How operation Baghdad was bungled

How operation Baghdad was bungled
By Stephen Fidler
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
Published: September 18 2006 03:00 | Last updated: September 18 2006 03:00


Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state, has admitted that the US committed perhaps thousands of tactical errors in its invasion and occupation of Iraq. This excellent book by Thomas Ricks, The Washington Post's senior Pentagon correspondent, emphasises that the mistakes in Iraq were more profound than that: Washington's strategy was mis-begotten from the beginning.

Built on the goal of capturing Baghdad, the strategy was designed by Tommy Franks, the general who headed US Central Command. According to Ricks, Gen Franks was a long way from being a strategic thinker. He also succumbed to relentless pressure from Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, to pare down the invading force. This meant there were insufficient troops to maintain order once the Battle of Baghdad was won.

Mr Rumsfeld, it appeared, was trying to do at least two things at once: win a war and prove to the world that the US could succeed in conflict with a lean, mean, technologically sophisticated military machine. He wanted to overturn the doctrine of overwhelming force used in the first Gulf war and disdained the resistance to change he saw in the US army.

But there is a law of economic policy that Mr Rumsfeld perhaps should have taken to heart: one policy tool for one policy objective. His notion about force numbers meant the US had the wherewithal to unseat a dictator but not to handle an occupation.

Mr Rumsfeld was not alone in his "fire and forget" approach. Senior Bush administration officials consistently "worst cased" the threat from Iraq and "best cased" the difficulties of occupation. "The result was that the US effort resembled a banana republic coup d'état more than a full-scale war plan that reflected the ambition of a great power to alter the politics of a crucial region of the world," Ricks says.

Once in charge, Washington failed to respect the iron rule of dealing with counter-insurgency: put one person, preferably a civilian, in charge. In Iraq, there were two - the civilian head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Paul Bremer, and the military, led by Ricardo Sanchez. They rarely talked.

The military had no viable counter-insurgency plan either. Ricks argues that the US army took from the Vietnam war only the lesson that it should not get involved in new counter-insurgencies. It failed to seal borders with neighbouring states, allowing foreign fighters to enter the country, and for much of 2003 and 2004 waged a conventional war against the insurgency.

This conventional war added fuel to the flames. In a counter-insurgency, the idea is not to kill as many of the enemy as you can; neither is it to throw large numbers of innocent -people into jail; nor to torture those that are there. Doing that alienates the population and in a counter-insurgency campaign the people are the prize.

As is clear from the many critiques of the conduct of the war cited by Ricks, the US military tries hard to learn from its mistakes and adapt its behaviour. However, because of the lack of a coherent strategy, he suggests, the lessons were learnt un-evenly, applied by commanders of some regions but not others. Even where there were local successes, frequent troop rotations meant that acquired local wisdom was lost. More-over, the mistakes made early in the campaign had so destabilised society and had given so much impetus to the insurgency that subsequent course corrections could do little to help.

Fiasco is one of two significant books from journalists on the military campaign in Iraq. The other, Cobra II, written by Michael Gordon of The New York Times and Bernard Trainor, a retired general, focuses on the campaign to capture Baghdad. It contains excellent descriptions of battles, but is more neutral in tone and the criticism of those running the campaign is more implicit. Ricks' book is more analytical, more judgmental, less wordy. It concisely explains the run-up to the war and the race for Baghdad but concentrates more on what happened after Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled.

Although he cites the evidence for his assertions and the countervailing view, Ricks does not pull his punches. As well as a US administration that refused to admit its mistakes, or correct or remove those who made them, targets include Gen Richard Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, who never publicly departed from the Rumsfeld line. He is critical of Gen Franks, Mr Bremer and George Tenet, the CIA chief who helped make the case for war, who he says were among those most responsible for mishandling the war. All three were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Now, Baghdad is described as resembling a "Hobbesian state", where all are at war against all others and where any security is self-provided. Failure of the military adventure is not guaranteed, but what would now be viewed as success does not look fantastic either. "We never got to the hard stuff," one reserve army officer is quoted as saying. "We did the easy stuff so badly."

The writer is the Financial Times' defence and security editor