avenues and methods—triremes rowed by mercenary and slave oarsmen, innovative techniques in siegecraft, the use of light cavalry, even terrorism. These set off a cycle of challenge and response like nothing seen before in Greek history.

By the time of Athens's defeat in 404 B.C.E., this early RMA had changed Western warfare seemingly for good. Just as states could no longer envision armed conflict as a series of pitched battles among ranks of hoplites, so the old social classifications of the battlefield—with the wealthy on ponies, small property-owners in the phalanx, and the landless poor as skirmishers and rowers—no longer prescribed how and where men would fight. Moral philosophers and conservative generals decried these changes, complaining that the rabble, war machines, and money were now the decisive factors in war; but to no avail.

This seeming break with the past, however, was hardly the end of the matter. In ancient Greece exactly as today, sudden innovation did not completely overturn the old order, and those who believed otherwise would often come to regret it. Despite the obsolescence of hoplite phalanxes, the general idea of spearmen in close order—eventually modified to become mercenary soldiers with pikes—persisted for centuries after the Peloponnesian war. Generals from Epaminondas to Alexander the Great learned that phalanxes were still integral to armies—provided they were given ample support by siegecraft, artillery, and horsemen—and were especially useful for shattering enemy infantry and cavalry.

In much the same way, and despite the introduction of satellites, computers, and radically new metals and munitions, tanks not so different in appearance from those of the 1920's remain invaluable in modern warfare. They still fulfill the age-old need for a powerful mobile artillery providing protection for foot soldiers. Even horses have not been entirely displaced—as we saw in the famous photos of mounted Special Forces soldiers typing GPS coordinates into their laptops in the wilds of Afghanistan. It is instructive that today's sophisticated ceramic body armor makes modern soldiers look like nothing so much as medieval knights or indeed Greek hoplites, reminding us that the tension between offense and defense is eternal.

It is also the case that certain laws of war—the need for unity of command, for integrating tactics with strategy, for devising strategy with political objectives in mind—have been immune to technological revolution. Nor is this surprising: war remains an irreducibly human phenomenon, and human nature itself has not changed over the ages. Thus, although the 1991 Gulf war was a memorably high-tech conflict, and although American M-1 Abrams tanks almost always destroyed their Iraqi counterparts in a first computer-guided shot, this by itself did not deliver lasting strategic advantage. The reason was that American planners were unsure of their ultimate goal: was it to defeat the Iraqi army in Kuwait while maintaining the sanctity of the wartime coalition, or to bring down the regime in Baghdad that was fielding that army?

Under this same heading comes the humbling and enduring reality highlighted by both Kagan and Boot: the transitory nature of military preeminence. By the end of the Peloponnesian war, Sparta had fashioned the best hoplite army in the world; yet in 371 B.C.E., the The-bans proved it tactically and strategically obsolete. Thirty years later, Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander showed that even the once-innovative Thebans were no match for pike-bearing, mercenary phalangites supported by heavy cavalry with sarissas. Resting on their laurels, today's victors like yesterday's often have to play catch-up when the shooting starts, and can stumble badly.

Finally, just about every technological transformation of consequence has taken place under Western auspices—if not Western in the strict geographical sense, then Western in the sense of a cultural landscape shaped by free thought and the chance for profit. Even non-Western innovations, like stirrups and gunpowder, have been quickly modified and improved by Western militaries. Jet fighters, GPS bombs, and laser-guided munitions are all products of Western expertise. Even the jihadists' most innovative and lethal weapons—improvised explosive devices and suicide belts—are cobbled together from Western-designed explosives and electronics.

But, as we have seen, this too is no cause for complacency. Precisely because such novel weaponry is a Western domain, there is always the danger that Westerners will underestimate the capacities of others. Crazy Horse at Little Big Horn, the Zulus at Isandlwana, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the Sunni Triangle—all have been able to import and use sophisticated weapons that they can neither make nor repair. The rocket-propelled grenades of al Qaeda may not be as fearsome as American anti-tank weapons, and may misfire or fail at much higher rates; nevertheless, they are good enough to permit illiterate teenagers to kill an American army officer with a quarter-million-dollar education from West Point, riding in a $100,000 Humvee.

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Where does that leave us? With reason for caution and circumspection, but also with clear advantages that are sometimes scanted by analysts fixated on our errors and missteps. True, our enemies may be able to exploit some of our advances, but they will never match our intellectual dynamism. No society in the present age is so self-critical, so ready to embrace foreign ideas, or so transparent and merit-based as the United States.

