|
Tom Ricks, Fiasco: The American Adventure
in Iraq. New York: Penguin,
2006. There are, broadly speaking, two ways to fight an insurgency. One
way is with violent repression: if the insurgents kill one government
soldier, you shoot a hundred randomly chosen villagers. Anyone who speaks
out is permanently silenced. Enemies of the regime simply disappear, and
everyone lives in fear. This approach can work. It is, after all, how
Saddam crushed the Shi'ite uprising in southern Iraq in the 1990s. For
Americans, however, there are certain problems with this approach. Many
oppressive methods are illegal under US and international law, and although
this kind of nicety has never bothered Bush and company much, there is
the problem that we keep saying we came to Iraq to liberate the Iraqis,
and this is hard to take seriously if we are violently oppressing them. There was planning for the period after the war. Lots of planning,
in fact -- in the State Department, at Central Command, in the Pentagon
-- but in the end nobody put it together into anything resembling a plan.
As a result the American military charged into Baghdad and fell into a void
of its own making. Without orders, they sat and did nothing while civilization
collapsed around them. This period, the summer and fall of 2003, is much
on the minds of people who think that if only we had performed better in those
crucial months things in Iraq might have gone very differently. Fiasco
is Tom Ricks' analysis of what went wrong and why. While I am not in the
end persuaded, this is a fascinating book, and reading it gave me the chance
to think over the events of 2003 and do my own wondering. The Bush administration's "rush to war" has become a cliché,
but it is important to remember that they really did charge into the war
without working out some crucial details. It is now clear that Rumsfeld
and his allies (Feith, Wolfowitz) had very different ideas about what should
happen after we reached Baghdad than the White House. Rumsfeld wanted to
overthrow Saddam, put his old friend Ahmed Chalabi in charge and go home.
Bush decided we would stay and "revolutionize" the contry by installing a
democracy, but nobody in Washington had a clear idea how we would do this.
It seems that as the tanks rolled into Iraq Rumsfeld and Feith still hoped
that Chalabi would be their postwar solution, and they flew him and his small
militia into the country. The decision that he would not have a major role
was made, not by anyone high up in Washington, but by Jake Garner, the rather
ineffectual general we sent to Baghdad to manage humanitarian relief operations.
The eventual democracy plan was dreamed up by Paul Bremer, the diplomat we
sent out to run the "Coalition Provisional Authority", and announced to
both Iraqis and the rest of the US government in an Op-Ed in the Washington
Post. The unplanned, ad-hoc, ill-considered occupation of Iraq would seem
a lot stranger if it weren't all too typical of our government's foreign
ventures. I first encountered our penchant for embarking on military actions
without thinking through the consequences while reading about the Bay of
Pigs. That operation was also begun without the major players in the White
House and the Pentagon sitting down to talk through what they were going
to do after they landed the volunteers in Cuba, and it turned out that Kennedy
and the Pentagon had very different ideas about what actions we might take.
I am struck by this pattern. It seems that in Washington powerful people
don't have time to think through complicated policy questions, and that when
there are differences it is easier to ignore them than to work out some kind
of agreement. We want our leaders to be men of action, not ditherers, and
they come into office thinking that they have to make things happen quickly.
There is no time for discussion, reflection, or second-guessing. Bush's
personal shortcomings magnified this tendency. Unable, it seems, to pay attention
to the details of anything, he rushed our nation headlong into catastrophe
in Iraq. Let's get back to the summer of 2003. The insurgency that still rages
in Iraq began immediately after the fall of Baghdad, if not before. One problem
with the blitzkrieg assault on Baghdad planned by Rumsfeld and his generals
is that it left large elements of the Iraqi army and the Baathist militia
unfought. Most of them just left their units and wandered home after Saddam
disappeared, but those who were loyal to the regime, or just hated Americans,
almost immediately began to launch guerilla attacks on American soldiers.
They did not feel like they had been defeated, so they continued to fight.
Another in the recent spate of books on what went wrong Iraq, Michael Gordon's
Cobra II, traces the subsequent troubles in Iraq exactly to
this issue. If only, Gordon writes, we had sent a larger force that engaged
and defeated Iraqi forces throughout the country, our victory would have
been more complete and our future problems much less. Ricks points instead to the divergent approaches adopted by American
officers without orders from above. Some of them, using their knowledge
of classic counter-insurgency doctrine, tried to minimize violence and develop
working relationships with town councils, tribal sheiks, and other local
leaders. Most prominent of these officers was Michael Petraeus, then the
commander of the 101st Airborne, who kept things fairly calm in northern Iraq
throughout his tour. But other American commanders focused on finding and
capturing or killing insurgents, carrying out "sweeps" through towns and
neighborhoods where there had been attacks. Doors were kicked in, occupants
ordered to the floor, guns pointed at women and children. (One of the admonitions
of the Small Wars Manual is "never point a gun at a man unless you
intend to shoot him," because just by pointing the gun you may have turned
him into an enemy.) In many of these missions every man of fighting age was
rounded up, and thousands of them were sent to Abu Ghraib prison. When they
met resistance, American troops used artillery, tank fire, and aerial bombardment
to destroy insurgent positions, which inevitably led to civilian casualties.
