Friday, August 18, 2006
Fiasco: A serial review, part last
This is the third and last part of my serial review of Thomas Ricks' book on Iraq, Fiasco (part I and part II), a relief to you all, I'm sure.
As I've intimated in previous posts, Fiasco is an extremely uneven book. At its best, Fiasco is quite good. The great strength of the book is its unit-by-unit analysis of tactics in each phase of the war, the discussion of the huge differences in philosophy, temperament and execution among the various division commanders, and the stories of individual soldiers. In the critical first year of the occupation, the practices of each American division diverged dramatically, and Ricks tells us how and why in much detail. The heroes of that first year were Army Maj. Gen. David Patraeus (picture of TigerHawk with General Patraeus and a review of his lecture at Princeton here), commander of the 101st Airborne, and Maj. Gen. James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, both of whom rather quickly understood that we were fighting a counterinsurgency and reacted accordingly. The big failure of that period (according to Ricks) was Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, who led that division in extremely heavy-handed tactics that -- in Ricks' view -- alienated Iraqis unnecessarily. Further, Ricks argues that the tremendous differences in approach among the various commanders was virtual proof that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who was in command of the whole country in the first year, had no strategic vision for the conflict. If Ricks' book is even half true, that much seems tough to deny.
These differences in tactics had wide-ranging consequences, especially when new units would rotate in to relieve the old. The approach and tone would vary so much from place to place and time to time that Iraqis would not know how to deal with Americans. At one point, Mattis' Marines felt so strongly about breaking with the practices of the Army that they planned to distinguish themselves by wearing jungle green uniforms when they rotated in to relieve the 82nd Airborne. The Marines only abandoned the plan when the 82nd's commander, Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack, told Mattis that it would be a "personal affront" to him if they did so. Ricks' also points out that the abuses at Abu Ghraib, which so damaged the image of the American military in the eyes of Iraqis, were in no small part a function of Odierno's tactics. The 4th ID under his command was so overinclusive and indiscriminate in its detention practices that it burdened the nascent prison system with literally thousands of detainees. Ricks argues that the overcrowding put an enormous strain on the untrained soldiers who managed Abu Ghraib. Those soldiers and their commanders were stressed down to their last nerve, left largely unprotected by the 1st Armored Division (the military unit in command of the area around Abu Ghraib), and ultimately took their anger and frustration out on the Iraqis in their charge. In this light, Abu Ghraib was actually, rather merely theoretically, the fault of Odierno and Sanchez in particular, both of whom were promoted on their return to the United States.
The book is decent in its discussion of bureaucratic politics, and Ricks is fair in the sense that he does not seem to side with his sources -- unlike most authors of Iraq books, he is not obviously out to vindicate any agency or faction at the expense of any other. Indeed, Ricks is particularly tough on various people who have emerged from previous criticisms of Iraq relatively unscathed, including especially Tommy Franks and Ricardo Sanchez. Paul Krugman claimed last week that Donald Rumsfeld is the "prime villain" of the book, but I don't read it that way. To be sure, Ricks blames Rumsfeld for a lot that went wrong, but the recurring theme is that the United States national security establishment writ large, especially the Army (as opposed to the other branches) but including the CIA, the State Department, and the White House, was and remains wrongly organized to initiate and complete a mission such as Operation Iraqi Freedom. Ricks identifies a great many specific mistakes by a great many particular people, but most of these ultimately derive from the culture and organization of our key agencies. This is not meant to exculpate Donald Rumsfeld, by the way, or make any of us comfortable. It is very distressing. It does, however, suggest that the only reason we did not confront these problems earlier is that since Vietnam we have run from any mission that would have surfaced them (see, e.g., Lebanon in 1983 or Somalia in 1993).
However, Ricks is weak at altitude. His analysis of the current and imagined strategic consequences of the war, positive or negative, is exceedingly superficial, and basically repeats the unsophisticated and mainstream criticism that the United States is less popular, Iraqis have not yet created a successful and legitimate democratic government, and that there are more terrorists operating in Iraq today than there were in 2002. From the title forward, Ricks is alarmist when he moves outside his narrative -- which is often gripping -- to consider ultimate consequences. Like most left-liberal observers (and I lump Ricks in with this crowd in that he approvingly cites Juan Cole and describes him as an "Iraq expert"), Ricks sees blowback in only one direction. What about the blowback against the Sunni jihadis? Yes, there may well be more "terrorists" in Iraq today than in 2002, but against whom are they operating and how many more Arabs are carrying guns and looking for them? Iraq is a lot of things, but it is nobody's "haven." Like most authors of blockbuster Iraq books -- including George Packer, whose book The Assassins' Gate was last season's failure-in-Iraq bestseller -- Ricks does not even consider these questions.