Indeed, future historians may well attribute our recent successes—toppling the two worst regimes in the Middle East, presiding over the birth of consensual governments in their places, and losing fewer soldiers in the effort than during many individual campaigns of World War II or Korea—to an ever-innovative American military that learned quickly from mistakes of the kind described in Finding the Target and War Made New. The sometimes dour work of Frederick Kagan and Max Boot is itself emblematic of one of our society's greatest strengths: the capacity to adjust to changing events with the help of thinkers relying on a more deeply informed sense of historical reality than that conveyed in the panicked conclusions of the 24-hour news cycle.

But recognizing our shortcomings, and even our strengths, is not enough. Military revolutions are missed not only because of military sloth, delusional leadership, or a reactionary romance with the past, but because of a failure at the elite levels of society either to perceive real threats posed by real external enemies or to countenance the sacrifices necessary to meet those threats. Notable examples include ancient Athens and Rome, turn-of-the-20th-century Russia, and France in the 1930's. The principal challenge today is not only to hone our military in the face of constantly evolving challenges, but to convince an affluent, leisured, and often cynical American public that that we should even try to do so.

Nothing Succeeds Like Success

 

Placing the surge alongside historical reversals of military fortune in Korea, the Civil War, and other conflicts.

Americans have regularly changed their minds in the midst of their ongoing wars—and not just once, but often. War is a volatile enterprise. Tactics, strategies, and commanders must be sorted out amid death and destruction before the proper combination is found to defeat the enemy. In the meantime, the reasons for going to war, the manner in which the war is fought, and the objectives for which it is waged are constantly being weighed at home against the costs of conducting it. As a result, impatient democracies—and Americans are nothing if not impatient—are liable to suffer alternating fits of unrestrained optimism and utter despair.

This volatility has certainly characterized our current engagement in Iraq, but it has been no less true before. In the early days of the Civil War, a confident North was sure of quick victory in a righteous cause. After the slaughters of 1862 at Shiloh, Antietam, and Frederickburg, the North then fell into collective querulousness and despair. By the summer of 1863, the North was ebullient again as its armies won crushing, near-simultaneous victories at both Gettysburg and Vicksburg. A year later, after the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor, Lincoln and all he stood for were reviled. Stalemate or concession seemed imminent—until General Philip Sheridan ran wild in the Shenandoah Valley and William Tecumseh Sherman took Atlanta on September 2, 1864.

Lincoln’s war aims were largely the same in April 1865 as they had been in April 1861. It was not his policies per se that lost, regained, lost, and once more gained public support but rather the perceived progress, or lack thereof, of Union arms. And these mercurial reactions have likewise been the norm in our later history. In World War II, well after the initial gloom of 1939-42 had disappeared with the turnaround in 1943 and 1944, near-shock set in over the horrendous Allied slaughters at the Bulge and Okinawa—only to be set aside within a matter of months when the war ended victoriously.

In the Korean war, to take another example, Seoul changed hands four times. Harry Truman, who had won support for the deployment of American troops in the summer of 1950 and then lost it with the massive Chinese invasion of December, left office in January 1953 with a 22-percent approval rating. But his successor Dwight Eisenhower, without materially changing American strategy or war aims, mustered fresh support for stabilizing the situation once General Matthew Ridgway had succeeded in restoring an autonomous South Korea below the 38th parallel, and in preventing further Communist aggression.

In the first two years of the Vietnam war (1963-65), the struggle was generally deemed to be essential to our national interest and, what is more, winnable. By 1967, however, the war was beginning to be seen as a quagmire; by mid-1968, it had been written off by many as a disaster. Then, five years later, in 1973, it was grudgingly judged to have been settled by the Paris peace accords—before being lost in 1975.

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And Iraq? Three-quarters of Americans favored the initial decision in October 2002 to remove Saddam Hussein. In the wake of our brilliant three-week victory in April 2003 and the initial, relatively quiet months of the postwar occupation, the public maintained its strong support. This remained the case even after it became clear that we had not found arsenals of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), one of the chief reasons offered by the Bush administration for going to war.

By late 2006, however—after the Abu Ghraib scandal, the pullback from Falluja, the withdrawal of some members of the original coalition, and increased internecine violence between Shiites and Sunnis, and in the face of some 3,000 American combat fatalities—only about a third of Americans still thought the war was worth the price or favored its continuation. By late summer 2007, of the 27 Democratic Senators who had voted to authorize hostilities in October 2002, only one, Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, was still on record as supporting the effort. Former President Bill Clinton, who in 2002 had boasted, “I don’t think it will be a big military problem if we do it,” and who reiterated his support in May 2003, announced last year that he had been against the war “from the beginning.”

