In the ranks of death

Williamson Murray and Major General Robert H. Scales Jr., The Iraq War: A Military History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard Press, 2003), 311 pp., $25.95.

Oliver North, War Stories: Operation Iraqi Freedom (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2003), 322 pp., $29.95 (includes DVD).

Todd S. Purdum, A Time of Our Choosing: America's War in Iraq (New York: New York Times Books, 2003), 319 pp., $25.

Martin Walker, ed., The Iraq War: As Witnessed by the Correspondents and Photographers of United Press International (Dulles, VA: Brassey's Inc., 2003), 225 pp., $19.95.

Sara Beck and Malcolm Downing, eds., The Battle for Iraq; BBC News Correspondents on the War Against Saddam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 216 pp., $27.95.

Sir John Keegan, ed., Daily Telegraph War on Saddam (London, UK: Constable & Robinson, 2003), 192 pp., 12.99 [pounds sterling].

Wesley K. Clark, Winning Modern Wars (New Yore PublicAffairs, 2003), 218 pp., $25.

Sir John Keegan, Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda (New York: Knopf, 2003), 387 pp., $30.

Abraham Rabinovich, The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter that Transformed the Middle East (New York: Schocken Books, 2004), 543 pp., $27.50.

WHEN ASKED for his own account of the battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington replied that the very idea was foolish, that one might as well try to write the history of a ball. Perhaps he felt that his own official dispatch on the conflict should suffice for the ages (although the Duke went on to produce a further "Waterloo Memorandum" in 1842). And yet for almost 180 years, Waterloo was widely reckoned to be the most thoroughly described battle in history thanks to the pioneering work of Captain William Siborne, who sought to produce an exact model of the battle that ended the Napoleonic wars. He accumulated accounts and letters from many of the British participants, which probably introduced a certain bias, but by the time Thackeray sat down in the 1840s to write the Waterloo scenes of Vanity Fair, there was a massive body of eyewitness material to guide the novelist's imagination. And in the small Hotel des Colonnes overlooking the battlefield, where Victor Hugo wrote Les Miserables in 1861 with its famous account of the battle, there was a pile of French memoirs of the battle to hand.

Yet controversy still reigns, and not only in the bizarre new history by the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, whose Les Cent Fours suggests that Napoleon's great defeat "gleams with an aura worthy of victory." In 1994, David Hamilton-Williams, an English historian, published Waterloo: New Perspectives, claiming to have delved in the Dutch, German and Belgian sources (and those nationalities provided the bulk of the Duke's army) to give a much fuller account of the battle, particularly on the Duke's left wing where few British troops were posted. He also claimed that Siborne, running out of money to finance his project, "traduced history" by soliciting funds from his wealthier sources, bending his history to suit the vanity of his more generous donors. Finally, and in defiance of the Duke's grumble that Siborne had given too much credit to General Blucher's Prussians, Hamilton-Williams suggested that Siborne was part of a British "conspiracy" to minimize the Prussian role in the joint victory.

In a series of devastating articles in the Napoleonic journal First Empire (numbers 23, 25 and 26) and in the Journal of Army Historical Research, Hamilton-Williams was accused of unfairly blackening Siborne's achievement and inventing his own sources. Visitors to the Hanoverian archives and to the Siborne archives in the British Library were unable to find some of the more dramatic materials he cited, including the private journal of Major George Baring, who commanded the King's German Legion defenders of the central farm of La Haye Sainte until their ammunition ran out and the farm fell. The late Colonel John Elting, West Point's sage on Napoleonic affairs, called the book an "outright fraud." The German military historian Peter Hofschroer (who really had gone through the Dutch and German archives to produce his 1815: The Waterloo Campaign), when asked to specify what was wrong in Hamilton-Williams's book, replied to one inquirer that "from the first page to the last" it was consumed with error.

