Perhaps the worst war plan in American history.
(Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, page 115)

‘It failed utterly.’
(Verdict of Marek Belka, Prime Minister of Poland which contributed troops to the coalition, describing the entire American project to invade and ‘liberate’ Iraq, p.347)

Bad assumptions

The US Army invaded Iraq on 20 March 2003. The moving forces behind the invasion – Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Under Secretary of Defence for Policy, Douglas Feith – said the war would be over in a matter of months, would require the bare minimum number of troops and would pay for itself out of Iraq’s increased oil revenue. They based these conclusions on the assumptions that:

1. large numbers of Iraqi security forces would be willing to change sides and help the occupiers
2. the ‘international community’ would pick up a lot of the task of reconstruction, meaning other Western countries, NGOs etc
3. a provisional Iraqi government would spring into being within months which the US could hand interim authority over to i.e.  they could stop being responsible for everything
4. the war would not cost much ($1.7 billion, the head of the US Agency for International development, Andrew Natsios, told Ted Koppel on the Nightline TV show, p.109) and this would all be paid for out of the new democratic and grateful Iraqi government’s oil revenues

All four of these premises, along with most of the other assumptions made by the invasion’s planners, turned out to be completely fallacious. To take one very specific example, the advance units of the American Army were told to expect the Iraqi forces they faced to quickly surrender or maybe even desert to them. In the event, none did. Everything else was like that – completely wrong and unexpected.

The US-led invasion was launched recklessly, with a flawed plan for war and a worse approach to occupation. (p.3)

There were plenty of critics who warned of the probable consequences:

• Michael O’Hanlon from the Brookings Institute
• Pentagon official Alina Romanowski (p.65)
• Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni (p.51)
• a conference of 70 national security and Middle East experts (p.72)
• General ‘Stormin” Norman Schwartzkopf (p.82)
• Air Force strategist Colonel John Warden (p.108)
• defence consultant Gary Anderson (p.137)

and plenty of others, predicted that the Americans would be entering an ethnic and religious minefield and get drawn into a country which was likely to collapse and split along ethnic or religious lines, requiring US forces to be there for 5 years or more. All correct predictions, all ignored or rubbished by the hawks, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith.

More than one critic assigns the consistent errors of the neo-con Republican hawks to ‘intellectual arrogance’ (p.99). Like Liz Truss and Kwazi Kwarteng, they knew they were right and all the critics, all the academics, regional experts, and senior army officers were dismissed as unduly negative, lacking vision, enemies of growth or America, anti-patriotic pessimists. ‘Rumsfeld’s self-confident stubbornness made him a big part of the problem’ (p.169).

They think it’s all over

The most profound mistake was thinking that once they had seized Baghdad, the Americans would have won the war. In fact, as they quickly found out, it was only the start of the conflict. The Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz clique thought they would be greeted like an army of liberation, like the Allied armies who liberated France in 1944. Instead, almost all Iraqis quickly came to regard them as an army of occupation, and many of the soldiers behaved like one, bullying, abusing and threatening all the locals they met. Aide to Rumsfeld, Lawrence Di Rita, told the press that US forces would be in Iraq for 120 days, tops (p.106). In fact US forces were to remain in Iraq for over 8 years.

No phase IV plan

And here’s where the greatest fiasco occurred. The Americans had no plan for what to do once they had overthrown Saddam Hussein, no planning at all for what was called, in military terms, Phase IV of the invasion i.e. the aftermath (p.151). Ricks, with his typically forensic and cerebral approach, cites two of the most famous theorists of war on just this subject:

• The first requirement in war is not to take the first step without considering the last (Karl von Clausewitz)
• To win victory is easy; to preserve its fruits, difficult (Sun Tzu) (p.59)

For the crucial months of April, May and June 2003, after they had won the actual war, the Americans delayed and prevaricated while they tried to cobble together a plan for the reconstruction of the country and installation of interim government. It was, as Captain David Chastain, a 3rd Infantry Division officer put it, ‘a clusterfuck’ of chaos (p.151).

President Bush realised the need for some kind of post-war administration late in the day and, just a month before the invasion, appointed retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner to post of Director of the hurriedly cobbled together Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for Iraq (ORHA).

