What Went Wrong In Iraq

David Rieff in the 4-17-06 edition of The New Republic reviews Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq by Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor. His description of the mind set of the Bush administration is frightening. One can only hope that we are so mired in Iraq, that attempting a similar foray into Iran is completely off the table. I’ve reduced a long review and essay to what I think is the essence of Reiff’s argument – namely that optimism blinded our leaders to the reality of the situation they faced.

Self-doubt, let alone pessimism, is generally not part of the mentality of people who start wars, and certainly not of those who plan to unleash the most powerful army in the history of the world against a third-rate ill-equipped military force commanded by a man whom one Marine commander described as "dumb as a rock" and his two psychopathic and hopelessly incompetent sons. Three years after our invasion of Iraq, an elective war, we know that the optimism not only of the senior members of the Bush administration, but also of the many liberal hawks who supported the toppling of Saddam Hussein, was misplaced. The salient question is whether the disappointments in the Iraq war are owed to the illusions that attend all war planning (we might call it, with apologies to Clausewitz, the fiction of war) or to illusions that were particular to this venture. Why has the war gone so wrong?

Gordon and Trainor establish beyond a doubt the incompetence and the hopelessness of the Iraqi forces, and they evoke with great conviction the dash and the creativity of American officers and enlisted personnel (their criticism is largely reserved for senior generals and civilian officials at the Pentagon). The implausibility of their story is owed, rather, to a fundamental defect in the military plot: our forces were not exactly fighting the Wehrmacht or the Red Army as they advanced toward Baghdad.

In the more sober and analytical parts of their book, Gordon and Trainor emphasize in heretofore unknown detail that the real challenge facing American planners--a challenge that they show the Pentagon largely bungled--was how to secure a lasting victory, or, to use the military term of art, the "desired end state." That end state was not, of course, only a military one. The institutional power play that put responsibility not just for the military campaign itself but also for postwar Iraq in the hands of the Pentagon is well known by now. As Gordon and Trainor put it, Rumsfeld was presenting a vision of a post-Saddam Iraq that would be virtually cost-free to the United States once the shooting had stopped. America could "oust a dictator, usher in a new era in Iraq, shift the balance of power in the Middle East in the United States's favor, all without America's committing itself to the lengthy, costly, and arduous peacekeeping and nation-building, which the Clinton administration had undertaken in Bosnia and Kosovo."

That the Bush administration was convinced that the war in Iraq was going to be cheap is well documented. Whether it was Paul Wolfowitz testifying before Congress that Iraqi oil revenues would almost certainly pay for the country's reconstruction, or Rumsfeld answering with an indignant "Baloney" George Stephanopoulos's query about whether a $300 billion price tag on the war might not be closer to the mark than the $50 or $60 billion the administration was forecasting, examples are legion of the Bush administration's refusal to budge from its most optimistic scenarios for postwar Iraq.

Gordon and Trainor document the same cult of the best-case scenario at the operational level: during the run-up to the war, military planners who thought that more troops would be needed for occupation duties were told no, and that forces from other countries would take care of this, and that American forces would be substantially reduced within a few months of Saddam's fall. The planners were told to make plans for these draw-downs even as planning for the war itself was still going on.

Despite its failure to put together a real coalition to invade Iraq, as President George H.W. Bush had done before the Gulf War of 1991, the Bush administration appears to have launched the war convinced that once Saddam Hussein had been removed, security in a postwar Iraq would be largely guaranteed by existing Iraqi police and military formations denuded of their Baathist senior commanders and buttressed, where necessary, by foreign constabulary forces from Italy, Denmark, Portugal, South Korea, Singapore, and elsewhere. As Gordon and Trainor note, "There was no fallback plan." They describe an administration impervious to the possibility of things going wrong once the initial military mission had been "accomplished," to use George W. Bush's unfortunate word when he addressed the nation from that aircraft carrier on April 26, 2003. "Few of the potential contributors [to this constabulary force]," they write, "had been wholehearted supporters of the war, but the administration assumed they would be willing to help keep peace in a relatively benign Iraq, which controlled some of the world's largest oil reserves and which would be ruled by a new enlightened government."