SO IF A BATTLE as familiar and well documented as Waterloo--with nearly two centuries of hindsight and historiography to its credit--can continue to arouse such passionate dispute, what is to be expected of the new crop of instant books on the Iraq War? The first objection to all of the accounts listed above is that they are distinctly premature. Indeed, Williamson Murray and Robert Scales, the authors of the most conventional and in that limited sense the most successful of these books, frankly admit:

   As we put this book to bed in mid-August
   2003, it is not entirely clear whether the conflict
   that began in mid-March has actually
   ended.... Whether [the postwar] violence
   represents the death throes of an evil and pernicious
   regime or the first phase of a protracted
   guerilla insurgency it is impossible to say.

The second objection is that far exceeding any Anglophilia of Captain Siborne on Waterloo, they are unashamedly one-sided. They are written from the Anglo-American side, and offer almost nothing from Iraqi sources. Anyone seeking to discover what kind of strategic discussion or planning took place in Baghdad, whether the Iraqi Army (as opposed to the Republican Guard or the Saddam Fedayeen) deliberately chose not to put up much of a fight, or indeed whether the Ba'athi regime planned, armed and equipped a postwar resistance, will find little illumination here. Oliver North's gung-ho account of American courage and prowess presents the kind of anecdotal evidence that most of us who accompanied the troops also witnessed:

   It's not uncommon for Marines sweeping
   through a trench line from which they have
   just taken fire to find the positions littered
   with green uniforms, helmets, gas masks,
   empty magazine pouches, and black boots.
   And then, a few moments later, dozens of
   beardless young men with short, military-style
   haircuts, garbed in Arab dress, are just
   standing around with no apparent place to
   go. Everyone knows that just minutes or
   hours before, they were wearing the discarded
   uniforms.

But this kind of tunnel vision is in the very nature of the instant books on war, although the model for the genre, Winston Churchill's The Malakand Field Force (on India's North-West frontier) and The River War (on the Omdurman campaign), spends considerable time on local color and customs and the military traditions and tactics of the foe. Consider A Time Of Our Choosing, which is the New York Times's version of the war. Assembled by Todd Purdum, the book benefits only to an extent from the presence of the excellent John Burns as the newspaper's correspondent in Baghdad. And yet the fascination for some sense of life behind enemy lines was clear from the wave of interest worldwide that greeted the intriguing Internet journal of the young Iraqi architect known as Salam Pax, who is now an occasional columnist for Britain's Guardian newspaper.

The Times's version is thorough and wide-ranging, focusing almost as much on the politics and diplomacy as on the war itself, although it sometimes reads as if the author has spent too much time with techno-thriller prose. One of its more original elements, the Times's version of Saddam's looting of the central bank, is rendered thus:

   It was 4 AM when the two men arrived in the
   empty darkness of downtown. They carried a
   letter from the president, bearing his signature
   and authorizing a large transaction. They
   gave no reason. They did not have to. No
   questions were asked. Soon enough, Qusay
   Saddam Hussein, the president's second son,
   and Abid Hamid Mahmoud al-Tikriti,
   Saddam's personal assistant, were overseeing
   the loading of 236 boxes into three tractor-trailers
   outside Iraq's Central Bank. A team of
   workers took two hours to finish the job. Bank
   employees were meticulous, good bureaucrats
   to the end. They kept records of every batch
   of bills, then placed a packing slip enumerating
   the contents into each box before it was
   sealed. Over the years, Saddam and his family
   would sometimes demand cash from Iraqi
   banks. "Small amounts, maybe $5 million",
   one official said. This withdrawal was something
   else again. The total haul: almost $I billion.
   There was $900 million in $100 bills and
   perhaps $100 million worth of euros, about a
   quarter of the country's hard-currency
   reserves, enough to rank as one of the largest
   bank robberies in history. Then again,
   Saddam's power was so absolute that this
   seizure might have broken no laws.

