Unlike allegations that the Bush Administration knowingly deceived the American people about Iraq’s possession of WMD, the charge that the administration failed to properly plan for the chaos of post-Saddam Iraq cannot be dismissed as mere partisanship. While Democrats have every reason to highlight the early mistakes and Republicans have reason to downplay them, there seems to be a growing consensus that the entire affair was poorly planned and managed.
In the months leading to the invasion of Iraq, George Packer writes, “a who’s who of foreign policy and military think tanks,” including the Rand Corporation, the Army War College, the United States Institute of Peace, and the National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies, produced reports that “were striking for their unanimity of opinion. Security and reconstruction in postwar Iraq would require large numbers of troops for an extended period, and international cooperation would be essential.” None of these, Packer observes, seems to have penetrated the Oval Office, nor did similar warnings and assessments from frustrated military experts inside the Pentagon, particularly the office of Stability and Peace Operations, or from the State Department’s “Future of Iraq Project.”
Even a figure as influentially placed as Marine General Anthony Zinni, Gen. Tommy Franks’ predecessor at U.S. Central Command, was ignored after urging CENTCOM to dust off Operation Desert Crossing, an on-the-shelf plan for reconstruction following regime change in Iraq. The litany of missed opportunities continues with a rebuffed bipartisan offer of assistance from the conservative Heritage Foundation and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, organized by the Council on Foreign Relations. Finally, Packer reminds us of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki’s testimony before Congress, in which Shinseki concluded that, based on his experience in the Balkans, postwar Iraq would require “something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers.” In return for this forthright but unwelcome assessment, for which he was publicly rebuked by Paul Wolfowitz, Shinseki was sent into early retirement.
In short, there was no shortage of well-informed observers inside and outside the government who believed that providing security and reconstruction in post-Saddam Iraq would be a most arduous task requiring, among other things, substantially higher troop levels than would be needed to destroy the regime. Given these warnings and assessments, the most prudent course would have been to hope for the best and plan for the worst. And yet, as Packer reminds us, by mid-February 2003, only a month before the invasion, “it was becoming clear to people paying attention that the administration wasn’t remotely prepared for dealing with post war Iraq.”
I can confirm the rising frustration of many within the defense and national security establishment. We were quite confident that we were going to war, but were increasingly frustrated that, as one senior military officer put it at a planning meeting in early 2003, Phase IV (the military term for postwar peace and security operations) was a “big black hole.” As Packer summarizes it, “Plan A was that the Iraqi government would be quickly decapitated, security would be turned over to remnants of the Iraqi police and army, international troops would soon arrive, and most American forces would leave within a few months. There was no Plan B.”
At the time, I found it all a bit puzzling. How could it be that those most committed to a vision of a democratic and stable Iraq, those most committed to Iraq’s central role in the broader strategic vision for the war against Islamic extremism, those most committed to the Bush Doctrine, and thus those most vulnerable to criticism if the situation became unglued, simply ignored these ample warnings and proceeded undisturbed with their unrealistically optimistic scenarios? Packer’s book helps to unravel the mystery.
The greatest contribution of The Assassins’ Gate lies in Packer’s highly readable, intelligent chronicle of failure in the planning and management of post-Saddam Iraq, and the subsequent impact it had on the lives of ordinary Iraqis, American military personnel, and civilians working to clean up the mess. In time, military historians and strategists will study the early planning failures, the delay in recognizing and responding to the insurgency, and more generally the causes for failure to establish order after the collapse of Saddam’s regime. In a less partisan environment, scholars will render a more studied judgment on whether more rigorous planning would have had a significant effect on security and reconstruction. Those more detailed, systematic, and analytical studies will no doubt round out Packer’s account, but this is about as good a first draft of history as you can get.
The book has two parts. The second chronicles four trips Packer made to Iraq on assignment for The New Yorker. Through the eyes of Drew Erdman, a recently minted Harvard Ph.D. who became Iraq’s de facto minister of education, we catch a glimpse of the chaos in the early days of the Coalition Provisional Authority led by Amb. L. Paul (Jerry) Bremer, including the effects of his controversial policy of de-Baathification and the related decision to disband the Iraqi army. We get a glimpse of the early struggles on the ground through Packer’s reportage on Capt. John Pryor, an army company commander admirably coming to grips with a burgeoning insurgency. We get a sense of the psychological damage and sociological pathologies wrought by Saddam’s Baathist regime through the eyes of Dr. Baher Butti, the chief psychologist in a psychiatric hospital. And we get some wonderful insights into cultural and political intrigue from Packer’s discussions with artists and professors at the Hiwar Gallery, a café in a hard-core Baathist district of Baghdad. Finally, I was particularly impressed by Packer’s insightful reportage on the Sunni and Shia insurgencies (correctly plural), exposing the deeply tribal nature of much of Iraqi society, not least the continued effects of pre-modern notions of blood vengeance and honor killings. Officers and NCOs deploying or re-deploying to Iraq would do well to add Packer’s chapters on “Occupied Iraqis,” “Insurgencies,” and “Civil War” to their pre-deployment reading list.
