by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
Commentary Magazine<\/em><\/p>\n T<\/span>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,\u00a0The Generals\u2019 War<\/i>\u00a0(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\u2019 sole point of contention. At war\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Now, in\u00a0Cobra II<\/i>,* the same authors have returned with an account of the three-week war of 2003 and its aftermath. The sense of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu extends even to the\u00a0dramatis personae<\/i>. Here, in the celebrity role played earlier by General Norman Schwarzkopf, is General Tommy Franks \u2014 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\u2019s defeated generals to proceed pretty much as they pleased against the postwar Shi\u2019ite 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\u00a0The Generals\u2019 War<\/i>\u00a0as nonchalantly allowing Saddam to persist in power, appears a decade later nonchalantly allowing the neoconservatives to pursue their trumped-up war.<\/p>\n Three interpretive themes, outlined in the opening chapters, dominate the narrative of\u00a0Cobra II<\/i>. 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\u2019s 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 \u201cdisparity of ends and means.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u201cwith the ruthless efficiency of a businessman for whom excess inventory was to be avoided at all cost.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s aftermath:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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 \u201cmajor combat operations in Iraq have ended,\u201d he had little idea that 2,000 combat dead, billions of dollars, and three Iraqi elections later, the country would still not be secure.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n<\/div>\n A<\/span>s a book,\u00a0Cobra II<\/i>\u00a0reads well, reflecting both Gordon\u2019s brave battle reporting under fire and Trainor\u2019s 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\u2019s way through participants\u2019 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.<\/p>\n For all their fault-finding, moreover, Gordon and Trainor convey an invaluable impression of tens of thousands of American soldiers hell-bent for Baghdad from their far distant starting point in Kuwait and miraculously deposing Saddam Hussein in three weeks\u2019 time. Rumsfeld\u2019s idea of a \u201crolling start\u201d 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.<\/p>\n From postbellum interviews of Iraqi leaders, the authors are able to reveal that Saddam\u2019s own generals did not realize that Iraq\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s outfitted with machine guns and in pick-up trucks with RPG\u2019s, 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.<\/p>\n For reporting all this well and vividly,\u00a0Cobra II<\/i>\u00a0has much to recommend it. Beyond that, however, all is questionable, to say the least. The book announces itself as an insider\u2019s history, but one distinguished by the scholarly rigor lacking in such purely journalistic accounts as Bob Woodward\u2019s\u00a0Plan of Attack<\/i>\u00a0(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.<\/p>\n There is, for example, no bibliography \u2014 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., \u201cweapons of mass destruction,\u201d \u201cShi\u2019ite,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Far more disturbingly, sources are often cited only as \u201cInterview, former senior military officer,\u201d \u201cInterview, former senior officer,\u201d \u201cInterview, former Centcom planner,\u201d \u201cInterview, Pentagon Officials,\u201d \u201cInterview, U.S. State Department Official,\u201d or the like, and in some cases simply as \u201cNotes of a participant.\u201d The veracity of these multiple, anonymous, and often hostile sources can never be checked.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0Cobra II<\/i>\u00a0is a critical take on the administration\u2019s 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\u2019s critics, both early and late: Brent Scowcroft, General Jay Garner, Paul Pillar, Lawrence Wilkerson, General Anthony Zinni, and others.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n * *\u00a0*<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I<\/span>f such selectivity in itself is insufficient to raise doubt over the reliability of key parts of\u00a0Cobra II<\/i>, there are the authors\u2019 three major themes to consider.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s intelligence agencies, which had prompted formal condemnation from both the Clinton administration and the Senate, might not have been a worthy\u00a0casus\u00a0<\/i>belli<\/i>\u00a0in a post-September 11 world. Although they do mention the Senate\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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 U.N. debate. Rarely, in truth, has the U.S. conducted so prolonged and so public a discussion about its intentions in the run-up to any war.<\/p>\n The authors are more on target in dwelling on the administration\u2019s 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 The authors\u2019 second and third themes \u2014 supposedly critical mistakes in troop levels and troop deployment both during and after the war \u2014 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 \u2014 if it did fail \u2014 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\u2019s restive Shi\u2019ites and Kurds were just as anxious for regime change as embattled warlords in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n As for troop levels, were these predicated entirely on Rumsfeld\u2019s 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\u2019s, 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\u2019s?