Fiasco, the American Military Adventure in Iraq.

Lang, W. Patrick

Fiasco, the American Military Adventure in Iraq, by Thomas E. Ricks. Penguin Press, 2006. 496 pages. $27.95.

A plethora of books now exist about Iraq, Afghanistan and related themes such as the Bush administration's decision-making processes, intelligence failures and internal propaganda. Half a dozen are in the marketplace so far, with more appearing every week as reporters finish their writing projects. These books are very useful for creating an informed electorate, and in some cases they are so richly sourced that historians will find them to be important starting points for scholarly research.

Fiasco is likely to serve that purpose. Thomas Ricks's wide acquaintance with military people and his long preoccupation with the psychology of warriors have made it possible for him to dig as deeply as anyone could into the war's meaning in terms of its impact on the "collective mind" of the American military and the terrible results of that mentality. Fiasco is very rich in detail that supports its judgments. Ricks spent a lot of time in Iraq absorbing the feel of disaster. He has captured it well.

Ricks painstakingly describes the ineptitude of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). This ineptitude formed the background for the collective military mindset that brought about the catastrophe in Iraq. It is still occurring there and still prevails in the American armed forces.

I suppose we must accept L. Paul Bremer's claim that it was his decision (and his alone) to disband the Iraqi security forces. He accepts responsibility for this egregious error, so why shouldn't we? The standard argument of the pro-Bremer group is that the Iraqi armed forces had ceased to exist and that therefore there were no security forces to disband or employ. What they mean by that is that there were no units to be found by the time the American forces captured Baghdad and that cantonments had been looted and abandoned across the country.

What this argument completely ignores is that armed forces are social groups, the functional equivalents of tribes. They are not just collections of weapons and men. In any reasonably coherent military force, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. As Ricks's military interlocutors in Iraq saw clearly, the Iraqi forces still existed as bodies of trained and disciplined men even if they were dispersed. They could have been "weeded" at the top to remove politically unacceptable people. After that, large numbers of men and officers might have been recalled to the colors, where they could have been used to stabilize the country. The authors of another of the books on Iraq discovered that only a small percentage of Iraqi military officers had ever been members of the Baath party. It had been a national army, not a party militia.

The decision to disband, supposedly made by Bremer, was the most important decision made in occupied Iraq. It may well have been the moment at which the war in Iraq was lost. The abrupt dismissal of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers drove many of them into the various Sunni insurgent groups. It is no accident that the insurgents possess a strong capacity for the technical aspects of bomb making and the operational planning that enables them to survive and, indeed, to prosper as our enemies.

In spite of Ricks's obvious disdain for the CPA, which he likens to a "children's crusade," his central subject is really the poor job that the senior officers of the U.S. Army have done in Iraq. He has far fewer negative things to say about Marine leadership, seemingly because of the marines' greater flexibility and willingness to adapt.

Ricks seems to find that the Army's generals have done poorly in Iraq, and the evidence supports his judgment. There are several armies contained within the larger framework of the U.S. Army. The largest by far is the combined-arms, armor-dominated, heavy structure built to fight the major wars faced by the United States in the aftermath of World War II. These forces were created and maintained for almost two generations for the purpose of fighting massive "force on force" battles of attrition in Europe and Korea. Throughout that period, it was clear that these forces would always fight outnumbered and that a dogged and inflexible defense would be necessary to achieve any sort of success. Rigid discipline, careful adherence to orders and an unquestioning attitude are critical in such fighting. In response, the heavy forces of the Army developed in that direction, as did the collective mentality of its officers.

At the same time, there was also a "minor theme" in the Army that existed for the purpose of conducting guerrilla warfare, counterinsurgency and the training of foreign troops in the field. U.S. Army Special Forces (the Green Berets) were the major actors in this role. Other groups that are not as well known also developed. In Vietnam these two different "armies" fought in the same country, but, in essence, they fought two different wars. The "heavies" fought the main-force divisions and regiments of the North Vietnamese Army out in the woods, where they seldom had anything to do with Vietnamese civilians. The "greenies" (Special Forces) and all the other "people's war" fighters fought the Viet Cong, tried to build the villages up and did a good job training local militias. When the war in Vietnam ended badly, the "heavy" army wanted nothing further to do with any of this and suppressed as much as possible anything that had to do with counterinsurgency. They actually destroyed the records in many cases. If it had not been for Congressional insistence on maintaining some capability against terrorism, the Green Berets would have ceased to exist.

As Ricks reports, the U.S. Army entered Iraq in 2003 with no doctrine concerning counterinsurgency, no plans for dealing with insurgency and lacking leadership enough to perceive the continuing guerrilla war as it developed. At the same time, the few Special Operations Forces that had survived successive Army purges had been largely transformed into counterterrorism commandos. As a result, the Heavy Army had to be asked to perform a task in nation building and counterinsurgency of which it was completely ignorant. The result lies before us, a sorry spectacle. Over the last three years, the "Heavy Army" has sought to learn how to fight such a war. The Army's institutions of learning are now replete with "Institutes of Cultural Studies," "Urban Warfare Operations Laboratories" and the like, and every grenadier is expected to be respectful of Islam. As Ricks points out, this process of inventing the wheelbarrow is very slow. Along with all the other parts of the Army, the "greenies" are re-learning their proper trade.

As a pedagogical exercise this will probably succeed for both groups, because, as the president has said, "It is going to be a long war."

W. Patrick Lang, former defense intelligence officer for the Middle East