The range of the first part of the book, which details the central ideas and personalities behind Operation Iraqi Freedom, is equally impressive. Most important to Packer’s story are his discussions with his longtime friend Kanan Makiya. The foremost intellectual among the Iraqi exiles, Makiya is best known for Republic of Fear, a seminal study of Saddam’s Iraq that was first published anonymously to protect the author’s life. Like Packer himself, Makiya is a man of the progressive Left, so his support for the U.S. invasion was particularly significant. Makiya personally assured President Bush that Iraqis would greet the troops with sweets and flowers. It was Makiya’s progressive humanitarian vision of a liberal Iraq and his unvarnished portrait of oppression of Iraq under Saddam that persuaded Packer, and not a few other liberals, to support the war on humanitarian grounds. Packer also profiles neoconservative hawks such as Richard Perle and Robert Kagan, numerous State Department and Defense officials, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.
Those already inclined to accept the familiar narrative of the run-up to the war depicting a gullible and inept administration hoodwinked by a small cabal of neoconservative foreign policy intellectuals will find just enough in Packer’s account to re-inforce their worst fears and expectations. Without a doubt, neoconservative intellectuals deserve a fair share, perhaps a majority share, of the blame for the overly optimistic assessment of what awaited the United States in post-Saddam Iraq. Particularly culpable are those such as Douglas Feith, who was directly responsible for reconstruction planning as the head of the Office of Special Plans.
Wolfowitz is subject to particular scrutiny. And yet, he comes off as more of a tragic and even sympathetic figure than the Darth Vader caricature of most progressive polemics:
Wolfowitz cared. For him Iraq was personal. He didn’t seem driven by other agendas: Military transformation and shoring up the Likud Party and screwing the Democrats were not his obsessions. He wasn’t a religious ideologue possessed by eschatological visions of remaking biblical lands. He was the closest thing to a liberal in the group. He had been pursuing this white whale for years, and he had everything to lose if Iraq went wrong. Why, then, did he find it all so hard to imagine?
Interestingly enough, Packer suggests that it was not Wolfowitz’s ideological commitments but rather his instincts as a “bureaucratic survivor of many administrations” that led him to accept the terms of his boss Donald Rumsfeld: “light force, little commitment in the postwar.” Which leads one to ask, “Why were those the terms?”
Indeed, while Packer’s book should serve as a reality check for those on the Right who tend to downplay the neocons’ responsibility for the problems of postwar Iraq, too much emphasis on the over-confidence of the neocons obscures an equally important reason for the problems in post-Saddam Iraq: the vision of warfare with which the Bush Administration came into office, and the concomitant understanding of how U.S. forces should be structured and transformed to fight future wars. In military jargon these are referred to as issues related to “force structure” and “military transformation.” Packer discusses these issues, but because his book lacks a systematic structure the reader may come away with the impression that they were only of secondary importance.
The issues raised by the doctrine of military transformation and the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) are complex and not easily summarized. In brief, advocates of military transformation have been arguing for well over a decade that advances in information technology and radical improvements in long-range precision strike technology (e.g., smart bombs) have significantly changed the way wars will be fought. Included in this vision is a preference for lighter mobile ground forces, including special operations forces over larger conventional forces. Hence Secretary Rumsfeld’s early goal of reducing the size of the active-duty army and the reserves by 20 percent to pay for his vision of transformation.
Some of the more radical advocates of military transformation argue that traditional notions of warfare are rapidly becoming obsolete. They claim, for example, that uncertainty in warfare has been so radically diminished by new and still-developing technology that talk about the “fog of war” is mostly hot air. While the extent to which Rumsfeld himself holds to the more radical version of the RMA is open to question, the Bush Administration, with Rumsfeld on point, clearly came to office with a firm commitment to military transformation.
And this explains, in turn, why President Bush ran for office with an explicit opposition to “peacekeeping” and “nation building” and “military operations other than war” (MOOTW, in military jargon) more generally. These types of military operations entail large personnel requirements and high costs, which place a drag on military transformation. Now, if you are planning to build a military that will have to deter and possibly fight the Chinese threat twenty years from now, this makes a certain amount of sense. But if you are talking about a long-term commitment to peacekeeping and unterinsurgency operations in Iraq and elsewhere, that is another matter altogether. Packer cites Secretary of the Army Thomas White, who summarized the resistance to planning for a large-scale security and reconstruction effort: “The type of operation a stability operation is—troop presence, police presence, these mundane activities—that’s not high tech, exotic, ‘we’re going to have satellites and Predators and hunt these guys down in the back roads of Yemen.’ This is boots on the ground and it is very untransformational.”