But when things did not go according to plan, the Bush administration failed to reconsider its postwar strategy. As Gordon and Trainor put it, President Bush and his team "failed to adapt to developments on the ground and remained wedded to their prewar analysis of Iraq even after Iraqis showed their penchant for guerrilla tactics in the first days of the war."

Gordon and Trainor argue that American troops on the ground understood that the nature of their enemy was different from the one anticipated in the war plan. But Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, they write, remained unconvinced, and adamantly refused to adjust their plan significantly. Instead they continued to believe that "their victory would be sealed with the seizure of Baghdad, which was identified as Iraq's 'center of gravity.'" They never seem to have understood that "from the first day of the invasion the United States was not fighting a purely conventional war, one that would suddenly be brought to an end when the regime's ministries were seized and its leader toppled." Instead, victory depended on bringing the Sunni regions of Iraq and the population centers of Iraq, above all Baghdad itself, under control. But Gordon and Trainor demonstrate conclusively that, given the administration's pre-existing convictions about what a post-Saddam Iraq would look like, and Rumsfeld's dogmatic insistence that large numbers of American troops would not be needed in Iraq after Baghdad fell, there was never any real thought given to altering the pre-existing strategy. Perhaps the most depressing of all Gordon and Trainor's depressing observations is that "Rumsfeld and his aides viewed the building of a new Iraq as a relatively undemanding pursuit."

Gordon and Trainor seem to have decided not to pursue in depth the question of why this was the case. Instead, they focus on military mistakes and on the disjunction between what they call "the bold and extraordinarily ambitious" political goals of the war and the quality of the actual planning. For Gordon and Trainor, five errors stand out--the failure to understand the question of tribalism in Iraq; the overuse of technology in war fighting; the failure to adapt to changing conditions on the ground; the failure to listen to different (and more pessimistic) military and political perspectives; and the failure to take into account the lessons of nation-building in the Balkans between 1995 and 2002.

We may never know much more about what went wrong in Iraq than what is to be found in the pages of this volume. But the problem is far deeper than loyalty to the president, or careerism, or staying on message. In Washington these days, it is customary to speak of someone who rigidly follows the Bush administration party line as having "swallowed the Kool-Aid." It is not a very accurate way of grasping the realities of presidential policy-making--except with regard to Iraq. Even today, it often seems as if the reality in Iraq has not yet sunk in. There is much talk about how American tactics and patience, so misrepresented by the mainstream media, are finally paying off and the Iraqi army is being "stood up," as they say in the military English in which Bush increasingly tries to take refuge. And administration officials continue to insist that, taken as a whole, the news from Iraq is good. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace, recently declared that on balance, and despite some setbacks, things were going "very, very well."

This is either self-deception or the deception of others. Judging from Gordon and Trainor's account, self-deception seems the likelier explanation. Then as now, the belief that we were winning was more theological than empirical. From my own experience, during the period when I was going back and forth to and from Iraq in 2003 and 2004, administration officials still broadly believed that they were winning and felt genuinely aggrieved that, unlike our colleagues from Fox News, upon whom the military and the Coalition Provisional Authority increasingly relied, we in the "mainstream media" could not accept the fact that, on balance, the news from Iraq was more good than bad. It is a view that persists to this day.

The question is why. Gordon and Trainor offer no opinion on the subject, but in my view it is probably unfair to focus exclusively, as they do, on the neo-conservatives, or even on the Bush administration as a whole. Rumsfeld, after all, is about as far from being a believer in democracy-building as it is possible to be--a major reason why he always emphasized to military commanders his preference for strategies that would allow U.S. forces to withdraw quickly. More broadly, the Iraq mess cannot be separated from the problematic question of America's official ideology. I do not mean capitalism or Christianity. I mean optimism.