In the event Garner’s term in post lasted less than a month, from 21 April to his abrupt replacement by L. Paul Bremer on 11 May. In fact the entire ORHA was abruptly closed down and replaced by another hastily cobbled organisation, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Neither ORHA nor CPA were properly staffed or organised, with new staffers being hired and flown out to Baghdad in a mad hurry, with minimum or zero qualifications, handed roles they were woefully inexperienced for, throughout the spring.

‘No clear strategy, very little detailed planning, poor communications, high personnel turnover, lots of young and inexperienced political appointees, no well-established business processes,’ (Colonel Ralph Hallenbeck who worked at the CPA, p.203)

Crucially – decisively – with no actual plan to hand, the Americans’ delay meant they lost the initiative, which passed over to the various types of religious, political and ethnic opposition groups or allowed these groups to come into existence and establish themselves. These groups seized abandoned government arms, organised, made plans, and commenced the ‘insurgency’ which was to bring havoc, violence and death across Iraq for the next 8 years.

Thomas E. Ricks

Thomas E. Ricks was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal for 17 years, latterly a specialist in the US military, until he joined the Washington Post in 2000 as senior Pentagon correspondent. His extremely detailed and thorough account of the invasion and its aftermath was published in 2006, three years into the painful and protracted unravelling of America’s plans.

Far from…

Far from being over in a few months with minimal casualties, the war in Iraq was to drag on until December 2011, lasting 8 years and nearly 9 months.

Paul Wolfowitz predicted the locals would welcome the Americans, there would be no ethnic fighting and that within a few months of victory, the troop numbers would be down to 34,000 (pages 97, 98 and 106). However, far from requiring a minimal army of 130,000 the troop numbers rose to a peak of 200,000 which most commentators still thought wasn’t enough. The Rand Corporation published a report claiming the task the US set itself would have required 500,000 troops. According to Army Central Command planner Colonel Agoglia, Wolfowitz suffered from ‘a complete and total lack of understanding’ of what was need to invade Iraq and create a new, independent state (p.128).

Far from costing a few billion dollars which would be paid for by the country’s own oil revenue, the US Congressional Budget Office has estimated the total cost of the war in Iraq to the United States will be around $1.9 trillion.

Legacy of the Gulf War

Many people thought Bush Jnr wanted to complete what his dad, George Bush Senior, began with his ejection of Saddam from Kuwait in 1991. Republicans and foreign policy hawks came to regret how the father ended the 100-hours war as soon as the Iraqi forces were expelled back onto Iraqi soil. Specially when Saddam went out of his way to prove what a bastard he was by massacring the Marsh Arabs who Bush Senior had encouraged to rise up against their dictator, and then turned his wrath on the Kurds in the north, who he drove from their towns and villages into the freezing mountains where many perished before the ‘international community’ stepped in to enforce a no-fly zone (Operation Northern Watch, p.13).

Throughout the 1990s the Allies maintained this no-fly zone despite Saddam’s policy of continually nagging and provoking them, and also enacted strong sanctions against the regime. He remained a thorn in the side of successive American administrations. Foreign policy hawks became obsessed with the idea that Saddam was moving heaven and earth to build facilities for creating weapons of mass destruction i.e. chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

In response to these provocations and paranoia, in October 1998 removing the Iraqi government became official US foreign policy with the enactment of the Iraq Liberation Act. This followed the creation of an advocacy group of neo-conservative Republicans, the Project for a New American Century, set up in January 1998 to lobby then-President Clinton for regime change in Iraq. Members included Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, future UN ambassador John Bolton and other hawks, who were to come into power when George W. Bush was elected president in November 2000.

Choosing to attack Iraq on a false prospectus

Hence, within days of the 9/11 attacks, President Bush and senior figures in his administration (vice-president Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld) began soliciting opinions from State Department officials and the military about the feasibility of completing the job of getting rid of Saddam.

Little over a month after 9/11 the US attacked Afghanistan whose Taliban rulers had refused to surrender Osama bin Laden who had emerged as the culprit for the 9/11 attacks. But alongside the Afghan plan, a definitive assault on Saddam’s Iraq was being planned.