So, where does this leave us? Fiasco is the military complement to The Assassins' Gate, which focused much more on the lives of Iraqis and the civilians in the Green Zone and much less on the military. The two books together (and many others that are less good and less famous) are the backbone of the now conventional view that the Iraq war is a catastrophe for the United States. Both books, however, are journalism, not history, and in that sense they do not put the American mission in Iraq in a context that is likely to stand the test of time. Sure, both books reveal very disquieting bureaucratic failures and apparently boneheaded individual decisions. Students of American military history, though, know that virtually all modern American wars have been littered with unbelievable screw-ups. One is forced to wonder whether in Iraq we are not seeing greater transparency, rather than greater tomfoolery.
4 Comments:
By 
Tom the Redhunter, at
Fri Aug 18, 08:44:00 AM:
I've noticed the uneven nature of Ricks' reporting in the Washington Post. When he is good, he is very good. When he is bad, though, he is way off base.
Excellent book review, however. And for it's flaws, it looks like his book will add to our knowledge of the war.
By 
, at
Fri Aug 18, 04:00:00 PM:
If Ricks isn't able to give a sophisticated strategic level assessment of the various and colossal blunders of this administration and its policy apparatus in Iraq, it's not because he lacks the expertise or insight. It's because the strategic failures are overwhelmingly obvious. Those are namely the direct costs and benefits to the nation of decision to, more or less unilaterally, invade Iraq. It is evident now, both from the dearth of WMD/WMD related program activity and from the fragile and ineffectual orientation of Saddam's regime that pre-war Iraq was no threat to the United States whatsoever, and certainly not a threat to our strategic interests. $300 billion dollars (enough for a substantial investment in domestic priorities that could provide a return to the citizenry and enhance our standard of living- think: Apollo program) and nearly 3000 American lives later, the nation is indeed a threat and a serious one most particularly were we to lose (and is looking increasingly evident, when we lose).
The indirect costs of our invasion of Iraq is the 24 trillion dollar question, and is where sophistication is little more than a fancy packaging of guesswork. Maybe Ricks didn't get the color scheme right, but what is undoubtedly the case is that we've opened a huge can of worms and any number of destabilizing events could be the result. For example, pan-regional armed conflict cannot be ruled out as a consequence (i.e. here's some $1000 barrels of oil for your strategic interests), especially in the event of withdrawal. Additionally, there is the effect of the war on the esteem with which America is held by the peoples of other nations. No matter your preference for playing to foreign tastes, this unknown variable accrues to our well being, (or as is increasingly the case, doesn't), as is partly in evidence by the latest Doha round of trade negotiations. Finally, there is the issue of our creating terrorists. Understood there is tremendous controversy surrounding this idea, however, it is my opinion that you cannot deter terrorism by killing terrorists. How does one deter a suicide bomber?? The only deterrence for terrorists are depriving them of motive and- more critically- by depriving the disaffected population from whence they come of the desire to support them. This latter is the most realistically accomplished by giving that population a dignified alternative which is to say, a voice in how regional affairs are conducted. Bombs simply don't do the trick. In any case, no matter how you slice it, the war in Iraq has not exactly slowed down whatever engine is out there cranking out terrorists. Methinks we'll run out of bombs before they run out of the human variety.
Without even speculating along these lines, there are ways to extend the strategic assessment. Using accrual accounting (e.g. including the cost of life-time health care to wounded veterans, retirement monies, etc.) to derive the monetary cost of our invasion and including likely future troop deployments you will arrive at an estimate of between 1 trillion and 2 trillion dollars even under rosy scenarios. To put that in perspective, that is the same ballpark as the current funding deficit for Social Security. So by initiating a war rather than dedicating the funds to this program, to give one example, younger Americans will be in the position of either paying drastically higher Social Security taxes in the future or receiving lesser benefits than otherwise (and much greater chances of receiving a lesser amount than contributed). That is a strategic consequence.