THERE ARE three classic forms of the instant war book. The first, exemplified by Oliver North, is one reporter's account of what he saw and felt and thought was happening. This suffers in perspective, since like most of the embedded reporters, North could only be in one place at a time and thus is able to offer only a partially organized worm's-eye view. But North's background as a Marine officer stands him in good stead, and his account of landing in a helicopter into the Baghdad palace complex and taking fire on a series of casualty evacuation missions is riveting and well written, with an actuality that anyone who has been under fire knows just cannot be faked. Of the various "I was there" war memoirs, North's stands out, although his rants against anti-war protesters, Hollywood, the rest of the American media and the French become tiresome. In addition, the 'Ollie-rant' tends to undermine his credibility when he writes of finding evidence of equipment used to disperse chemical weapons. He also misspells Osirak, the name of the French-built Iraqi nuclear reactor that was destroyed by the Israeli Air Force. His relentless political agenda weakens what is otherwise a valuable eye-witness account, although it does produce the occasional good line. He notes that the troops

   know the French have wimped out once
   again. And they are quick to remind any journalist
   who will listen that it's okay because, as
   one Marine puts it, "the French have always
   been there when they needed us."

The second type of instant war book is the New York Times sort. It makes use of the paper's stories as raw material for a slightly later, would-be magisterial account that employs hindsight and reporters' varying perspectives to give an overall account of the war on many fronts, political as well as military. Of its kind, it is good, but at the same time is easily outmatched on topics such as the nature of the war and what the war revealed about the current state and doctrine of the U.S. military by the Murray-Scales book.

Murray and Scales stress the degree to which the U.S. military had changed since the Gulf War. They point out that the improved firepower, mobility and air support meant that the division was no longer the essential unit of organization, but that, rather like the German military in World War II, the U.S. Army had sufficient common doctrine and training that it could be swiftly and flexibly re-organized to fight in ad hoc task forces. There are usually three brigades in a division, and the authors suggest that by 2003, each of the Brigade Combat Teams could match the weight and coverage of a Gulf War-era division. They also point out the advances in the deployment of precision weapons:

   In previous wars, the measure of effectiveness
   was the number of sorties necessary to
   destroy a single target: in this war, the measure
   of effectiveness was the number of targets
   a single sortie could destroy.

The air war was shatteringly effective. By the eve of the assault on Baghdad, the three Republican Guard armored divisions that had been holding the approaches to the Iraqi capital had been destroyed. At the start of the war, they had deployed some 850 tanks; by April 8, just 19 remained still operational. Of their 550 artillery pieces, 510 had been eliminated. The skilled combination of the use of sensors, drones, battlefield intelligence and ground-air cooperation (particularly in the case of the Marines, who deployed Marine pilots in their front-line units to coordinate air strikes) was extraordinarily effective. But this was not achieved without loss. Murray and Scales discuss how not to use air power in their account of the ambush of the Army's 11th Attack Helicopter Regiment when it tried to soften up the Republican Guard's Medina Division. Fuel shortages and logistical foul-ups meant there was only enough fuel for two-thirds of the Apaches assigned to the attack, and the attack went in three hours late. But nobody told the artillery, which was meant to prepare the battlefield with a barrage of shells and ATACMS (Army Tactical Missiles) just as the Apaches went in. In the three post-barrage hours before the helicopters went in unsupported, a spate of intercepted cell phone calls suggested that the Iraqis suspected what was to come, and they met the helicopters with a storm of steel from every gun and RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) in the division. The 11th was lucky that only one Apache was shot down, although all of the helicopters were hit.

A PART FROM the grueling battles of attrition around Najaf and Nasariyah as the Saddam Fedayeen forces tried to interrupt crucial U.S. supply lines, the three hardest battles of the war took place on the outskirts of Baghdad. The relative absence of embedded reporters with the ability to transmit their stories and images out meant that the battle of Highway 8, on the way into Baghdad, the Objective Titans battle and the Marines' tough assault across the Diyala river received far less attention during the war that each deserved. (Oliver North has a good account of a preliminary skirmish of the Diyala crossing, when his helicopter was shot up when scouting for a crossing point and forced to land.) At Diyala, the Marines finally had to mount an infantry assault across a half-demolished bridge, pushing planks across the gaps while under fire, before finally storming the Iraqi defenses, some of them with the bayonet.

On Highway 8, the main highway into Baghdad from the southwest, the 3rd Division's 2nd Brigade Combat Team forced their way into Baghdad with an armored column, but then the defenders ambushed the soft-skinned vehicles that were following. At Objective Curly, one of the Highway 8 intersections, the U.S. troops came within an ace of being overrun. The medics and the chaplain picked up guns, armed the wounded, and fought for their lives as artillery was called in almost on top of them to scrape off the attacking irregulars.

