One Utah

I’ve read my share of books about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. There are a lot of good ones out there, but the best so far IMHO is Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas Ricks, the Washington Post’s senior Pentagon correspondent.

Ricks pulls no punches. In addition to the usual suspects at the top– Bush, Cheney, Condi, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Franks, Sanchez, Bremer –he goes over the errors and misconceptions of Army officers down to the division, brigade, battalion and even company level. That was difficult reading for me. After the end of the Vietnam War, I was one of the officers who believed we (i.e. the non-Special Forces combat arms) were done with counter-insurgency forever. We just didn’t train for that, which is ironic because the military always gets criticized for “preparing to fight the last war.” Nor did we train for urban combat: our doctrine was, tank outfits don’t go there.

The Pentagon had no real plan for Phase IV, the occupation of Iraq– just some PowerPoint slides and some wishful thinking about bringing most of of soldiers home within three months. In the absence of a plan, commanders were on their own. The hastily concocted Coalition Provisional Authority quickly became known by the acronym CPA– “Can’t Provide Anything.”

Fiasco reads like an after-action report translated into ordinary, well-written English. There is something good I could quote on every page, but here’s one of Ricks’ numerous well-documented conclusions:

An Army built to execute swift, crushing operations designed around heavy armor instead found itself enmeshed in a slow-moving, close-up war of small arms.

…It was a situation that defeated many of the technological advantages wielded by the U.S. military. After years of talking about its information superiority, the Army suddenly was in an inferior position. It didn’t speak the language, it didn’t understand the culture, it didn’t know much about its enemy, and it seemed all too often to be the last one to know what was going on.

Not only did the Army find itself again (as in Vietnam) trying to adapt to unconventional warfare, but the misconceptions emanating from Washington made things even harder.

The strategic confusion about why the United States was in Iraq, such as the Bush administration’s insistence that the war was part of the counterattack against al Qaeda-style terrorism and so was somehow a response to the 9/11 attacks, may have led some American soldiers to treat ordinary Iraqis as if they were terrorists. Some indeed were. But many—certainly the majority of those raided and detained—were just average Iraqis, not necessarily sympathetic to the U.S. presence but not actually taking up arms against it, at least before they were humiliated or incarcerated.

Small-scale guerilla attacks, IEDs and ambushes on Army units often led to violent overreaction, which had the unintended effect of growing the insurgency. One battalion commander said, in the understated way typical of the military: “Some have questioned our forcefulness, but we will not win them over by handing out lollipops.” A brigade commander who ordered random artillery harassment and interdiction fire into populated areas declared that his forces were there to “kill the enemy, not to win their hearts and minds.” By the time these commanders and their units left Iraq, their misguided aggressiveness had set in motion the deteriorating situation that continues now. As a result, our soldiers have had to come back again and again– some are starting their fourth deployment in Iraq.

Some officers, for example General Petraeus who commanded the 101st Airborne Division in the invasion, understood the difference between anti-insurgency operations (what the US Army was doing as commanders improvised tactics to kill or capture enemy fighters) and counter-insurgency operations (what we should have been doing, but weren’t prepared for). The 101st did a much better job of creating security in its zone than anywhere else in Iraq except for the British in Basra– by talking to the Iraqis, helping to solve problems, and using force only as a last resort. Those early efforts unraveled as fresh units rotated into Iraq and took over occupation duties.

Strategic confusion continues to cloud decisions in Washington and Baghdad. The assignment of General Petraeus (now a four-star) to overall command is only a superficial gesture with nothing to back it up. There is no viable political program to achieve the stated American objectives. The war is over, we lost it in 2003-2004– but the occupation goes on as long as our government wants to offer up more sacrifices.

Yesterday, Arianna Huffington blogged about where we are now:

With a growing edge in his voice, McCain explained that he had sat down with General Petraeus. “He looked me in the eye,” said McCain, “and told me ‘I can do it with 21,000. And if I can’t, I’ll ask for more.’” McCain went on to say he believes that in a country of 300 million we should be able to have a large enough volunteer army to do whatever we need to do.

“That’s all very good in theory,” I replied, “but, in practice, where are these additional troops going to come from? And you keep saying that the American people are ‘frustrated’ about Iraq, which totally minimizes the outrage there is at continuing to be misled by this administration.”

Bush’s “new” strategy for Iraq still consists of nothing more than PowerPoint slides and wishful thinking. Now the problem is counterinsurgency plus civil war. There is no Army doctrine for fighting in another country’s civil war.

It’s like that funny but tragic Ned Lamont campaign commercial where the Republican guy (or is it Joe Lieberman, who can tell?) drives his shiny new car straight into a brick wall labeled “IRAQ WAR.” But it isn’t really his own car, it belongs to America. That’s Fiasco in a 30-second ad.

UPDATE: CNN’s coverage of the fighting on Haifa Street illustrates the anti-insurgency mindset. In one scene, US Army and Iraqi forces are taking fire from a high-rise apartment building. Their solution is to call in an airstrike. This is on what used to be one of the nicest streets in Baghdad– thousands of civilians still live there. How many hearts and minds are we winning?

This entry was posted Sunday, January 28th, 2007 at 10:59 am and is filed under Disaster, Disgrace to the Military, George W. Bush, Iraq, National Politics, Neocons, Republicans, This Blog, War. Both comments and pings are currently closed.