But we appear to have entered lately into still another cycle of re-interpretation, clearly the result of a new array of converging developments. Among these, the successful “surge” of U.S. troops, the appointment of General David Petraeus as senior theater commander, and the tactical switch from counter-terrorism to counter-insurgency are no doubt the most salient. These days, although there is no great public elation at our improved prospects, or appreciation that al Qaeda by its own admission is in disarray in Iraq, we see or hear very little of antiwar groups like Code Pink or the Cindy Sheehan brigades, and none of Hollywood’s recent antiwar movies—Lions for Lambs, Redacted, Rendition, Valley of Elah—has made a dent at the box office. At the very least, many Americans seem tired of being told that the United States is the culpable party in the war.
As we see improved chances for an eventual U.S. victory and a stabilized Iraq, it is therefore worth returning to the most controversial issues of the war—not in order to re-fight it, but to gain some perspective on the relationship between battlefield developments and perceptions of the worthiness and achievability of American aims.

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The Bush administration, like Congress in its authorizations of October 2002, advanced many arguments for going into Iraq: Saddam Hussein’s possession of WMD, his links with al Qaeda, his genocidal actions at home and abroad, his harboring of terrorists, his non-stop violations of UN mandates and of the accords struck after the first Gulf war from 1991 onward. Of these, we may begin with the first two, the only ones to become issues mired in acrimony.

Upon their arrival in Iraq, U.S. forces found no arsenals of WMD. Accordingly, when the occupation took a deadly turn, a new slogan emerged: “Bush lied, thousands died.” The United States, in other words, had gotten itself into a hopeless and vastly destructive war over a nonexistent cause. Yet now that things are improving in Iraq, does that verdict hold up or can we look back and see larger considerations at stake? 

The case of Libya offers the most compelling reason to view the question afresh. Only upon our invasion of Iraq did we learn about Libya’s own nuclear-weapons programs, the existence and dangerous extent of which had not been previously discovered by our intelligence services. Instead, we learned about them thanks to Muammar Qaddafi’s sudden promise to give them up. Was Qaddafi’s precipitous action the consequence, as diplomats boasted, of a longstanding Western effort to isolate Libya diplomatically and economically, or was it rather the consequence of the recent and unexpected demonstration of victorious American might in Iraq? The timing of the announcement—in December 2003, a week after the much-photographed capture of a haggard and bedraggled Saddam Hussein—suggests the latter.

Nor was this the only coincidence of timing. Take the case of Iran, which, according to the National Intelligence Estimate of 2007, may have halted elements of its own nuclear-weapons program in the fall of 2003. If that is true—the accuracy of the NIE as a whole is highly questionable—we have here another instance of the inhibiting effect of vigorous American action on the nuclear ambitions of rogue states.

This is not to suggest that the Iraq war was fought in order to pressure Libya and Iran into desisting from their quest for WMD. But had we not gone into Iraq, it is all too easy to envision a scenario in which Libya and Iran would now be proceeding to process weapons-grade uranium and we would still be as unsure about Iraq itself as we and the international community had been throughout the 1990’s. And this is to say nothing of a related development in Pakistan—where, at almost the same moment as Saddam’s capture, Dr. A.Q. Khan was abruptly detained and subsequently confessed to having been involved in the covert international proliferation of nuclear-weapons technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea.

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In this connection, we might also pause to consider another “lesson” of Iraq that only yesterday was thought to have been resolved for all time. In the heyday following the quick removal of the Taliban and preceding the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration released a National Security Strategy document embracing the doctrine of preemptive war against suspected enemies, especially those with the capability of developing WMD. “We will not wait,” George Bush declared in his March 6, 2003 address to the nation, “to see what terrorists or terrorist states will do.”

But then, after we failed to find WMD in Iraq, and the violence in that country escalated, preemption, too, was added to the growing indictment sheet of the administration’s supposed record of arrogance and incompetence. Does that charge, in light of where we are today, still stand?

Retrospectively, the legitimacy of preemption can be confirmed (if not precisely in the terms its backers expected) by the Libyan announcement, the possible cessation of enrichment in Iran, and the detention of A.Q. Khan. All three are examples of changes in the balance of power that did not require the direct application of preemptive American force but were the results of its preemptive application elsewhere.