Finally a rescue mission reached them, just as the air support arrived. But for the tiny ad hoc band of combat engineers, a mortar platoon and four Bradleys that made up the command of Captain Zan Hornbuckle at Objective Curly, it was a very close-run thing.

The Objective Titans battle has barely been covered at all, although this day-long fight to seal the Highway 1 northern exit road from Baghdad was ferocious, as the 3rd Brigade Combat Team fought to prevent Iraq's elite from escaping the city. The 7th Cavalry fought an intense battle for the last remaining bridge with a large Republican Guard tank force, knocking out eight of them. (The best account of this battle came almost live from CNN's Walter Rogers, attached to the 7th Cavalry, who was consistently one of the outstanding combat reporters of this war.)

The third form of instant war book is one that re-assembles the on-the-spot reporting of a team of journalists, tries to give some perspective with an introduction and conclusion, and cobbles it all together into some form of coherence. (Interest declared: this is precisely what the current reviewer sought to do in The Iraq War: As Witnessed by the Correspondents and Photographers of United Press International.) And from personal experience, to make a book out of the vast mass of day-to-day journalism filed by correspondents with the Marines and troops in Iraq, with Special Forces in the north, with the British troops at Basra, aboard aircraft carriers, from Jordan and Turkey and Kuwait and Egypt and Brussels and London and New York and Washington, is not as easy as it sounds. In her forward to the book, Margaret Thatcher kindly wrote that "written under the lash of the deadline, it passes every test of accuracy and prescience--history vividly told and shrewdly judged."

The BBC and Britain's Daily Telegraph each swiftly published excellent books of this kind, and unlike the New York Times account, that of Oliver North or, worse, Wesley Clark, they give the separate British operation at Basra the attention it deserves. Murray and Scales rightly devote a full chapter to the British war, and also point out the essential role of the Royal Air Force tankers in maintaining the U.S. air campaign. But the presence of the eminent military historian Sir John Keegan as the Telegraph's military correspondent gives their version the edge over the BBC account. Keegan repeatedly stressed the point, too often understated in much of the American reporting, that the Iraqis "ignored every rule of defensive warfare. They also handled their troops in an illogical fashion", he adds.

   Saddam had on paper nearly 400,000 soldiers
   at his disposal, consisting, in descending order
   of quality, of his Republican Guard of six divisions,
   his regular army of 17 divisions and his
   paramilitaries, including the Fedayeen irregulars
   and the Ba'ath Party militia, totaling perhaps
   30,000. In orthodox military practice,
   the Republican Guard, less perhaps a portion
   held back for last-ditch defense, should have
   been committed first, to blunt the coalition
   onset. The regular army should then have
   been committed to reinforce the Republican
   Guard when and where it achieved success.
   The paramilitaries should have been kept out
   of battle, to harass the invaders if the regular
   defense collapsed. Saddam fought the battle
   the other way around.

The BBC and Telegraph books also differ in the crucial perspective, which bedevils all Western reporters who hope to maintain some kind of objectivity in the cauldron of war, of knowing what side one is on. Despite some superb reporters like John Simpson, with the Kurds and Special Forces in the north, there is a fastidious tone to the BBC book, as if to suggest that it would be beneath the institution to show the slightest partiality to the side represented by the government that sustains them (and even less to the Bush Administration). Keegan may be harsh when he concluded at the war's end:

   The brave young American and British servicemen--and
   women--who have risked
   their lives to bring down Saddam have every
   reason to feel that there is something corrupt
   about their home-based media.

And yet most of the nonsense about the Americans facing defeat at the hands of Saddam loyalists, or serious setbacks with the sandstorm, came from armchair strategists in London and Washington (and rather more gleefully in Paris, Berlin, Cairo and Amman) rather than with the reporters at the sharp end.