Prisoners were routinely roughed up. Women were taken into custody on several
occasions and used as hostages to force their male relatives to turn themselves
in. Soldiers on convoy duty routinely shot at any Iraqi vehicle that got too
close. Some of Ricks' sources spoke darkly of units that "went crazy," and
we can only guess how some of those soldiers acted. All of this, Ricks points out, violates the rules for counter-insurgency
warfare. As the Marine Small Wars Manual puts it, in a counter-insurgency
situation killing one wrong person can undo the good done by killing a
hundred of the right ones. American troops acted in ways guaranteed to
make thousands of Iraqis hate them, and since weapons were everywhere in
Iraq, their hatred was very quickly translated into deadly attacks. Many
American commanders dismissed such concerns, saying that they were capturing
and killing the "bad guys," not seeming to care that their actions were
creating two or three insurgents for every one they eliminated. The way
Americans treated Iraqi prisoners was no secret in Iraq, even before the
revolutions from Abu Ghraib focused American attention on it, and this only
made the situation worse. Counter-insurgency warfare, according to the experts,
should not be focused on killing insurgents, but on winning the population
over to your side. The US command structure violated another of the basic
counter-insurgency rules. All the theorists insist that there has to be
unity of political and military control, and that political leaders have
to be in charge, because defeating an insurgency is essentially a political
matter. In Iraq in 2003-2004 there was next to no coordination between the
military commanders and the Coalition Provisional Authority, and, as we
already saw, the military leaders did little to get their field commanders
to work together, either. In the winter of 2004 the troops that had been in Iraq rotated out
and new units came in, and the problem of every unit taking its own approach
was only compounded. One of the best lines in Ricks' book is from
an Iraqi sheikh, who, complaining about the different approaches taken by
every American unit, says, "You are experimenting on us, and that is not
right." In places where the approach had been violent, new commanders tried
to use gentler tactics, only to discover that the trust needed for political
solutions had already been destroyed. Events in the city of Fallujah, in
Anbar Province, give a good example of the American confusion and the chaos
it created. Fallujah had always been a Baathist stronghold, and when tough-minded
units of the 82nd Airborne occupied the city, trouble flared within weeks.
On April 30, 2003, US soldiers opened fire on a mostly peaceful demonstration
and killed a dozen civilians. The soldiers said they had been shot at by
snipers hiding in the crowd, and a US investigations concluded that they
probably had been -- but this is, of course, a common guerilla tactic, and
the Small Wars Manual warns against shooting civilians in exactly
this situation. Fallujah boiled over. Another of the basic counterinsurgency
rules is that you must secure the borders, and since the undermanned Americans
failed to do this, jihadists bent on killing Americans or dying in the effort
easily slipped in from Syria, and old Baathists were able to set up a financial
network that moved millions of dollars into and out of the country. As a
result Anbar Province became the deadliest place in Iraq. In the winter of 2004 US Marines replaced the 82nd, and they were
so determined to act differently that they even considered wearing their
olive green uniforms instead of desert camouflage, so nobody would mistake
them for the Army. Marine commanders felt they were making progress with
their gentler approach when hotheads in Fallujah killed four security contractors
from Blackwater, Inc., mutiliated their bodies and hung them from a bridge.
The Marine commanders wanted to respond carefully, finding out through
their intelligence sources exactly who carried out the attack and nabbing
them with a quick raid. But the White House demanded an immediate and overwhelming
"response," so the Marines launched a major assault on the city. Fighting
was intense, many civilians were killed, and Arab television carried non-stop
coverage of their suffering. In the face of Arab anger and unease among
our Iraqi friends, Bush called off the attack. Marines who had never wanted
to make the attack in the first place were incensed to have it halted halfway
through. Now Fallujah was enemy territory, under the control of the most
hardened anti-American fighters, and they turned the city into a base for
car bombings and other attacks throughout the country. In the end the Marines
had to go back and clear the city block by block in bloody urban fighting,
losing 54 killed and hundreds of wounded and leaving the city in ruins. I have to agree with Ricks that the way we handled the conquest
and occupation of Iraq has been a "fiasco." I am not sure, though, that a
more organized approach would in the end have made much difference. The underlying
situation in Iraq is that the Kurds don't want to be part of the country,
and the Shi'ites and Sunnis both think they have the right to rule the
whole thing. I do not believe that the Sunnis would ever have accepted
a Shi'ite dominated government without a fight. I do not think that Kirkuk,
historically a Kurdish city but now home to many Arabs settled there by
Saddam, will be added the the Kurdish region without violence. I suspect
that even if the US military had done all the things that Ricks (and probably
Petraeus) wanted it to do, violence might have taken longer to develop but
it would still have come in the end. Iraq has been in a state of Civil War
since Saddam fell, and Civil Wars end only in two ways: either one side
is decisively defeated, or both sides are fought to exhaustion and decide
that they can do better through negotiation. Consider what has been happening in Basra. Basra is a mostly Shi'ite
city where almost everyone hated the Baathists, and the British forces
who occupied it used the politically-based, minimally violent tactics of
the counterinsurgency theorists. Nonetheless, the British have still suffered
156 men killed, and Basra is in the hands of violent Shi'ite militias that
regularly fight each other over control of neighborhoods and the distribution
of oil money. The Baghdad government has next to no authority there, and
it is not likely ever to get that authority without fighting for it. So
far Basra has been a calmer and less violent place than Baghdad, but I am
not sure that its future is any brighter. I think Iraq was doomed to civil war. My heart rose at the sight
of all those Iraqis holding up their purple-stained fingers, but there
is more to democracy than voting. Democracy means accepting when your party
has lost, and it means that the winners can't ignore or punish the losers.
I don't think Iraqis were ready for that in 2003, and I don't think they
are ready now. I predict years of violent turmoil ahead, no matter what the
US does.
|
From the
Commonplace Book
Tell me where this ends. --General Michael Petraeus to a reporter, as his troops entered Iraq
Departments Thoughts
Index |