The problem of optimism lies at the heart of what went wrong both in the planning stages for the war and subsequently on the ground in Iraq. Recently, the U.S. Army journal Military Review published an essay by Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, a British officer who had served in Iraq alongside U.S. forces. His criticism was sharp, and for the most part it concerned strictly military matters. But he, too, came back again and again to this question of what he called "damaging optimism"--the refusal of American commanders to accept the possibility that things might go wrong. And lest this seem simply like the usual British sour grapes about America (Greece to their Rome and all that jazz), the worry about overly optimistic thinking is one of the key recommendations of a recent Department of Defense study cautioning that the tendency of U.S. officers to take their wishes for reality has created huge problems for the American effort in Iraq.

Aylwin-Foster wrote that "self-belief and resilient optimism are recognized necessities for successful command, and all professional forces strive for a strong can-do ethos. However, it is unhelpful if it discourages junior commandeers from reporting unwelcome news up the chain of command. Force commanders and political masters need to know the true state of affairs if they are to reach timely decisions to change plans: arguably, they [the Americans] did not always do so." In a somewhat more discreet echo of Gordon and Trainor's blunt talk about "the dysfunction of American military structures," Aylwin-Foster described the American military establishment in Iraq as seeming to be "weighted down by bureaucracy, a stiflingly hierarchical outlook, a predisposition to offensive operations, and a sense that duty required all issues to be confronted head-on." In other words, a military admirably configured to mount a lightning campaign against an inferior foe, but not a military (let alone a political leadership!) prepared to fight a prolonged semi-guerrilla war, particularly in a context of mounting sectarian violence in which the United States can obviously take no side.

But even today it often seems as if this lesson has not yet sunk in. Though the U.S. military does understand that the solution to the Iraqi quagmire is principally political, neither they nor their civilian leaders have any real idea of what that political solution might look like. Perhaps this is why, increasingly, those who still defend the war do so in default terms, arguing that the United States has to stay in Iraq because otherwise we will have granted a victory to the terrorists. This is eleventh-hour talk, the language of damage limitation. We have to stay because we cannot go.

But those wanting a more vivid and credible sense of what is taking place in Iraq today might heed the blogger Zeyad, a Baghdadi dentist who welcomed the American overthrow of Saddam, and whose blog, Healing Iraq, was once one of the preferred sources for many boosterish conservative bloggers in the United States. Here is how Zeyad describes Baghdad today:

Please don't ask me whether I believe Iraq is on the verge of civil war yet or not. I have never experienced a civil war before, only regular ones. All I see is that both sides are engaged in tit-for-tat lynchings and summary executions. I see governmental forces openly taking sides or stepping aside. I see an occupation force that is clueless about what is going on in the country. I see politicians that distrust each other and continue to flame the situation for their own personal interests. I see Islamic clerics delivering fiery sermons against each other, then smile and hug each other at the end of the day in staged PR stunts. I see the country breaking into pieces. The frontlines between different districts of Baghdad are already clearly demarked and ready for the battle. I was stopped in my own neighborhood yesterday by a watch team and questioned where I live and what I was doing in that area. I see other people curiously staring in each other's faces on the street. I see hundreds of people disappearing in the middle of the night and their corpses surfacing next day with electric drill holes in them. I see people blown up to smithereens because a brainwashed virgin seeker targeted a crowded market or café. I see all that and more. Don't you dare chastise me for what I write about my country.

On the home page of Healing Iraq, there is an epigraph from Swift: "It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of what he was never reasoned into." Gordon and Trainor establish in extraordinary detail that the same could be said about the Bush administration. Throughout military history, from Alcibiades's Sicilian expedition to the "bridge too far" at Arnhem in World War II, nations and individuals have paid a terrible price for the decisions of commanders in whom daring and determination were married to delusion, self-regard, and a fatal disrespect for their adversaries. Whatever the outcome in Iraq, Gordon and Trainor have definitively entered Operation Iraqi Freedom on that sorry roster.