But one knows what Keegan means. And if objectivity be the test, then this reviewer for one has failed it. Still, I am not much embarrassed by re-reading some of my own understandably heated copy from the immediacy of the front lines, in which I confessed that I had

   learned to love the military. Time after time,
   they saved our necks. They put our soft-skinned
   vehicles behind their armor when the
   shells came in. They told us when to duck
   and when it was safe to move. They shared
   their food and water with us and were embarrassingly
   grateful when we let them use our
   satellite phones to call home. We were
   embarrassed that it was all we could do for
   them.... Forget journalistic objectivity.
   There were armed men across the road trying
   to kill me and my protection depended
   on these troops, many of whom I now knew
   by their first names. There was no question
   which side I was on.

IT IS CLEAR that the most salient reasons given by the British and U.S. governments for going to war turn out to have been a great deal less than compelling. They seem to have been largely wrong about the scale, danger and battlefield availability of Saddam Hussein's vaunted weapons of mass destruction, albeit wrong in the company of U.S. and British and Israeli (and French and German) intelligence. Does this rob the war of legitimacy? Not for anyone who saw Iraqis kiss British tanks in Basra and hail the weary Marines in Baghdad, nor even for those reporters who stayed on to chronicle Saddam's torture chambers and the mass graves that remain the most pungent and enduring monument to the Ozymandias of Baghdad.

There was, in those thrilling moments in April, a mood of liberation in much of Iraq, however much it may have become squandered since, in large part because of the rather endearing fact that Americans, to their credit, do not make natural imperialists. And many of those who initially supported the war--witness several of the Democrat presidential candidates--have subsequently taken advantage of postwar occupation setbacks to modify their views. Wesley Clark has been accused of this, unfairly in my view, on the basis of several conversations in the spring and summer of 2002 when Clark and I both served on a team examining the principles of coalition warfare that was organized by the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. His view then consistently echoed Churchill's celebrated line that the only thing worse than fighting with allies is fighting without them--despite the inevitable costs in diplomatic or operational compromise.

Clark's book, Winning Modern Wars, is schizoid. The first half is a highly competent summary and analysis of the war. The second half is largely a garrulous and not entirely coherent political campaign manifesto--rendered largely irrelevant because of his political implosion--that attacks the Bush Administration's foreign policy record and offers much bromide in its place.

The book has come in for considerable criticism, notably Max Frankel's New York Times review which called it "a polemic" and sneered that it was "obviously designed to abet the swift transformation of a once embittered warrior and armchair television analyst into a hard-driving, platitudinous candidate for president." But Clark has a point when he concludes that

   [T]he strategy was flawed, out of balance; too
   much effort against Iraq, not enough against
   the terrorists themselves.... The Bush
   Administration's focus on Iraq had thus far
   weakened our counterterrorist efforts, diverting
   attention, resources and leadership, alienating
   allied supporters, and serving as a rallying
   point for anyone wishing harm to the
   United States and Americans.

The most striking note in Clark's book comes when he acts as a reporter, visiting the Pentagon in November, 2001, and using his old military contacts to chat with

   one of the senior military staff officers. Yes,
   we were still on track for going against Iraq,
   he said. But there was more. This was being
   discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan,
   he said, and there were a total of seven countries,
   beginning with Iraq, then Syria,
   Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan.
   So, I thought, this is what they meant when
   they talk about draining the swamp.... It
   seemed that we were being taken into a strategy
   more likely to make us the enemy--encouraging
   what could look like a clash of
   civilizations--not a good strategy for winning
   the war on terror.

Evidently, Clark was writing before the capture of Saddam Hussein, before the British, French and German foreign ministers succeeded in persuading Iran to submit to the intensified inspections of its nuclear facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency, before Libya's Qaddafi agreed to drop his nuclear ambitions and accept inspection by British and American experts, and before President George W. Bush's important speech on encouraging the Arab world towards democratic reforms. Bush has dared to cut through the Gordian knot of decades of failed policy in the region to argue that "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe." The Bush Administration's grand strategy now looks considerably more coherent, if still highly daunting.