Throughout 2002 the administration ramped up the pressure with an escalating series of deadlines for Saddam to surrender his weapons of mass destruction, obey sanctions and so on. Saddam’s truculence and mishandling of UN weapons inspectors played with into the US hawks’ plans.

Colin Powell’s day of shame

Early in 2003, on 5 February, Bush sent Secretary of State Colin Powell to the UN to make America’s case, to present ‘evidence’ that Iraq was hiding unconventional weapons. His presentation to the UN was later shown to be wrong and misleading in every single detail (pages 90 to 93). The Americans were warned by British and other security services, at the time, that this ‘evidence’ was very flaky, based, for example, on the claims of an Iraqi emigrant living in Germany who later admitted having falsified his testimony (p.91). The monitoring efforts of the International Atomic Energy Agency had found no evidence of WMD at all – but the Bush administration ignored anything which stood in the way of their determination to overthrow Saddam.

The Bush White House case was based on the claims that a) there was a direct link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda and b) that Saddam had ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that posed a serious threat to the West. Whereas:

• in 2004, the 9/11 Commission concluded there was no evidence of any relationship between Saddam’s regime and al-Qaeda
• and no stockpiles of WMDs or active WMD program were ever found in Iraq (p.375)

Has any US president ever told such a pack of lies with such catastrophic consequences? Ricks doesn’t hold back.

• Blame must lie foremost with President Bush himself, but his incompetence and arrogance are only part of the story. It takes more than one person to make a mess as big as Iraq. (p.4)
• President Bush’s response to the growing violence in Iraq was even more painfully wrong than Rumsfeld’s. (p.172)

Ricks’s intelligence and authority

What makes Fiasco such a blistering record of the intellectual arrogance, blinkered ignorance, chaotic mismanagement, wishful thinking and stupidity which characterised the American invasion of Iraq is the supreme intelligence and incisive analysis Ricks deploys on every page. He is an extremely clever guy, a deep thinker, with the added huge advantage of managing to get pretty much all the key players, all the senior people at the State Department (America’s Foreign Office) and Pentagon (the military), to talk to him and give often scathing and bitterly critical insights into the chaos and mismanagement which operated at every level of the US administration.

But it wasn’t just the US government and key figures in the US army who made terrible mistakes and miscalculations. The press was shamefully complicit in this slack, badly planned wishful thinking. Ricks names and shames the cheerleaders for the invasion in the American press and TV, some of whom saw their careers destroyed for recklessly supporting the administration (Ricks singles out New York Times reporter Judith Miller for particular criticism, p.35).

And Congress pitifully failed in its duty to review the executive’s plans, especially war plans. Members of Congress were intimidated by the great wave of patriotic rhetoric flooding the airwaves. In the feverish mood after 9/11 Congress didn’t want to seem unpatriotic and so subjected the administrations plans to pitifully inadequate questioning, and failed in its duty of overseeing the Executive branch of government (p.88 and p.387). Fail fail fail.

Ricks subjects specific each of the main players, in the White House, State Department, Pentagon and Army to detailed and authoritative profiles and then withering analysis of their failures, which leave virtually none of their reputations intact.

General Tommy Franks, the man given overall charge of the invasion, was widely thought to have no grasp of strategy; he was a tactical, operations man incapable of seeing the big picture.

• ‘[Franks] ran an extremely unhappy headquarters’ (p.33)
• ‘the intellectually shoddy atmosphere that characterised war planning under Franks’ (p.34)

Thus it was that Franks fell in with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, who both continually demanded a smaller force, chipped away at the proposals, demanding that army commanders reduce their numbers to a size which was to prove completely inadequate for the task ahead. As late as April 28 Wolfowitz was insisting the Americans only needed the 135,000 troops they had so far deployed, even as the evidence came in that this was completely inadequate. Ricks’s description of the shambolic office run by Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Jay Feith, beggars belief:

• The owlish Feith was a management disaster who served as a bottleneck on decision making. (p.76)
• ‘the dumbest fucking guy on the planet’ according to Tommy Franks (p.78)
• ‘incredibly dangerous’, according to general Jay Garner (p.78)

Franks announced his retirement very soon after combat operations finished, on 22 May 2003. He was replaced by General Ricardo Sanchez who, according to the sources Ricks speaks to, struggled with the scope of the role. Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Holshek: ‘He was in over  his head. He was a fulfilment of the Peter principle’ (p.173).

