There was never any doubt that the American military, by far the strongest in the world, would make short work of Iraqi defenses once the early “shock and awe” airstrikes were over and the boots on the ground were headed inexorably for Baghdad in March 2003.
But what about after that? What would Iraq look like after Saddam Hussein was deposed and America was strapped with occupying a country with a devastated infrastructure sorely lacking in most of the rudiments of life, like electricity, clean water and working sewer systems?
Well, the jury is in for the most part, according to Thomas E. Ricks in his blistering new book, “Fiasco.” Infrastructure is still a major concern, a nascent government is struggling at getting its act together, and U.S. and coalition forces are faced with a strong and apparently well-trained, well-funded insurgency that shows no signs of letting up.
Every day there are new incidents of roadside bombs killing soldiers, or suicide bombers blowing up markets, or internecine conflict among warring Sunnis and Shiites. The two most dreaded words in Iraq right now are “civil war,” and some are saying that it is inevitable, while others say it’s already started. In short, Iraq is in chaos.
But, according to Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent for The Wash-
ington Post and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, it didn’t have to be that way. Ricks takes a lot of people to the proverbial woodshed: the Pentagon civilian leadership, the State Department and the White House, along with our top military leaders.
Much of the blame, Ricks says, was in the early planning stages when the civilian leadership was hellbent on going to war and would suffer no amount of disuasion. There were those who said that an insurgency would develop and that you would need many more troops to combat it. The leadership would not listen. The implication is that you couldn’t cut the hubris with a knife.
Strategic misstep
All of the planning leading up to the war was on taking Baghdad militarily, with no grand strategy for what would come next. “It is difficult to overstate what a key misstep this lack of strategic direction was,” Ricks writes, “probably the single most significant miscalculation of the entire effort. In its absence, the U.S. military would fight hard and well but blindly, and the noble sacrifices of soldiers would be undercut by the lack of thoughtful leadership at the top that soberly assessed the realities of the situation and constructed a response.”
Ricks says that Army Gen. Tommy Franks was responsible for devising the plan but that “ultimately, the fault lies with (Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld.”
L. Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority and the highest ranking civilian in Iraq, made some decisions that Ricks says probably sealed the deal for the insurgency.
First, he removed senior Baathists from their positions and banned them from future employment in the public sector. But, Ricks notes, these were the people who knew the ins and outs of the country’s infrastructure and that knowledge was invaluable.
Second, Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army and the national police force. Here was a ready labor force of 300,000 to 400,000 people who simply went on the unemployment roles. “Abruptly terminating the livelihoods of these men created a vast pool of humiliated, antagonized and politicized men,” many of whom were armed, Ricks quotes Faleh Jabar, an expert on the Baathist Party.
Finally, Bremer alienated the Iraqi middle-class by moving the country toward a free-market economy and shutting down state-run industries.
And, the occupation in the summer of 2003 came to a standstill while the country dissolved into chaos. Administration officials weren’t finding what they expected after the fighting stopped. There were no weapons of mass destruction; instead they were finding violent and widespread resistance to their presence. The Iraqi people didn’t welcome Americans with open arms.
Still, Ricks says, Rumsfeld could have made a difference. “Instead, Rumsfeld’s self-confident stubbornness made him a big part of the problem. The defense secretary’s vulnerability wasn’t that he made errors, it was that he seemed unable to recognize them and make adjustments.”
But Rumsfeld is not the only administration member catching heat from Ricks. He also points the finger at President Bush, along with Vice President Dick Chaney, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and more for relying on faulty intelligence and for unaltering rosy scenarios for how the war in Iraq was going to turn out.
And the military leaders don’t fare any better, mostly because even though they knew, or at least sensed, that things could turn out badly, they failed to argue their case with enough fervor. Also, once the die was cast, many of them seemed unable to adjust to a changing political and military scene.
Stuck in the Green Zone
As the summer of 2003 progressed, things became worse for Bremer’s CPA, Ricks says. There was a high turnover among the staff, mostly young Republicans, and there was still no strategy. The Green Zone, the protected area in central Baghdad where the civilian headquarters was located, was so isolated that people rarely got out into the countryside to see the result of their nation- building. As Ricks quotes one State Department official: “You had this odd situation where the journalists knew more about the situation than the briefers did, because the journalists moved around and the briefers didn’t get out of the Green Zone much.”
No one, it seems, had much good to say about the CPA under Bremer. “Underneath the poor image,” writes Ricks, “was a poor reality. The CPA was ineptly organized and frequently incompetent.”
One of the major arguing points between a largely acquiescent military and its civilian leadership was the number of troops that might be needed in occupying Iraq. Rumsfeld and others at the Department of Defense were determined to keep the numbers down while some in the military argued for more.
It was one of the reasons, Ricks contends, for the scandal that rocked the military to its core and is blamed for setting back efforts to win over the Iraqis – the Abu Ghraib abuse of prisoners incident.
“All of the Army’s problems in Iraq in 2003 – poor planning, clumsy leadership, strategic confusion, counterproductive tactics, undermanning, being overly reactive – came together in the treatment of prisoners, a wide-ranging scandal that eventually was summarized in the phrase ‘Abu
Ghraib,’ after the big prison west of Baghdad where many prisoners would end up, and where some were tortured,” Ricks says.
Ricks takes the administration to task, much as other books have done, notably “Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq,” by Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, for going to war based on faulty information and questionable purposes.
As he puts it, “The Bush administration offered three basic rationales for the U.S. intervention in Iraq: the threat it believed was posed by Saddam’s WMD; the supposed nexus it saw between Saddam Hussein’s government and transnational terrorism; and the need to liberate an oppressed people. In the spring of 2004, the first two arguments were undercut by official findings by the same government that had invaded Iraq, and the third was tarred by the revelation of the Abu Ghraib scandal.”
Glimmer of hope
Ricks isn’t wholly pessimistic, and holds out hope, scant as it is. “While there is a small chance that the Bush administration’s inflexible optimism will be rewarded,” he writes, “that the political process will undercut the insurgency, and that democracy will take hold in Iraq, there is a far greater chance of other, more troublesome outcomes.”
One of those “troublesome outcomes” would be if Iraq should become a terrorist haven. If that happens, the thinking is the U.S. would have to go right back in and start all over.
“Fiasco” isn’t a political or ideological tome. There are relatively few anonymous sources, particularly when you consider the subjects and personalities involved, and Ricks had access to tens of thousands of pages of official documents and conducted interviews with more than 100 senior military officers.
You should read this one; it’s important.
Books editor Tom Walker can be reached at 303-820-1624 or twalker@denverpost.com.
Fiasco
The American Military Adventure in Iraq
By Thomas E. Ricks
Penguin, 482 pages, $27.95