Intelligence and War

THE PROBLEM that remains--and persists on several different levels--is that neither the White House nor the Pentagon (the faults of the State Department and the CIA are less clear) seems particularly well informed about Iraq and the region generally. The ugly truth of the brilliant military victory over Saddam Hussein's reluctant forces is that the U.S. experienced a series of intelligence failures, tactical as well as strategic. The most obvious concerns Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction. The most strategically embarrassing was the misjudgment over the impact of the Turkish election and the presence of a new and moderately Islamist government on the Pentagon plan to invade Iraq on two fronts with the 4th Division attacking from the north through Turkey. In the event, the Turkish parliament failed to approve the plan.

Tactically, the most telling comment on the inadequacy of U.S. Intelligence (cited in Murray and Sales) comes from Major General James Mattis, commanding the 1st Marine Division, who noted that "T. E. Lawrence had a better idea of the personality and capability of his Turkish adversaries in World War I" than he, Mattis, was ever able to get from U.S. intelligence concerning the Iraqis. The use of the Saddam Fedayeen against the U.S. supply lines at Nasariyah came as a nasty surprise, despite abundant evidence in the Iraqi media that Saddam's sons were organizing just such a force. The reluctance of the Shi'a in the South to embrace their liberators, until they were convinced they would not be abandoned as they were in 1991, was equally unexpected, as was the ability of a relatively small group of Ba'athi militants to maintain their authority in Basra.

Politically, the reliance on the Iraqi exiles led by Ahmed Chalabi, and the acceptance of their biased advice to purge all known Ba'athi and dismantle the Iraqi Army, has put formidable obstacles in the path of postwar stabilization. The failure (or perhaps refusal) of the Pentagon to make use of the State Department's impressive multi-volume plan for postwar reconstruction was at best ill-informed, but it was just one element in an evident breach of understanding between these two grand institutions of the American state for which the president and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, bear the ultimate responsibility. Throw in the bureaucratic civil war over intelligence between the CIA and the Pentagon and there were times, before and after the war, when the Bush Administration appeared seriously and alarmingly dysfunctional. The final intelligence failure was to underestimate the potential for postwar resistance.

None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who has read Sir John Keegan's new book, Intelligence in War. In a spirited gallop through Admiral Nelson's Mediterranean campaign; Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley; the wireless-dependent naval battles of Coronel and the Falklands in 1914; and Crete, Midway, the Battle of the Atlantic and the issue of Hitler's secret weapons in World War II, Sir John points out the endemic uncertainty and misuse of necessarily flawed intelligence. In the real world of battle, it is a critical but often misleading tool. Whatever the claims of the spooks (who usually tend to be more dubious than the political customers like to hear), infallibility is not a human quality. Generals and statesmen can never do everything with intelligence, even if they can seldom achieve much without it.

This is a most useful corrective to the delusion that has emerged since the revelations of the Ultra system at Bletchley, which read encrypted German signals, that intelligence can win wars. Take the classic case of Crete, in which General Freyburg's garrison of British regulars and good Australian and New Zealand troops heavily outnumbered the German 7th Parachute Division and 5th Mountain Division attackers. Thanks to Ultra decrypts, Freyburg knew when and where the Germans were coming but was still defeated because his reading of the intelligence was faulty (he kept expecting a further seaborne invasion) and because he could not fully envisage the losses the elite German troops were prepared to take to seize control of the crucial airfield. Throw in some flawed tactical decisions by local commanders, and Crete was lost. And all the skill of the American naval cryptologists in predicting the Japanese attack on Midway might not have staved off defeat but for the sheer good fortune of the last flight of American warplanes in finding Admiral Nagumo's carriers with their decks still in easily inflammable chaos from the hasty attempt to re-arm the strike aircraft to attack American ships rather than land installations. Sir John concludes:

   In the last resort, intelligence is a weak form
   of attack.... Foreknowledge is no protection
   against disaster. Even real-time intelligence is
   never real enough. Only force finally counts.

THE FORCE of that judgment is amply corroborated in Abraham Rabinovich's excellent The Yom Kippur War. Indeed, his dismaying account of the monumental failure of AMAN (Israeli Military Intelligence) to predict the joint Syrian-Egyptian attack in October 1973 demonstrates the Keegan rule. The Israelis won all the same, even though the three main advantages on which they counted each proved flawed.