<\/p>\n And what about the supposed lessons of Vietnam, which purportedly worked against Rumsfeld\u2019s views? In fact, the massive U.S. troop presence on the ground in Vietnam in the late 1960\u2019s, 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 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 \u2014 liberated from an unpopular dictator, rather than punished and made to suffer the wages of its aggression.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n<\/div>\n A<\/span>s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n Like the invasion of Iraq itself,\u00a0Cobra II<\/i>\u00a0takes 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\u2019s forces from a bloody six-week stalemate in the hedgerows. By way of explaining their choice of title, the authors note that General McKiernan\u2019s thrust to Baghdad emulated George S. Patton\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n That is indicative of the way in which\u00a0Cobra II<\/i>, 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\u2019 preferred solutions might not themselves pose just as many problems, if not worse ones.<\/p>\n Gordon and Trainor close on a trite note: \u201cThe 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.\u201d Vexed? Yes, of course \u2014 but this tossed-off banality is true for the aftermath of almost all of America\u2019s 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 \u2014 leaving Saddam in power. That decision was rightly criticized in the authors\u2019 earlier book. But if it was wrong to leave Saddam in power then, why was it even worse to have taken him out later?<\/p>\n The authors\u2019 failure to notice this irony suggests an underlying blind spot: what interests them is not policy \u2014 in this case, whether and how to deal with the menace of Saddam Hussein \u2014 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.<\/p>\n Relying on the partial (in every sense) testimony of these men, Gordon and Trainor assure us that \u201cthe bitter insurgency American and British forces confront today was not preordained. There were lost opportunities, military and political, along the way.\u201d How do they know this? \u201cThe commanders and troops who fought the war explained them to us.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n \u00a92006 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson Commentary Magazine Ten 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[773],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-127","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":4336,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-iraqi-wars\/","url_meta":{"origin":3975,"position":0},"title":"The Iraqi Wars","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 12, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Our 15-year conflict with Iraq. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Iraq is a blur now. Everyone from Norman Schwarzkopf and General Zinni to Tommy Franks and General Abezaid is mixed up in our memories. The public can't quite separate Baathists from jihadists, Shiite from Sunni, or one coalition\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "July 2005"","block_context":{"text":"July 2005","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2005\/july-2005\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3964,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/betting-on-defeat\/","url_meta":{"origin":3975,"position":1},"title":"Betting on Defeat?","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 16, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"It's far from a safe bet. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Lately, it has become popular to recant on Iraq. 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Last month, though, the Allawi-led Iraqiya alliance won, by a narrow margin, more parliamentary seats than any\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "April 2010"","block_context":{"text":"April 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/april-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4955,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/doom-doom-and-more-doom\/","url_meta":{"origin":3975,"position":3},"title":"Doom, Doom and More Doom","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 7, 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"Should we trust past facts or present hysterics? by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online What can we expect from the possible invasion of Iraq? Everything in war is of course uncertain \u2014 an awful time when the lives of thousands of soldiers hang in the balance, and brutal, dirty\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "February 2003"","block_context":{"text":"February 2003","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2003\/february-2003\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":543,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/iraqi-irony\/","url_meta":{"origin":3975,"position":4},"title":"Iraqi Irony","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 1, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Amid all the stories about the ongoing violence in Syria, the most disturbing is the possibility that President Bashar Assad could either deploy the arsenal of chemical and biological weapons that his government claims it has, or provide it to terrorists. 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\nafter nonexistent or no longer existent arsenals. Yet even here there is a disconnect in their version of the WMD issue \u2014 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\u2019s frantic efforts to warn his commanders about the impending threat of chemical and biological attack.<\/p>\n