Prospectively, as we ponder Iran’s ongoing violations of the international inspection regime and the failure of diplomatic efforts to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons, preemption seems to have become once again thinkable, winning to its side such unlikely converts as French President Nicolas Sarkozy and NATO ministers who recently declared their own willingness to embrace preemptive strategies, including nuclear options, against states that threaten NATO members with state-sponsored terror and deadly new weapons. And as for Pakistan, which already has a sizable nuclear arsenal, political figures as diverse as Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee have suggested preemptive incursions in order to find Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants—a proposal scarcely conceivable just two years ago when our “unnecessary preemptive war” in Iraq had allegedly landed us in a quagmire.

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Which brings us back to the second highly controversial reason adduced for the war in Iraq—namely, the existence of links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. A loose affinity between the two men was widely accepted as canonical in late 2002. In the words of the joint congressional authorization, bin Laden’s operatives were “known to be in Iraq,” and Senator Hillary Clinton confirmed that “intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein . . . has given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.” Buttressing this assurance were a number of established facts: Saddam’s knowledge of or assistance to the al-Qaeda affiliate Ansar al-Islam in Kurdistan; the presence in Baghdad of Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the architects of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center; and the flight to Iraq of one of bin Laden’s followers, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, after the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

But when intra-Iraq violence increased in 2004-5, and when the 9/11 commission found no evidence of formal cooperation between al Qaeda and Saddam, the “link” was pronounced another fabrication—more proof that our presence in Iraq had nothing to do with defeating the people who had killed thousands of Americans on September 11. Instead, the new narrative had it that, simply by being in Iraq, we had created an army of terrorists who would have otherwise never existed or never have been drawn there.

Today, the issue is being slowly re-framed. True, there may never have been a formal working relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda, but some natural affinity there was. Certainly, once Saddam’s Baathist remnant found itself without an army, it had no difficulty looking to al Qaeda to import one post-haste. Since 2003, al-Qaeda fighters have operated in conjunction with the Saddamist insurgents. Only now, and with the help of former Baathist and Sunni extremists whom we have persuaded to turn against their erstwhile allies, are American soldiers on the verge of inflicting a thorough defeat on al Qaeda in Iraq—a development with major strategic implications for the war against Islamic terrorists and one, moreover, that is taking place, as originally intended, at a safe distance from our own shores.

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Still another point of reexamination relates to the status and image of the U.S. military. If the spectacular three-week victory over Saddam in 2003 led to a kind of temporary triumphalism, the four years of hard fighting, long rotations, and casualties that followed it prompted a deep-seated revisionist pessimism. Our military was said to be worn out, poorly led, and prone to crimes like Abu Ghraib and the Haditha “massacres.” The Pentagon was indicted as having been fatally blindsided by the ingenuity and ferocity of enemy attacks. Enlistments were said to be to be falling below manpower targets, with no end in sight.

Today’s perception is once again different. Thanks to the success of our counter-insurgency tactics and the consequent drop in violence—during 2007, ethnic fighting in Baghdad decreased by over 90 percent—ordinary Americans are beginning to grasp that our military forces, and especially the Army and Marine corps, are within sight of accomplishing a task that is still confidently pronounced impossible by some prominent public figures.

As of December 2007, enlistments in the four services have exceeded manpower goals, and entirely new combat brigades are being created. Our officers and their troops, however weary they may be from repeated tours, are now acknowledged to be the world’s most sophisticated practitioners of counter-insurgency warfare. Their competence is on display not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan, where American veterans of the Iraq war have proved far more adroit against the Taliban than their unseasoned NATO allies. Like the emergence of Sherman’s Army of the West in the autumn of 1864, which renewed the North’s faith in its military prowess and in the wisdom of Lincoln’s war planners, the Petraeus command in Iraq has prompted a new appreciation of our military’s talents.

What about troop deployments, an issue much agitated among supporters of the war no less than among opponents? If the 2003 lightning strike on Saddam was tendered as confirmation of the efficacy of Donald Rumsfeld’s “revolution in military affairs,” the subsequent bloody occupation was taken as a rebuke not just to the Rumsfeld doctrine, but also to the entire notion of an expeditionary war conducted with a small local footprint. For much of 2004, former generals, antiwar politicians, and some proponents of the war insisted that too few troops had been committed in 2003 and far too few allotted for the subsequent occupation. Initial calls for a corrective surge in 2004, voiced by stalwarts like John McCain, stipulated reinforcements in numbers ranging from 80,000 to 100,000 troops. But by mid-2007 a much smaller compromise figure of 30,000 was reached—the maximum number considered to be politically palatable, sufficient to support a change in tactics, and, given other American military deployments around the globe, just barely doable.

