Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Iraq: Revising the first draft of history
The New York Times is running yet another series of bombshell stories in connection with the publication of a book by its reporters. Times reporter Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor have published -- today -- Cobra II : The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq
(which, by the way, I have ordered).Gordon and Trainor made much on the Sunday talk show circuit of the divisions within the American command and its many failures of perception and decision, the subject of their story in yesterday's Times. This is the bit that will sell books in today's highly charged political atmosphere.
In the long run, the more important story will be the first story in the series, Sunday's "Even as U.S. Invaded, Hussein Saw Iraqi Unrest as Top Threat".
The Sunday article helpfully summarizes its key revelations in bullet points:
...Mr. Hussein was so preoccupied about the threat from within his country that he crippled his military in fighting the threat from without.
Only one of his defenses — the Saddam Fedayeen — proved potent against the invaders. They later joined the insurgency still roiling Iraq, but that was largely by default, not design.
Ever vigilant about coups and fearful of revolt, Mr. Hussein was deeply distrustful of his own commanders and soldiers, the documents show.
He made crucial decisions himself, relied on his sons for military counsel and imposed security measures that had the effect of hobbling his forces. He did that in several ways:
¶The Iraqi dictator was so secretive and kept information so compartmentalized that his top military leaders were stunned when he told them three months before the war that he had no weapons of mass destruction, and they were demoralized because they had counted on hidden stocks of poison gas or germ weapons for the nation's defense.
¶He put a general widely viewed as an incompetent drunkard in charge of the Special Republican Guard, entrusted to protect the capital, primarily because he was considered loyal.
¶Mr. Hussein micromanaged the war, not allowing commanders to move troops without permission from Baghdad and blocking communications among military leaders.
Did you notice that The New York Times buried the lede? Iraq's own "top military leaders were stunned" only three months before the war when he told them that he had no weapons of mass destruction. If anybody is counting the days, that revelation happened after Iraq served up its required and obviously fraudulent declaration of December 7, 2002.
There is also this bit:
Even some Iraqi officials were impressed by Mr. Powell's presentation [to the United Nations Security Council]. Abd al-Tawab Mullah Huwaish, who oversaw Iraq's military industry, thought he knew all the government's secrets. But Bush administration officials were so insistent that he began to question whether Iraq might have prohibited weapons after all. "I knew a lot, but wondered why Bush believed we had these weapons," he told interrogators after the war, according to the Iraq Survey Group report.
If senior military officers within Saddam's government who should have known that there were no WMD were "stunned" to learn this after the first weapons declaration, and if Colin Powell's allegedly lame presentation spread doubts among Iraqi officials who thought they knew there were no weapons, is there anything left remaining of the "Bush lied, people died" canard? Indeed, if there was this vast confusion within Saddam's chain of command, it would have been astonishing if there had not been huge controversy about what was going on within the American intelligence establishment.
The linked article also stands for a different proposition, but one equally germane to the decision to go to war: that Saddam Hussein made national security decisions irrationally, and therefore was not reliably deterrable.
The nuanced argument for war (summarized, among other places, in a post I wrote back before I had readers) relied on exactly this point: that if containment collapsed -- as it was -- our only fall back position was to deterrance. Saddam, however, had demonstrated through countless decisions that he was not merely aggressive and expansionist but irrational. Since deterrance requires a rational actor on the other side, we therefore could not safely rely on our ability to deter Saddam. Kenneth Pollack, quoted in the linked post, was particularly persuasive on this point.
Well, Sunday's article reinforces the pre-war claims of those who claimed that Saddam could not be deterred. His perception of the threat he faced on the eve of the Coalition's invasion was divorced from all reality. How is it possible to deter such a person? If containment had collapsed, as it was going to do under pressure from the French, the Russians, and the NGOs, how could any American president have relied on deterrance alone to contain Ba'athist Iraq?
9 Comments:
By 
Cardinalpark, at
Tue Mar 14, 02:29:00 PM:
I love armchair generals like Trainor taking shots at Tommy Franks. The guy (Franks) sprints his force -- SPRINTS -- to Baghdad, limits his wartime casualties to historically unheard of low levels -- and now they start with the office politics. The NYT is shocked, shocked to hear that Franks contemplated removing a General who wasn't getting it done in the field, and implies that this is some sort of failure?
This is what leaders do. They push, they inspire, they fire, they adapt. They MUST have EGO folks.
What Franks and his team and their troops accomplished is historically unprecedented in its brilliance - both in planning and execution. The reason the post-war period has been challenging as compared to other wars is because in other wars, we destroyed every square inch on the way to the heart, killing and losing lots more people. This time we grabbed the heart and ripped it out, leaving most of the rest of the body at least ok. If you visit Dresden or Dusseldorf or Hiroshima or Nagasaki, you don't see much prewar architecture, you know?