‘Historians will remember Sanchez as the William Westmoreland of the Iraq War – the general who misunderstood the nature of the conflict he faced and thereby played into the enemy’s hands,’ retired army Colonel Andrew Bacevich (p.392)

Who would have suspected so many senior administration officials were so incompetent and divisive?

Strategy versus tactics

Quite apart from the riveting and mind-boggling stories on every page, two big concepts underpin Ricks’s account. One is the difference between strategy and tactics. He explains that to ascertain strategy you must ask four questions:

1. who are we?
2. what are we trying to do here?
3. how will we do it?
4. what resources and means do we need to do it?

Answering those questions completely and correctly gives you your strategy (p.127). Once you have established this, tried and tested it against the evidence, then you are in a position to start developing the tactics which you will apply in specific situations or areas which will all work towards achieving your overall goals.

Ricks shows in fascinating detail how the general in overall command of the war, Tommy Franks, was great at working out detailed tactics but completely failed to grasp the overall strategy, which was itself laughably unrealistic, the ambition not only to overthrow Saddam but to re-engineer the entire Middle East to suit America and Israel’s convenience. The result was that the US effort more closely resembled a coup in a banana republic than a deeply through-through, carefully worked out, large-scale, long-term plan to alter the politics of a crucial part of the globe (p.128).

The neo-conservative Republicans who drove the invasion thought there was no need for a phase IV because the Iraqi population would greet the Americans with flowers and kisses (p.96), Iraqi politicians would quickly set up their own government, and their army and police would manage the transformation of Iraq into a shiny new democracy. They were completely and utterly wrong (p.170).

The looting

Before the invasion phase of the war (19 March to 30 April) had even finished, Iraqi society began to fall apart. The TV cameras caught the pulling down of the massive statue of Saddam at the centre of Baghdad on 9 April 2003 (I remember watching it live on TV; it took ages). But even as they did so the epidemic of looting, burning and destruction of the country was beginning. The French, liberated from their Nazi occupiers carried on with their civic duties. The Iraqis, liberated from Saddam’s totalitarian rule, went mad with a spectacular outburst of civil disorder and chaos on the streets.

And did the Americans have the manpower to enforce security, law and order? No, because Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and their creature at the Pentagon, Douglas Feith, and the many other true believers, had moved heaven and earth to have the smallest possible supply of boots on the ground.

Interviewed on TV Rumsfield famously dismissed the looting by saying freedom is messy (p.136). In other words, he was a cretin. He and his fellow believers didn’t realise that it was in those early days that America lost the respect of the nation they had conquered, that an entire people saw American soldiers standing by idly while ministry buildings were comprehensively sacks, looted and set on fire, criminal gangs roamed the streets, cars were hijacked, civilians kidnapped, women raped. Not my problem, said Rumsfeld.

Excellent at sending laser-directed bombs at infrastructure targets, the American Army turned out to be useless at enforcing law and order. Within days many Iraqis began to pine for the good old days under Saddam. At least under the tyrant the streets were safe to walk or drive through. It is vital for an invading force to gain the population’s trust and to display competence and command. During the orgy of looting the US forces lost all this and never regained it (p.136).

Mission accomplished?

On 1 May Bush made his Mission Accomplished speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln cruising off the coast of California (p.145). Ricks goes out of his way to say that Bush never used the phrase ‘mission accomplished’, it was just the words on a huge banner hanging behind him. But even to an informed amateur like myself it was obvious what a stupid, short-sighted and profoundly ignorant speech it was. The Americans’ problems were just starting, as anybody who knew anything about the Middle East or the Arab world could have told the hawks for the price of a pint.

Weapons of mass distraction

It is amusing to learn how, during these crucial first days and weeks, US forces wasted an immense amount of time and resources searching for the non-existent weapons of mass destruction instead of policing the streets, which is what a country descending into chaos needed (p.146).