So we have gone from a general feeling in 2003 that 200,000 was the right number to execute our brilliant defeat of Saddam Hussein, to a subsequent consensus that it was veritable insanity to commit a mere 150,000 troops to pacify a country of 26 million, to an acknowledgment that, after four years of fighting, a surge to 160,000 was large enough. The point is hardly to suggest there is no correct answer to the question of numbers or that manpower needs do not change with the pulse of battle, but rather, in the light of today’s good news, to cast doubt on the fiercely held revisionist orthodoxy of 2004-06 that the total size of the needed deployment of American occupiers lay in several hundreds of thousands.

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Finally, there is the future. As early as April 2003, some observers had begun to speak of an unstoppable American juggernaut, which, having already destroyed two extremist regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, and on the brink of establishing stable reform governments in those countries, could now quickly shift its attention to such other terrorist-sponsoring states as Syria and Iran.

This confidence, dashed by the insurgency and sectarian strife in Iraq, was soon supplanted by a new conventional wisdom. Far from being able to decapitate other enemy nations, it was said, we had further empowered them. Iran in particular, its regional ambitions no longer checked by Saddam, and newly emboldened by perceived American setbacks, was declared the real “winner” of our folly, carving out a rump Shiite state in southern Iraq, boldly exporting jihadists all over the region from Iraq to Lebanon, and on the verge of acquiring the bomb. Syria under Bashar Assad was proceeding methodically to choke Lebanon to death.

Now all this has begun to be rethought once more. By the end of 2007, Moqtada al-Sadr, the chief local surrogate of the Ayatollahs, evidently sensing a change in the local balance of power, had prudently withdrawn from his violent anti-American and anti-Sunni activity. Meanwhile, the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad was beginning to restore domestic funding to Sunni communities in Anbar province and to be inching toward a more genuinely representative system. Perhaps, it was being whispered, Iraqi Shiites valued their Iraqi and Arab identity over their sectarian Shiite allegiance after all, and might be prepared to resist Iranian encroachments on their sovereignty. Regionally, too, there have been signs, however halting and uncertain, of a growing Arab desire to contain Iran. Could it be that, provided the nuclear threat can be disposed of, the long-running grip of Khomeinism might be better challenged in the  landscape of a post-Saddam Iraq?

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So far, none of these gradual reversals of opinion has affected overall judgments of the Bush administration, whose approval ratings, according to most polls, still hover around 35 percent. This continued unpopularity has prompted some among the President’s supporters to compare his tenure with that of Harry Truman, who as we have seen exited office in 1953 with even lower ratings. Only later, with the dramatic turnabout in Korea and the gradual emergence of a successful South Korea, did Truman achieve his lasting reputation as the executor of the cold-war strategy of containment and a hugely consequential President.

Such positive revisionism can take years to develop. Assessments from the battlefield must be digested, partisan distortions rectified, and volatile news cycles balanced by the more measured perspective that comes only with time.

The optimism of 2003, it is good to remember, was itself not just a product of the spectacular removal of Saddam and the Taliban, but a dividend of other successful interventions dating back decades: Grenada, Panama, the first Gulf war, the successful Balkan bombing campaign against Slobodan Milosevic, and the rapid removal of the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. By the turn of the millennium, an almost antiseptic notion of American war-making had been created in the public mind. In turn, the bitterness over Iraq, whose symptoms peaked last year in the attempt by congressional Democrats to force a precipitous withdrawal of American troops, resulted from four years of unrelievedly pessimistic reporting from Iraq—reporting that itself owed much to a media template forged decades earlier in Vietnam. If the success of the surge continues through 2008, and culminates in a stable Iraqi government, we can assume the gradual emergence of a new consensus, and perhaps, with time, even a change in the current low public regard for the administration and its war aims.

It would be folly to think, however, that one can sit by and wait for history to deliver a smiling verdict. Shifting judgments about the causes, conduct, and consequences of America conflicts are indeed the norm in American history. These ongoing swings depend in large part on whether the United States is thought to be winning or losing, and are finally codified only at war’s end or well afterward. But for the cycle to play out, there must be a persistence of spirit and a willingness to see a war through to the end, as well as a bedrock confidence in both the capabilities of America’s armed forces and the righteousness of the American cause.

After our aberrant defeat in Vietnam, we may have collectively forgotten that even successful wars of long duration undergo many incarnations, with accompanying swings of mood that alternately damn and support aims, methods, costs, and benefits. But this is in fact the pattern, and it has once again been discernible in Iraq. The road to defeat lies only in the willful denial of this elementary fact.

