[MLUG - DISCUSSION] From Planning to Warfare to Occupation, How Iraq Went Wrong

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

The book review below sums it up pretty succinctly.  Here is my even 
briefer summary:  The Administration did not listen to expert advice in 
making their plans for war.  This failure to incorporate views of others 
allowed them to err in almost unthinkable ways.  Bush's Iraq War will be 
remembered as one of the greatest foreign-policy errors in US history. 
--Mike

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/25/books/25kaku.html

N.Y. Times
July 25, 2006

Books of The Times

From Planning to Warfare to Occupation, How Iraq Went Wrong

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

The title of this devastating new book about the American war in Iraq says 
it all: "Fiasco." That is the judgment that Thomas E. Ricks, senior 
Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post, passes on the Bush 
administration's decision to invade Iraq and its management of the war and 
the occupation. And he serves up his portrait of that war as a misguided 
exercise in hubris, incompetence and folly with a wealth of detail and 
evidence that is both staggeringly vivid and persuasive.

By virtue of the author's wealth of sources within the American military 
and the book's comprehensive timeline (beginning with the administration's 
inflammatory statements about Saddam Hussein in the wake of 9/11, through 
the invasion and occupation, to the escalating religious and ethnic strife 
that afflicts the country today), "Fiasco" is absolutely essential reading 
for anyone interested in understanding how the United States came to go to 
war in Iraq, how a bungled occupation fed a ballooning insurgency and how 
these events will affect the future of the American military. Though other 
books have depicted aspects of the Iraq war in more intimate and harrowing 
detail, though other books have broken more news about aspects of the war, 
this volume gives the reader a lucid, tough-minded overview of this tragic 
enterprise that stands apart from earlier assessments in terms of simple 
coherence and scope.

"President George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003 ultimately may 
come to be seen as one of the most profligate actions in the history of 
American foreign policy," Mr. Ricks writes. "The consequences of his 
choice won't be clear for decades, but it already is abundantly apparent 
in mid-2006 that the U.S. government went to war in Iraq with scant solid 
international support and on the basis of incorrect information -- about 
weapons of mass destruction and a supposed nexus between Saddam Hussein 
and Al Qaeda's terrorism -- and then occupied the country negligently. 
Thousands of U.S. troops and an untold number of Iraqis have died. 
Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent, many of them squandered. 
Democracy may yet come to Iraq and the region, but so too may civil war or 
a regional conflagration, which in turn could lead to spiraling oil prices 
and a global economic shock."

Much of the material dealing with the time just before the war has been 
chronicled in earlier books (not to mention an outpouring of newspaper and 
magazine articles), but Mr. Ricks provides a succinct narrative that 
emphasizes how this period "laid the shaky foundation for the derelict 
occupation that followed." He reminds us that when it came to the threat 
posed by Mr. Hussein, the administration consistently emphasized 
"worst-case scenarios" even as it was " 'best-casing' the subsequent cost 
and difficulty of occupying the country." And he shows how this blinkered 
outlook resulted in a failure to plan for the realities of the occupation 
and a failure to allocate sufficient manpower and resources.

Mr. Ricks's narrative is based on hundreds of interviews and more than 
37,000 pages of documents, and many of the book's most scorching 
assessments of the White House and Pentagon's conduct of the war come from 
members of the uniformed military and official military reports.

An after-action review from the Third Infantry Division underscores the 
Pentagon's paucity of postwar planning, stating that "there was no 
guidance for restoring order in Baghdad, creating an interim government, 
hiring government and essential services employees, and ensuring that the 
judicial system was operational." And an end-of-tour report by a colonel 
assigned to the Coalition Provisional Authority memorably summarized his 
office's work as "pasting feathers together, hoping for a duck."

Mr. Ricks writes in these pages as both a reporter and an analyst, and 
many of his findings amplify observations made by other journalists and 
former insiders in earlier books: namely that the Bush White House 
routinely ignored the advice of experts (be they military, diplomatic or 
Middle East experts); that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's 
determination to conduct the war with a light, fast force had crippling 
consequences for the American military's ability to restore law and order 
in post-invasion Iraq; and that infighting between the State and Defense 
Departments, between civilians at the Pentagon and the uniformed military, 
and between the military and the Coalition Provisional Authority severely 
hampered the making and execution of United States policy.

"Fiasco" does not possess the dramatic combat details of "Cobra II" by 
Michael R. Gordon (chief military correspondent for The New York Times) 
and Bernard E. Trainor (a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general and 
former military correspondent for The Times), but unlike that book, which 
basically ends in the summer of 2003, it goes on to chronicle America's 
flailing efforts to contain a metastasizing insurgency over the next three 
years.