What’s more, in the quest for phantom WMD, American forces left hundreds of thousands of conventional weapons untouched, partly for fear that detonating them might blow up gas or chemicals, mostly because they were looking for the phantom factories and warehouses. And so they allowed insurgents-in-the-making to walk in and loot vast amounts of arms and munitions and walk off with them at their leisure. Breath-taking, amazing stupidity.

hence the jokey phrase that the non-existent weapons of mass destruction in practice turned out to be weapons of mass distraction, distracting US forces from the more straightforward and useful task of securing Iraq’s armouries. Not only were WMDs a fake reason for the invasion but they then significantly contributed to the arming of the insurgencies which were to bedevil the American occupation.

Definition of ‘the initiative’

In late April and early May the Americans, with no clear plan in place and insufficient personnel to secure the country, lost the initiative. In most people’s hands this would be a phrase, but what makes the book outstanding is the way Ricks gives these terms careful definitions, often within the specific context of military doctrine. Thus he defines ‘the initiative’ as ‘the ability to choose the time and location of battle, a key and often decisive factor in any military engagement’. Instead, the Americans’ drift and lack of direction handed the initiative over to countless angry insurgents.

According to the Pentagon, 250,000 tons of ordnance was looted, providing a significant source of ammunition to the future insurgents. In addition, the Iraqi army and Republican Guard had created hundreds of hidden weapons caches before the invasion in preparation for prolonged resistance.

There weren’t enough US troops:

• to stop the looting which wrecked then occupiers reputation and damaged important infrastructure
• to secure the borders, specially in the west with Syria, across which streamed zealous jihadis
• to train new Iraqi police, a task delegated to contractors
• to supervise detainees who swiftly filled the gaols to overflowing

Chronic lack of personnel in each of these areas – on the direct personal orders of Rumsfeld – was have catastrophic consequences (p.147).

The scandal of Abu Ghraib

The most florid and attention-grabbing was the complete failure to prepare to handle the large number of detainees the army soon started rounding up and sending to prison to be interrogated. Which prisons? The same ones Saddam had used such as Abu Ghraib just west of the capital, only even more degraded and squalid than during his time. So much for ‘liberation’.

There weren’t enough trained interrogators who could speak Arabic, so interrogation often ended up as a lot of slapping and shouting, plus the new techniques of waterboarding and other forms of abuse and torture. What was required was Military Police but large units of these had been deliberately and specifically dropped from the invasion plan by Rumsfeld in person. And it was this Rumsfeld-created shortage of Military Police or soldiers trained to run such facilities meant they were run by the likes of the badly trained and inadequately supervised junior soldiers who took all those photographs of terrorising Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib which leaked out with a catastrophic loss of reputation for America, for all time. A reputation for holding the moral high ground, around the developing world, which it will never really capture (pages 197 to 200 and 290 to 293, 296 to 297).

The notorious photos from Abu Ghraib prison showing untrained low-ranking American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners

One of the keys to winning a counterinsurgency is to treat enemy captives well; if won over with leniency and understanding, today’s captive may be converted to tomorrow’s mayor or council member, a useful ally in reconstructing civil society (p.421). So how did America treat its prisoners? Worse than animals. Hence 8 years of war.

Bremer’s historic mistakes

Within a week of taking over command of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer made his two infamous decisions (pages 158 to 165):

• Coalition Provisional Authority Order 1 banned the Ba’ath party in all forms and banned from public life anyone who had been a member of the party, no matter how lowly
• Coalition Provisional Authority Order 2 dismantled the Iraqi Army, 23 May 2003

The first one deprived over100,000 generally honest Iraqi citizens of their livelihoods. The second did the same to about 400,000 members of the armed forces. Both were overnight deprived of their livelihoods, income and the respect so important in an Arab country. Some were angry and protested outside the newly established Green Zone. Others took steps to join the nascent insurgencies, many of which offered them cash to join.

Ricks quote numerous army officers such as Major General Renuart, saying things like: ‘That was the day that we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory’ (p.163) or Colonel Alan King: ‘May was the turning point. When we disbanded the military and announced that we were occupiers, that was it’ (p.164); Colonel Paul Hughes: ‘When we disbanded the Iraqi army we created a significant part of the Iraqi insurgency’ (p.191) and many more like them.

More strategically, in a country riven by ethnic and religious divisions, the army had (as in so many developing countries) been one of the few unifying national institutions. Not only did abolishing it turn hundreds of thousands of angry and well-trained soldiers into insurgents, it hugely exacerbated ethnic division (p.163).