A dangerous world will become more disorderly and we will not have the means to straighten it out.

 

"The stupidest f—ing guy on the planet” is how General Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, summed up Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy in the Pentagon from July 2001 until his resignation in August 2005. Franks was cruder than most, but Feith was under almost continuously hostile scrutiny and controversy throughout his tenure. As the third-highest ranking civilian official in Donald Rumsfeld’s wartime Pentagon, he oversaw the Defense Department’s relations with foreign governments at a time of unprecedented anti-Americanism abroad. More important, he headed both the Office of Special Plans, charged with analyzing prewar intelligence reports on the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, and, subsequently, the Pentagon groups that would eventually coalesce into the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, which oversaw much of the early rebuilding of postwar Iraq.

Of course, many other policy-makers in the Bush administration came in for their share of contumely after the lightning-fast victory of April 2003 turned into the long slog of the occupation and the rise of the Iraqi insurgency. But no one was quite so vilified as the Harvard- and Georgetown-educated Feith. He was variously charged with advocating torture, undermining the Geneva Convention, fronting for Israel’s Likud party, and sexing up the intelligence to exaggerate Saddam Hussein’s links with al Qaeda—not to mention sheer incompetence in failing to foresee the problems of the occupation.

Since 2005, journalists including Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Michael Gordon, George Packer, Thomas Ricks, Bernard Trainor, and Bob Woodward have published scathing accounts of administration policy. According to much of their common narrative, neoconservatives like Feith distorted prewar intelligence, brainwashing or tricking others into undertaking a unilateral, preemptive, and unnecessary war. They then subverted the postwar occupation by disbanding the Iraqi army, sending too few American troops, and ignoring the principled warnings of patriots like Secretary of State Colin Powell and Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage, Generals Eric Shinseki and Anthony Zinni, and a host of former advisers to George Bush, Sr. The result was the loss of thousands of lives and a trillion dollars in a struggle that has left us less safe and the Iraqis worse off, and whose only solution is summary withdrawal.

Agreeing with a great deal of this critique, army officers like Franks, and civilian officials such as CIA director George Tenet and Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, have claimed that others, not they, were the real culprits for the botched operations and occupation. And once again at the center of the indictments has been Feith, the bespectacled neocon who is said to have imperiously nitpicked, second-guessed, and hobbled the more experienced men of action.

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In War and Decision, Feith offers a dispassionate counterresponse—the first, one can only hope, of others to follow from Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and George W. Bush. Feith is not interested in getting even, but rather in systematically exploring the accuracy of the entire pessimistic narrative that has grown up about Iraq. Although he does not question every detail, he subjects enough of the narrative to cross-examination to show that it is largely a myth. His tools are understated irony and extensive documentation—some 600 footnotes and dozens of reprinted documents. These bring forcefully to view what the Bush administration was actually thinking in the days, weeks, and months after 9/11.

As the record adduced by Feith clearly demonstrates, neither he nor Rumsfeld advocated a preemptive war for democracy. Feith was more interested in simply removing dictators like the Taliban and Saddam Hussein from power before they or their surrogates could trump the horrors of 9/11, while Rumsfeld was almost obsessive in his anxiety over mounting costs, unforeseen battlefield complications, and occupations with no predetermined end. Far from wanting an imperial American presence in Iraq, Pentagon officials wished to transfer sovereignty to the Iraqis as quickly as possible—unlike their counterparts in the State Department, and unlike Paul Bremer, whose quest for the perfect constitutional government got in the way of implementing an interim governing body that would have been good enough.

Powell and Armitage—as the record also demonstrates—were neither critics nor supporters of the war, but had carefully situated themselves to be for it if it worked, and against it if it did not. Their studied triangulation meant that when things went well they were never enthusiastic advocates of the policies they were charged with overseeing, while when things turned bad they were ready to provide off-the-record quotes and background information to the growing chorus of antiwar critics.

As for the intelligence about Saddam’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, that came from the CIA, and it happened to coincide with the assessment of every pertinent foreign intelligence agency as well, including that of France. (This, quite apart from the fact that the CIA was a hotbed of political and ideological partisans with little sympathy for the Bush administration and less for its decision to go to war.) Arguments over proper troop levels were left largely to top generals. Franks adjudicated the size of the invading forces. He never requested additional troops, and summarily quit his command six weeks after the victory, just as the insurgency began.