The Israelis were convinced that they would have sufficient warning of an attack to mobilize their reserves. Thanks to General Eli Zeria's breathtaking self-confidence in his own assessments of the intelligence, the Israelis had almost no warning. Then the Israelis were convinced that their superb Air Force would be able to hold the line even if the warning failed. Not so. The SAM missiles that the Soviets had supplied to the Arabs in such abundance meant that the Israelis lost a quarter of their Air Force in the first three days, with little to show for it. The Israeli Air Force commanded the skies over the whole Middle East, except for those two crucial battle zones over the Golan Heights and the Suez Canal.

The Israelis were also convinced that their armored forces were so much higher in quality than the despised Arab foes that their counter-attacks would quickly send any impudent Arab incursions fleeing back to Cairo and Damascus. Again, they had not counted on the Soviet provision of masses of Sagger anti-tank missiles and RPGs to the Arabs, and the Egyptians had been trained under General Shazly's bold and clever plan for a limited invasion to make excellent use of them and to destroy the Israeli tank charges as soon as they came into range. Finally--and this is less a failure of intelligence than of imagination--the Israelis had never expected the Arabs to fight so well, or as bravely as they did.

If Rabinovich's book has a flaw, it lies in the way he rather skates over the issue of whether Israel was by the third day of the war so desperate that it came close to using nuclear weapons. Certainly Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was telling Air Force General Benny Peled to scrap all the careful plans to attack the Egyptian missile system because "the Third Temple is falling." Rabinovich notes that on the morning of October 9, the Israeli general staff recommended taking "extreme measures." But there he leaves it. Media reports that Israeli aircraft were loaded with nukes are simply ignored. He does not deal with the subsequent Cabinet decision to go no further, nor with the suggestion by other authors that Israel simply flirted with the nuclear option in order to convince the U.S. government of the seriousness of its plight. But then this would be intelligence of another kind, the deliberate use of disinformation, rather like the attempts of Generals David Elazar and Haim Bar-Lev to stage a radio conversation in which they described their beating off of an Egyptian armored attack as an Israeli defeat, in the hope of tempting the Egyptians to try again.

Old Lessons, New Students

INTELLIGENCE and disinformation are as old as war, and this brings us back to Waterloo. The Duke of Wellington had learned in Portugal and Spain that the way to frustrate the French attacks was to hide the bulk of his troops behind a ridge line, sparing them from the massed bombardments of the excellent French artillery. This had the added advantage of confusing the enemy about his strength and his dispositions. Napoleon made a personal tour of the battlefield, walking dangerously close to the British lines at 2 AM on the night before the battle, in order to place his massed artillery to best advantage. But Napoleon still found himself uncertain not only where the British and allied troops were posted in most strength, and above all did not know that the only half-defeated Prussians were plodding through the Belgian countryside to unleash a devastating attack on his right flank and rear. A couple of regiments of the magnificent cavalry that Marshal Ney wasted in fruitless attack on the British squares--if sent out to scout--might have warned Napoleon of the Prussian advance. It was not only the fault of Marshal Grouchy, failing to pursue the Prussians closely enough after the battle of Ligny to keep them out of Napoleon's attack on Wellington, it was a monumental failure of elementary battlefield intelligence on the part of the French. Perhaps that lesson, along with subsequent misadventures in 1940, helps explain the latest fashion in Jacques Chirac's Paris for military timidity and diplomatic aggression, whatever Chirac's bombastic foreign minister might spout about Waterloo as some kind of French triumph.

Dangerous Risks

If care is not taken, international forces will be introduced not as peacekeepers or even peace enforcers but as a substitute for effective civil authority. Many of the proposals for use of international in these situations are asking, in effect, that they play the role of the old imperial powers. Yet despite the lure of riches and glory, the imperial powers lacked the will to sustain such a role; it is not clear why an international force should fare better, absent any specific national interest. Unless the international force can muster an exceptional level of local support, it will have to use force and take casualties that will cause its mission to be questioned around the world.

--Paul D. Wolfowitz, "Clinton's First Year", Foreign Affairs Jan/Feb 1994), p. 38.

Martin Walker, Editor in Chief of United Press International, took part in the attack on Basra with the British troops.

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