Counter-insurgency

The other Big Idea which increasingly comes to dominate Ricks’s accountt is that of counter-insurgency. In brief, it became more and more obvious to intelligent observers (i.e. nobody in the Bush administration) that the Americans were fighting the wrong kind of war. The army had been briefed from top to bottom to fight a conventional war, advancing in formation, accompanied by tanks and air support overhead, against conventional forces arrayed in trenches or battle formation etc.

First of all the military was blindsided when, having won the conventional war in a matter of weeks, it turned out that they were being called on to maintain the peace, enforce law and order, manage the never-ending influx of detainees, something none of them had been trained for (Abu Ghraib).

But then the situation took a further turn, as the insurgents, taking advantage of the Americans’ complete lack of a plan, began to launch an insurgency. It took the people in charge, in the Pentagon and State Department months and months to realise this was what was happening. The conflict changed from the quick, easy war they’d been bragging about into another Vietnam-style, prolonged, small-scale, low-level insurgency, precisely the kind of thing they’d sworn blind would never happen.

What is counter-insurgency?

In a conventional war your aim is to kill as many of the enemy as necessary until they surrender and cease to be combatants. The civilian population are uninvolved bystanders to the clash between two uniformed, centrally organised armies. In an insurgency the opposition does not wear uniform, blends in with the civilian population, launches small attacks on vulnerable targets (police stations, foot patrols) before disappearing back into the population.

Therefore, the key plank of counterinsurgency warfare is to win the population. The population are the battle space and the goal of counter-insurgency. Only with the passive assistance of the general population can an insurgency survive. If you win over the population, the insurgents have no background to slip back into. The general population is the goal and therefore you do everything in your power to win them over.

How? By providing what they need: bringing security, enforcing law and order, getting the electricity and drinking water working. Above all you are polite and respectful. A country like Iraq gives great importance to personal dignity, especially of the male head of households or the elders of communities, villages and tribes. Therefore extreme respect must be shown at all times. The army must go out of its way to win the respect and trust of the civilian population. That is the only way to slowly, patiently, strangle an insurgency, by steadily reducing the pool or recruits and the places it can hire.

Did the Americans practice counter-insurgency?

No, they did the exact opposite. Hence the 50 page-section Ricks ironically titles ‘How to create an insurgency’ (pages 149 to 200).

The Americans stood by while the country collapsed into chaos, the Americans did nothing as criminal gangs roamed the streets. The Americans allowed government ministries, museums, schools and hospitals to be looted and destroyed.

On a personal level, the Americans were extremely rude and aggressive with Iraq civilians. They forced other road users off the roads. They drove round pointing their guns at everyone. They shot first and asked questions later, killing unarmed civilians in the process, on several notorious occasions killing Iraqi policemen who they themselves had helped to train (by accident and incompetence, rival night patrols opening fire on each other, that sort of thing).

And the Americans carried out systematic abuse of prisoners or ‘persons under control’ (PUC). Ordinary soldiers developed an attitude called ‘Fuck a PUC’ (p.278), yelling and abuse was the start which often escalated to beating, punching, up to breaking bones, threatening with guns etc.

As the insurgency ramped up, US forces took to raiding entire quarters of any town or city where an insurgent attack took place, kicking open the doors of domestic houses, waving guns around, chucking hand grenades into cellars, corralling women and children screaming with terror into the main room and telling them to shut the fuck up. Very often they deliberately humiliated the man of the house in front of his women and children, forcing him to the floor, kneeling on his neck, yelling abuse, letting off pistols right by his ear. Ricks tells the story of the soldier who told an older man he was going to execute one of his two sons and to pick which one to save and which one to condemn to death before taking one of them outside, out of sight and firing his gun, reducing the father to tears of hysteria (p.273).

At a higher, operational level, the Americans made the bad mistake of regularly rotating troops back to the States. This meant that individual commanders and soldiers on the ground were just beginning to establish relationships with local communities, civic leaders and so on, building trust and respect, when they were moved on and a new bunch of soldiers came in who had to start all over from scratch (p.142).

In short, the Americans broke every rule in the counter-insurgency guidebook and did everything they possibly could to turn the entire population against them.