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What then were the administration’s mistakes? Feith lists several. In his view, it was wrong to make Saddam’s arsenals into the main casus belli, especially since Congress had listed several other justifications for war that could have easily been given pride of place. Although there was prewar planning aplenty, in the euphoria that followed the three-week walkover of Saddam it was either poorly implemented—too many diverse agencies—or hijacked by the State Department and the often maverick Bremer. Among particular lapses, Feith lists Bremer’s failure to turn control over to Iraqi officials early enough and waiting too long to create an Iraqi security force.

It was Defense Department personnel who, Feith writes, had been largely responsible for the inspired American efforts against the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. Had they been listened to, they might have mitigated at least some of the unfolding difficulties in Iraq. Richard Meyers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was hardly the weak facilitator he was sometimes portrayed as being. Donald Rumsfeld pressed his underlings too hard, but not as hard as he worked himself. His tragedy lay not in any failure to anticipate the mess of 2004-06—in fact, he uncannily forecast almost every mishap of the “long hard slog”—but his inability to convince the President or the State Department of the mounting dangers and his crippling worry that committing more troops would stretch U.S. forces too thinly elsewhere.

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There is much to be said about each of these points, and others one might name (like the debate over incorporating anti-Baathist “externals”—i.e., Iraqis who had fled Saddam’s regime—into the postwar government). Perhaps the first thing to be noted in assessing Feith’s version, however, is that even today we still do not have the final verdict on Iraq. The costly occupation/reconstruction seems one endless and bitter disappointment when set against the brilliant three-week removal of Saddam; but, on a longer-term view, if we defeat and humiliate al Qaeda in Iraq and ensure the stability of a constitutional government, even this will appear in retrospect to have been not so disastrous after all.

Similarly, it is worth bearing in mind that the choices facing Feith and others were usually of the bad-vs.-worse variety; there were no good ones. Should we cleanse the Iraqi government of Baathists who had blood on their hands, or retain valuable civil servants no matter their previous record or potential security risk? Such choices were predicated ultimately on the military situation: had we crushed the insurgency in its first few weeks, going with the worse of two bad alternatives would probably not have proved so catastrophic.

In any case, what is refreshingly and almost startlingly different about Feith’s account, in contrast to others, is that it provides a basis for disagreement. Feith does not rely on quotations from anonymous sources. Instead of the usual ploy of advancing pseudo-citations from “a senior Pentagon official” or “a high-ranking officer,” his footnotes refer to what actual people have said and have put their names to. Critics can fault his interpretation of the evidence, but at least they have a body of evidence over which to argue. In addition, Feith has provided a website (www.waranddecision.com) where readers can check his sources and ascertain for themselves the degree to which he has quoted fairly and argued honestly. All this is a huge vote in his favor.

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In light of this book’s virtues, it is somewhat regrettable that Feith does not address in detail the failure of the administration to apprise the American people adequately as to the difficulty of the task ahead or to counter the often untrue but sensational accusations of critics. That multi-agency failure constantly to set the record straight did terrible damage to the once-strong public support for the war. Administration officials might have explained over and over again what exactly were our choices after 9/11, what our aims were in Iraq, how the unexpected dilemmas of this war were materially no different from those of past wars, and how, even so, our blunders in Iraq nowhere approximated the scale of earlier disasters in Korea, in World War II, in World War I, or in the Civil War.

Early on, as Feith points out, administration officials stopped emphasizing the benefits—to the Iraqis, to us, to the world—of having Saddam gone from the scene, concentrating instead on the future advantages that would accrue from Iraqi democracy. This mixed message came at precisely the moment when the insurgency was growing, and when security, not idealism, was the chief concern of the American people. The result was that our successful effort to remove a genocidal dictator in the heart of the ancient caliphate—followed by the establishment of a constitutional government where none had previously existed in the Arab world, by the routing of al Qaeda, and by the recruiting and training of thousands of Iraqi fighters, all at the cost of fewer lives than most single battles of World War II—could be written off as the worst blunder in our nation’s history.  It would be useful to have had not just Feith’s general views of this matter but an anatomy of who in the administration was responsible for the lapse and why and how it was never rectified.

I have mentioned the campaign of near-character assassination waged against Douglas Feith. The supposedly unpardonable sins of which he has been accused—they amount to his being an unapologetic policy intellectual who could be haughty to his subordinates and colleagues and obsequious to his superiors—do nothing to obscure the fact that he served his country honorably in wartime and has written a candid and invaluable account of that service.