Long story short, some of these costs are the result of the mishandling of the war, some are exacerbated by the mishandling of the war and some are a result of going to war in the first place, (the blame for which cannot be placed with the armed forces). But make no mistake about it, all these costs are very real and very much borne by Americans, sophisticated or no.
By Unknown, at
Sat Aug 19, 03:30:00 PM:
re: costs of the war.
Are unknowable for the time being. We will not know the trades (just as we did not know about the civil war or WW2) until long after the conflict. And then these discussions will be in the realm of historians and not current political passions. Note that no one would have thought in the early days of communism (and containing it rather than killing it) that the eventual bill for our own sin of omission would be 100 million early deaths and the waste of billions of otherwise productive lives (like the holocaust victims, which of these of Stalin's "statistics" would have found a cure for cancer, aids or the next 1919 flu pandemic, to say nothing of new energy sources and likely bringing an end to $1-a-day poverty and suffering as we know it today, around the world).
re: money better spent on social programs, wealth transfers, leftist feel-goods.
At the moment all the countries that have mercantilist polices that cause them to underwrite their manufacturing and export by borrowing our expensive dollars (that we will repay with cheap, later, as an ever smaller percentage of the economy as it grows unencumbered by war taxes and a draft) are paying for this war (which is just a fraction of their quarter trillion dollar a year "gift"). Which is only fair considering they are the largest beneficiary of our keeping-the-peace (and the oil flowing - their ME consumption dwarfs ours).
One of the wonders (and curses) of managing the world's reserve currency means we get to play with both sides of the equation. So the money we send off shore as foreign aid, and spend in countries like Iraq simply never returns. It's as if they made us a loan of their efforts and goods for script. We're richer, and they're richer - until such time as circulation returns because they turn utterly corrupt (and the dictators bank our aid that they steal offshore) or they enter the 1st world markets both in trade and capital. The latter being a wonderful result but a nit on the accounting sheet (as both parties are richer and our unfunded liabilities for SSI become smaller and smaller as the world's wealth grows beyond arithmetically - the wonder of free enterprise and (at least economically) free people.
Else it's funny money. Unlike wealth transfers here, either direct or generational, which are a net economic loss, right off the top. Consider that regulation is one of the most regressive of all taxes - the poor pay for "cleaner air" just as much as the rich and get much less for it. It's sad, but the last quarter of the Clinton administration and his regulatory presidential directives have cost the poor and bottom half of the middle-class at least a decade of raises for "goods" they will never see because they are mostly ephemeral feel-goods, payback to the bureaucracies-and-agencies-in-league with the courts making law (requiring bigger budgets and staffs) and/or ambulance-chasers rather than practical improvements. Everyone is poorer for it.
We're fortunate that we've had enough growth (because the maternalists have not been in charge since 1994) that our poor generally live better in terms of consumption, goods, air-conditioning, food, travel and entertainment, and have much better health care crisis outcomes than any middle class in europe, save perhaps tiny Belgium (benefiting from the EC hq), and parts of Switzerland (ditto UN hq largess).
Someday the socialists will learn that the wealthy don't take wealth or power from the non-wealthy, but from the government - and since they are not the government, these made-wealthy-by-their-enterprise actually create more wealth for everyone else. Granted, there are exceptions, but they are noise compared to government greater-than-half-failures despite their good intentions. The socialists may also learn that the government is NOT the people but just another special interest, a necessary but often bad actor in the affairs of man.
By , at
Sun Oct 01, 04:41:00 PM:
TH,
I enjoyed you Adirondacks vacation posts. And my family enjoyed our annual vacation in Saranac Lake, and ventured to the new natural history museum in Tupper Lake.
Like you, I read Fiasco (up there, actually) and several other Iraq books. Cumulatively, they have shaken, even transformed, my views on Bush and Iraq. Maybe I haven't read your relevant posts, but your views seem less affected than mine.
If you could email me with links to posts that elucidate your thoughts, I would surely read them.
Regards,
The Commissar
http://acepilots.com/mt
commissar@acepilots.com