The administration’s convictions on military transformation were clearly reinforced by the speed with which the Taliban was toppled in Afghanistan. In his December 2001 speech at the Citadel, President Bush declared,
Afghanistan has been a proving ground for this new approach. These past two months have shown that an innovative doctrine and high-tech weaponry can shape and then dominate an unconventional conflict… . The conflict in Afghanistan has taught us more about the future of our military than a decade of blue ribbon panels and think-tank symposiums.
The president concluded, “When all of our military can continuously locate and track moving targets—with surveillance from air and space—warfare will be truly revolutionized.” Indeed, Rumsfeld and the advocates for transformation could legitimately claim that they were partially vindicated by the toppling of the Saddam regime and the fall of Baghdad with a relatively light force. Those who predicted massive slaughter in urban fighting were simply wrong.
It is important to note that the impact of transformation falls disproportionately on the Army. Not surprisingly, Army leadership has been the most resistant to transformation initiatives. It’s likely that the civilian DOD leadership dismissed calls for a larger troop presence as merely another bureaucratic attempt to stall the administration on military transformation—a suspicion with considerable credibility. After all, the Army tends to be no more enthusiastic about “constabulatory” missions and counterinsurgency missions than are the advocates of transformation. I suspect that skepticism regarding the Army’s response led to the fateful decision to place responsibility for post-Saddam security and reconstruction outside the normal Pentagon bureaucracy, in the hands of the civilians in the Office of Special Plans, headed by Douglas Feith.
In short, the DOD bears the primary responsibility for the failures in postwar Iraq. But Packer is fair enough in his coverage to show that there’s plenty of blame to be spread around. One anecdote in particular serves to exemplify the petty infighting that hampered the postwar effort. A State Department official tells Packer that shortly after Jerry Bremer was tasked to head the Coalition Provisional Authority, Colin Powell told a staff meeting, “We have one priority. That priority is Iraq. What Jerry Bremer asks for, Jerry Bremer gets and he gets it today. Any questions?” And yet, this official said, the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, the enemy of the neoconservatives, essentially said:
“Okay, you don’t want us—f___ you.” And then from there on out it was, “Let’s see what impediments we can put in their way. Let’s see how long we can be in delivering this particular commodity or individual or amount of expertise. Let’s see how long we can stiff ’em.”
So, the neocons in the DOD failed to plan adequately for the reconstruction and the counter-insurgency; the Army was perceived as lobbying for a larger invasion force at least partly out of institutional self-interest; and the State Department’s experts were throwing a temper-tantrum. No wonder things turned out the way they did.
So what are the lessons learned? First, neoconservative foreign policy intellectuals ought to take a step back and review an elementary lesson in political theory: order is necessary before liberty can flourish. The easy way would be to learn it from Hobbes or Burke. Iraq is re-teaching the lesson the hard way.
The second lesson is from military historian and strategist Frederick Kagan, who rightly insists that advocates of military transformation have forgotten the Clausewitzian dictum. As Kagan observes, a warfighting strategy is more than just a “targeting drill,” and the manner of fighting a war can’t be detached from the broader political objective:
From the standpoint of establishing a good peace it matters a great deal how, exactly, one defeats the enemy and what the enemy’s country looks like at the moment the bullets stop flying. The U.S. has developed and implemented a method of warfare that can produce stunning military victories but does not necessarily accomplish the political goals for which the war was fought.
Fortunately, the Bush Administration appears to be recognizing this, if only belatedly. A DOD directive issued in early December acknowledges that “stability operations are a core U.S. military mission” deserving of “priority comparable to combat missions.”
Finally, a word ought to be said about the scope of the early planning failures and mistakes in Iraq. Some commentators have downplayed the missteps by suggesting that they pale in comparison to other military blunders in American history. And indeed, when compared to the slaughter of Marines at Tarawa, the failure to detect and prepare for the German counteroffensive which resulted in the
Battle of the Bulge, and the innumerable screwups on D-Day—to limit examples to World War II—the failures in Iraq don’t look so egregious. But what if the Bush Administration and others who have been broadly supportive of the war, such as Sen. Joe Lieberman, are correct—as I believe they are—in warning that failure in Iraq would be catastrophic for both the broader war on Islamic extremism and for a vision of a more just and peaceful Middle East? In that case, if the U.S. intervention is ultimately unsuccessful, these early failures will be magnified, and the military and civilian architects of the war will be judged harshly indeed. If, on the other hand, order and representative government eventually come to Iraq, we may be left with Packer’s assessment that those in positions of highest responsibility for Iraq “turned a difficult undertaking into a needlessly deadly one.” Which is bad enough.
Keith J. Pavlischek is a colonel in the U.S. Marines. A reservist, he has served on active duty since being mobilized after 9/11, including a recent stint in Iraq.
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