Your point about the fact that Saddam wasn't deterrable is correct and will eventually become conventional wisdom. My guess is that when Bush has left the Presidency conventional wisdom will evolve to support what we did in Iraq. It will take awhile if only because it's embarrassing to do too rapid an about face. Remember the press hated Pershing IIs in Europe and "evil empire" talk and "tear down this wall" and this stuff, but Reagan is a hero and most people don't know Sam Donaldson from Adam. Even Dan "fake but accurate" Rather saluted Reagan (at the funeral of course).
Iraq is mostly in the rearview mirror militarily at this point. Iran is in the windshield...what there TH, what there?
By cakreiz, at
Tue Mar 14, 04:08:00 PM:
I read the article, Hawk; very interesting stuff. Here's my qualm- to some extent, the NYT's piece portrays Saddam as a rational actor, trying to balance his ruthless domestic agenda, on the one hand, against the impending US attack. The Times piece suggests that he was playing Hamlet- trying to appear to have WMD for domestic consumption while disavowing them internationally. He comes across as a rational guy between a rock and a hard place.
My view is that Saddam was, at the end of the day, an irrational narcissist. His assessment of the US was completely out of touch, for example. Does the NYT piece give him too much credit for rationality?
By cakreiz, at
Tue Mar 14, 04:15:00 PM:
One more point- I agree with you entirely that Saddam was irrational and therefore incapable of being deterred. Iran's in much the same posture- except that its irrationality stems from radical religious beliefs rather than narcissism.
By Cardinalpark, at
Tue Mar 14, 06:42:00 PM:
Malevolent tyrants of any sort are by definition irrational. They are or become irrational because they cannot tolerate dissent. They are only told fairy tales and lies by sycophants, rather than being told objective truth (or given advice) by intelligent, independent thinking people. Even if the tyrant is shrewd and intelligent, he becomes poorly informed and therefore becomes incapable of rational decisions or action. This ultimately is why tyrannies in a world with freely flowing information are doomed. It is why the great political trend since 1776 has been toward democracy and away from tyranny.
There will be more failed tyrannies and irrationality along the way, and some of them could be quite ugly. Iran may be next. Let's hope it's bloodless. But the likelihood that there is some well-informed, creative free thinker inside of the Iranian regime giving Ahmedinejad open advice on his odds against the US and Israel are probably not so good. Any general who says "this ain't a good idea Ahmed" will get his eyeballs roasted or acid thrown on him. Or maybe his plane will mysteriously crash. So he is miscalculating just as badly as Saddam did. And if he reads the western press, he is even more poorly informed -- about how stretched our military is, and how powerless the lameduck Bush is.
Come to think of it, maybe that's why the MSM are reporting this way! It's all a giant headfake.
By Dawnfire82, at
Tue Mar 14, 08:20:00 PM:
By PeterBoston, at
Wed Mar 15, 07:01:00 AM:
The NYT is so predictable that given just the headline almost anyone could write the story complete with all the conclusions. Reading the NYT is like deciphering Pravda. Jump ahead 15 pages and look in the 2nd or 3rd paragraph from the end for any acutal facts. The rest is agenda.
By cakreiz, at
Wed Mar 15, 09:20:00 AM:
That's funny, Peter- and accurate. I've never thought of the NYT in Pravdavian (?) terms.
By Gordon Smith, at
Wed Mar 15, 12:28:00 PM:
Deter him from what?
Using WMD?
Attacking his neighbors?
I think you maybe mean deter him from making us mad?
Saddam wasn't a threat to anyone outside of Iraq. But I guess the rationale now is that it's our job to march the freedom anywhere it hasn't been marching.
I guess we need to deter him from deterring the freedom march.
By Cardinalpark, at
Wed Mar 15, 02:51:00 PM:
SH - 2 points worth making in response:
1) your observation about Saddam not being a threat to anybody outside of Iraq is plainly, factually wrong. He waged war with Iran from 1981 to 1988. He gassed the Kurds (yes, inside Iraq). He annexed Kuwait in 1990. He had kicked UNSCOM inspectors out of Iraq in 1998, provoking Operation Desert Fox (whoopee) from President Clinton. Finally, he threatened Israel daily with its destruction. Your comment is folly. It is senseless. It pays no heed to Saddam's actions throughout his tyranny. It ignores President Clinton's observations, forget Bush's.
2) Saddam worked willingly with international terrorists -- most prominently Hamas and the range of alphabet soup of Palestinian terror groups, Abu Nidal and others; and he had recently provided haven and training to Ansar Al Islam, an Al Qaeda affiliate in Iraq run by the now notorious Jordanian, Abu Musab Al Zarqawi. As Fouad Ajami, a noted Middle Eastern Scholar at Johns Hopkins University observed, Saddam is the "prince of terror."
As Saddam was also a sworn enemy of the United States, was well financed by oil and had affiliates of the sort I just mentioned, how can you conclude Saddam wasn't a threat?
You may say it wasn't serious. Or not worth it. Or the odds were against him doing anything. something like that. People can disagree on the magnitude of the threat he posed. But to dismiss him and say he wasn't a threat -- regionally or even beyond the region, just screams willful ignorance and a profound absence of seriousness. Or merely a silly agenda. Did you vote for Clinton? Or Nader?