Mr. Ricks argues that the invasion of Iraq "was based on perhaps the worst 
war plan in American history," an incomplete plan that "confused removing 
Iraq's regime with the far more difficult task of changing the entire 
country." The result of going in with too few troops and no larger 
strategic plan, he says, was "that the U.S. effort resembled a banana 
republic coup d'état more than a full-scale war plan that reflected the 
ambition of a great power to alter the politics of a crucial region of the 
world."

This was partly a byproduct of the Pollyannaish optimism of hawks like 
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, who slapped down the estimate 
by the Army's chief of staff, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, that several hundred 
thousand soldiers would be required to secure Iraq.  And it was partly a 
byproduct of a conviction shared by Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen. Tommy 
Franks that speed, in Mr. Ricks's words, "could be substituted for mass in 
military operations."

Mr. Rumsfeld's stubborn reluctance to acknowledge a growing insurgency and 
his resistance to making adjustments, Mr. Ricks says, contributed further 
to the military's problems on the ground. A continuing shortage of troops 
meant that borders could not be sealed, armament caches could not be 
secured, and security and basic services could not be restored. As a 
consequence support for the occupation rapidly dwindled among the Iraqis.

To make matters worse, Mr. Ricks adds, the Army seemed to have "forgotten 
almost everything it had learned in the Vietnam War about 
counterinsurgency." During 2003 and much of 2004 effective 
counterinsurgency measures aimed at winning the political support of the 
Iraqi people were not being employed; instead, an emphasis was put on "the 
use of force, on powerful retaliation and on protecting U.S. troops at all 
costs."

There were mass roundups of Iraqis (many of them bystanders caught up in 
the sweeps), and some of those detainees were harshly treated by American 
troops who had not been "trained or mentally prepared for the mission" 
they faced in postwar Iraq. Mr. Ricks sees the Abu Ghraib scandal not as 
an anomalous incident but as "the logical and predictable outcome of a 
series of panicky decisions made by senior commanders, which in turn had 
resulted from the divided, troop-poor approach devised months earlier by 
Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen.  Franks."

Mr. Ricks notes that the Bush administration has tended "to dismiss 
critics as 'Monday morning quarterbacks,' " but he points out that that 
phrase "conveniently disregarded the fact that many of the critics had 
expressed their worries before the war even began." His book is replete 
with warnings from Middle East experts and military veterans (like Gen. 
Anthony C. Zinni and Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf), who presciently 
cautioned that the invasion and its aftermath would not be as simple or as 
fast as many in the administration predicted.

In late 2002, Mr. Ricks reports, 70 national security experts and Mideast 
scholars met at the National Defense University to discuss the looming war 
and concluded that occupying Iraq would "be the most daunting and complex 
task the U.S. and the international community will have undertaken since 
the end of World War II." The group's emphasis on the importance of 
"maintaining a secure environment" in post-invasion Iraq and its 
recommendation against a swift dissolution of the Iraqi military would be 
ignored in the ensuing months.

"It isn't clear that a large and persistent insurgency was inevitable," 
Mr. Ricks concludes, adding that "the U.S. approach, both in occupation 
policy and military tactics, helped spur the insurgency and made it 
broader than it might have been." Among the crucial post-invasion missteps 
made by the Bush administration, he suggests, were the decision, after the 
fall of Baghdad, not to send two additional divisions of troops 
immediately, which might have helped keep the lid on the insurgency, and 
the orders issued by the head of the American occupation, L. Paul Bremer 
III, disbanding the old Iraqi army and banning thousands of Baath Party 
officials from returning to their government jobs.

The failure to contain the insurgency would have dire consequences as the 
war dragged on. While the occupation of Iraq (which Mr. Wolfowitz had 
predicted would basically pay for itself through oil revenue) was costing 
American taxpayers an estimated $5 billion a month in 2004 and 2005, the 
chaos-ridden country was replacing Afghanistan as a training ground for a 
new generation of terrorists. Meanwhile, writes Mr.  Ricks, the United 
States Army found itself in a strategic position that "painfully resembled 
that of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the early 1980's."

Not only had the war "stressed the U.S. Army to the breaking point," a 
study published by the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute 
declared, but it had also turned out to be "an unnecessary preventive war 
of choice" that "created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic 
terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing the 
American homeland" against further attacks from Al Qaeda.  The war "was 
not integral" to the global war on terrorism, the report concluded, but 
was a costly "detour from it."


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

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