To no avail, it would seem. Recently, Georgetown University released Feith from teaching a class at its school of foreign service. A student paper at the university ran an editorial about his impending departure: “Feith can take his salary,” it thundered, “and the further thousands he will no doubt earn from his memoir, and try to justify his failures somewhere else.”

Here, however, is the final paragraph of the appendix to War and Decision:

With appreciation of the valor and sacrifice of the men and women of the U.S. armed forces, I have donated all of my revenues from this book to a charitable foundation that will use the funds exclusively for the benefit of veterans and their families.

This, too, needs to be entered into the record, and gratefully acknowledged.

The Defense Department Lost Track of Millions Sent to Chinese Labs

 

The Department of Defense Inspector General is out with a new report detailing how the Pentagon sent millions of dollars in American taxpayer funding to a number of research labs in China and then lost track of how it was being used. 

The audit was conducted in compliance with the National Defense Authorization Act and looked at where funds were sent, in addition to whether they were used in ways that could spark a pandemic. Investigators probed whether money was sent to the Chinese Communist Party, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and much more.  

(U) Management Advisory: Review of DoD Funds Provided to the People’s Republic of China and Associated Affiliates for Research Activities or Any Foreign Countries for the Enhancement of Pathogens of Pandemic Potential (Report No. DODIG‑2024‑099)

The purpose of this management advisory is to inform Congress and DoD leadership of the results of our review required in response to Public Law 118‑31, “National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024,” section 252, “Audit to Identify Diversion of Department of Defense Funding to China’s Research Labs. Section 252 requires our office to identify and report to Congressional Defense Committees: 

The amount of Federal funds awarded by the Department of Defense(whether directly or indirectly) through grants, contracts, subgrants, subcontracts, or any other type of agreement or collaboration, during the10‑year period immediately preceding such date of enactment, that—(U) (1) was provided, whether purposely or inadvertently, to

(U) (A) the People’s Republic of China;

(U) (B) the Communist Party of China;

(U) (C) the Wuhan Institute of Virology or any other organization administered by the Chinese Academy of Sciences;

(U) (D) EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. for work performed in China on research supported by the Government of China, including any subsidiaries and related organizations that are directly controlled byEcoHealth Alliance, Inc.;

(U) (E) the Academy of Military Medical Sciences or any of its research institutes, including the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology;

(U) (F) any other lab, agency, organization, individual, or instrumentality that is owned, controlled (directly or indirectly), or overseen (officially or unofficially) by any of the entities listed in subparagraphs (A) through (E); or

(U) (2) was used to fund research or experiments that could have reasonably resulted in the enhancement of any coronavirus, influenza, Nipah, Ebola, or other pathogen of pandemic potential or chimeric versions of such a virus or pathogen in the People’s Republic of China or any other foreign country.

The report states that due to a lack of proper oversight and tracking, much of the funding was lost and where it went or how it was used is unaccounted for.

“The full extent of DoD funds provided to Chinese research laboratories or other foreign countries for research related to enhancement of pathogens of pandemic potential is unknown,” the report found. “The DoD did not track funding at the level of detail necessary to enable us to completely and accurately determine if the DoD provided funding to Chinese research laboratories or other foreign countries for research related to the enhancement of pathogens of pandemic potential. For example, when the DoD awards funds to an entity, the entity often provides some of those funds to other organizations for subawards or contracted services. DoD officials stated that during the initial grant application process, they have visibility over who the subaward recipients are intended to be. However, we found that DoD organizations lacked visibility of subaward information over the life of contracts and grants.” 

Due to limitations in the DoD’s tracking systems, the full extent of DoD funds provided to Chinese research laboratories for research related to enhancement of pathogens of pandemic potential is unknown. Read our new report now: https://t.co/Ts7V7C15V9— DoD Office of Inspector General (@DoD_IG) June 20, 2024

“We found significant limitations with the adequacy of data, similar to the observations the GAO found in its reports. Specifically, the DoD did not track funding at the level of detail necessary to determine whether the DoD provided funding to Chinese research laboratories or other foreign countries for research related to enhancement of pathogens of pandemic potential,” the report concludes. “In addition, DoD organizations did not have visibility of subaward information throughout the life of contracts and grants. In addition, except for the CDMRP electronic grants system, DoD organizations could not effectively search award systems to identify all contracts, subcontracts, grants, and subgrants that may have been related to pathogen research performed by China and other foreign countries. As a result, DoD organizations could not produce a complete population of pathogen research grants and subawards necessary for us to conclude on the use of DoD funds provided for pathogen research.”

Oddly, the page about Chinese entities is redacted.