[lit-ideas] Re: Hitchens' Hypothetical Iraq War
- From: Robert Paul <robert.paul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 20:21:21 -0800
[From The New Yorker]
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060403ta_talk_coll
Issue of 2006-04-03
Posted 2006-03-27
Deluded
by Steve Coll
After the fall of Baghdad, three years ago, the United States military
began a secret investigation of the decision-making within Saddam
Hussein’s dictatorship. The study, carried out by the U.S. Joint Forces
Command, drew on captured documents and interviews with former Baath
Party officials and Iraqi military officers, and when it was completed,
last year, it was delivered to President Bush. The full work remains
classified, but “Cobra II,” a recently published book about the early
phases of the war, by the Times reporter Michael Gordon and Lieutenant
General Bernard Trainor, has disclosed parts of the study, and the
Pentagon has released declassified sections, which Foreign Affairs has
posted on its Web site. Reading them, it is easy to imagine why the
Administration might resist publication of the full study. The extracts
describe how the Iraq invasion, more than any other war in American
history, was a construct of delusion. Frustratingly, however, we now
understand much more about the textures of fantasy in Saddam’s palaces
in early 2003 than we do about the self-delusions then prevalent in the
West Wing.
The study portrays the Iraqi President as a fading adversary who felt
boxed in by sanctions and political pressure. Saddam’s former generals
and civilian aides—such as his principal secretary, Lieutenant General
Abed Hamid Mahmoud, and the former Iraqi foreign minister, Tariq
Aziz—describe their old boss as a Lear-like figure, a confused despot in
the enervating twilight of a ruthless career: unable to think straight,
dependent upon his two lunatic and incompetent sons, and increasingly
reliant on bluff and bluster to remain in power. Saddam lay awake at
night worrying about knotty problems, and later issued memos based on
the dreams he had when he drifted into sleep. As the invasion
approached, he so feared a coup that he refused to allow his generals to
prepare seriously for war. Instead, he endorsed a plan for the defense
of Baghdad that essentially instructed his generals to talk with no one,
think rousing thoughts, and await further orders. The generals knew that
to question their leader or his sons was suicide, so they just saluted.
“We’re doing great!” the Minister of Defense wrote to his field
commanders on April 6th, as Baghdad fell.
Nor did this sham mask any plan to foil the invasion by launching a
guerrilla war. There has long been speculation that the insurgency,
which has so far taken more than twenty-three hundred American lives,
might have been seeded in part by clandestine prewar cell formations or
arms distributions. In fact, according to the study, there was no such
preparation by Saddam or any of his generals, not even as the regime’s
“world crumbled around it”; the insurgency was an unplanned, evolving
response to the political failings and humiliations of the occupation.
As for weapons of mass destruction, there were none, but Saddam could
not bring himself to admit it, because he feared a loss of prestige and,
in particular, that Iran might take advantage of his weakness—a
conclusion also sketched earlier by the C.I.A.-supervised Iraq Survey
Group. He did not tell even his most senior generals that he had no
W.M.D. until just before the invasion. They were appalled, and some
thought he might be lying, because, they later told their interrogators,
the American government insisted that Iraq did have such weapons. Saddam
“found it impossible to abandon the illusion of having W.M.D.,” the
study says. The Bush war cabinet, of course, clung to the same illusion,
and a kind of mutually reinforcing trance took hold between the two
leaderships as the invasion neared.
When the opposing armies finally crashed into each other in the desert,
the professional officers fighting the war had in common a rich disdain
for the self-styled strategists who had sent them into battle. Gordon
and Trainor’s extensive interviews with the Army and Marine generals and
colonels who commanded the invasion show that they had almost as little
faith in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his aides as their Iraqi
counterparts had in Saddam and his sons. Indeed, the American officers
featured in “Cobra II” are remarkably open about the war’s many errors
of conception and execution. Of course, they do not seem to believe that
any of the big mistakes were their fault—they blame the C.I.A. for
repeatedly getting the battlefield intelligence wrong, and they blame
Rumsfeld and his pliant subordinates for sending them to occupy Iraq
with a force of inadequate size. The Army and the Marines have paid an
extraordinarily high price for the war’s compounding blunders, and,
presumably, the officers are speaking candidly now not just to settle
scores but to avoid such bungling in the future.
[snip]
The President and the members of his war cabinet now routinely wave at
the horizon and speak about the long arc of history’s judgment—many
years or decades must pass, they suggest, before the overthrow of Saddam
and its impact on the Middle East can be properly evaluated. This is not
only an evasion; it is bad historiography. Particularly in free
societies, botched or unnecessary military invasions are almost always
recognized as mistakes by the public and the professional military soon
after they happen, and are rarely vindicated by time. This was true of
the Boer War, Suez, and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and it will be
true of Iraq. At best, when enough time has passed, and the human toll
is not so palpable, we may come to think of the invasion, and its
tragicomedy of missing weapons, as just another imperial folly, the way
we now remember the Spanish-American War or the doomed British invasions
of Afghanistan. But that will take a very long time, and it will never
pass as vindication.
Forwarded for scholarly purposes by Robert Paul robert.paul@xxxxxxxx
------------------------------------
[From Foreign Affairs May/June 2006]
Saddam's Delusions: The View from the Inside
Kevin Woods, James Lacey, and Williamson Murray
Summary: A special, double-length article from the upcoming May/June
issue of Foreign Affairs, presenting key excerpts from the recently
declassified book-length report of the USJFCOM Iraqi Perspectives Project.
Kevin Woods is a defense analyst in Washington, D.C. James Lacey is a
military analyst for the U.S. Joint Forces Command. Williamson Murray is
Class of 1957 Distinguished Visiting Professor of History at the U.S.
Naval Academy. Along with Mark Stout and Michael Pease, they were the
principal participants in the USJFCOM Iraqi Perspectives Project.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The fall of Baghdad in April 2003 opened one of the most
secretive and brutal governments in history to outside scrutiny. For the
first time since the end of World War II, American analysts did not have
to guess what had happened on the other side of a conflict but could
actually read the defeated enemy's documents and interrogate its leading
figures. To make the most of this unique opportunity, the U.S. Joint
Forces Command (USJFCOM) commissioned a comprehensive study of the inner
workings and behavior of Saddam Hussein's regime based on previously
inaccessible primary sources. Drawing on interviews with dozens of
captured senior Iraqi military and political leaders and hundreds of
thousands of official Iraqi documents (hundreds of them fully
translated), this two-year project has changed our understanding of the
war from the ground up. The study was partially declassified in late
February; its key findings are presented here.
New on March 24, 2006: Today the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command (JFCOM)
released the 230-page report of the Iraq Perspective Project (IPP) on
which "Saddam's Delusions" is based. Essay authors Woods, Lacey, and
Williamson were the principal authors of the IPP report.
You may download the full IPP report from the Foreign Affairs website as
an Adobe Acrobat file (.pdf, 7.2 MB).
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060501faessay85301/kevin-woods-james-lacey-williamson-murray/saddam-s-delusions-the-view-from-the-inside.html
Robert Paul
The Reed Institute
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