Ricks makes the specific point that men who had been publicly humiliated in the way I’ve described, were compelled by their culture’s sense of honour, to redeem their manhood. Even if they didn’t particularly want to, or weren’t naturally violent, their culture demanded they strike back to redeem themselves and so hundreds of thousands of men were recruited to give active or passive assistance to the insurgency.

It took over a year for the Americans to realise they were fighting the wrong kind of war. Ricks’s book is absolutely riveting as he describes the way some military leaders (Major General David Petraeus, Marine Corps General James Mattis) always knew this or learned it and promulgated it to the divisions under their command.

Classic guides to counter-insurgency

Ricks’s description of counter-insurgent warfare is so insightful and clear and useful partly because he cites classic works on the theme. These include:

• 27 Articles by Lawrence of Arabia
• Learning to Eat Soup With A Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam by Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Nagl (2002) (p.133)
• Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice by French Army Lieutenant Colonel David Galula (1964) (p.264)
• Best Practices in Counterinsurgency, Military Review, May to June 2005, pages 8 to 12: a review of the hallmarks of success and failure, which established that the US military had followed only one of the 12 rules for success but enthusiastically prosecuted all 9 of the rules of failure

Galula’s book lays out four principles:

1. The aim of the war is to gain the support of the population rather than control of territory.
2. Most of the population will be neutral in the conflict; support of the masses can be obtained with the help of an active friendly minority.
3. Support of the population may be lost. The population must be efficiently protected to allow it to cooperate without fear of retribution by the enemy.
4. Order enforcement should be done progressively by removing or driving away armed opponents, then gaining the support of the population, then strengthening positions by building infrastructure and setting long-term relationships with the population. This must be done area by area, using a pacified territory as a basis of operation to conquer a neighbouring area.

These echo the four principles laid out by a British soldier, Sir Charles Gwynne, who wrote in his 1939 textbook ‘Imperial Policing’ that, because counter-insurgency is primarily a political strategy (p.266):

1. the civil power must be in charge
2. civilian and military powers must cooperate closely in everything to ensure one chain of command and unified approach
3. if required, action must be firm and prompt
4. but force should always be kept to an absolute minimum to avoid losing the population

Or to put it another way:

• A lesson of every successful modern counterinsurgency campaign [is that] violence is the tool of last resort, especially for troops foreign to the local population (p.225)
• The great body of successful counterinsurgency practice…holds that firepower should be as restrained as possible. (p.234)
• One of the most basic concepts of counterinsurgency campaigns, that they succeed when a minimum of firepower is employed. (p.250)

For in counterinsurgency warfare, the population is the prize (p.318):

• Classic counterinsurgency doctrine…holds that the objective is first to gain control of the population and then win their support. (p.250)
• ‘The population…becomes the objective for the counterinsurgent as it was for his enemy’ Galula, quoted p.266)
• ‘Success in a counterinsurgency environment is based on winning popular support, not on blowing up people’s houses’ (p.315)

The immensely complicated effort required for modern warfare

Obviously the US invasion and occupation of Iraq was catastrophic in all sorts of ways which Ricks’s book describes in excruciating detail. But what really comes over is a sense of how complicated it is a mount a modern military campaign, at how many levels or aspects you have to manage to manage so many people with so many conflicting priorities and opinions.

At the very least there’s the international diplomatic scene to be managed, relationships with NATO partners as well as with the usual antagonists at the United Nations, Russia and China.

There’s public opinion which has to be managed and, in this case, lied to about weapons of mass destruction, in order to psych it for war.

But Ricks’s book makes abundantly clear that the real struggle comes within your own administration itself, where you need a) the right person as minister of war and b) the right person in charge of the Army; you need c) both to be in charge of functioning, well-managed organisations, and d) the two top guys to be able to communicate and work together to a shared goal.

One small criticism

Obviously the book only goes up to early 2006, when it was published, whereas the conflict continued on until 2011. My 2007 paperback edition has an afterword in which Ricks gives several scenarios to how he thinks the conflict might play out.

It’s not really a criticism but the one big thing I wish the book had contained was more about the contemporaneous situation in Afghanistan. Given the tremendous detail Ricks goes into about the structure and bureaucracy and funding and planning and key personnel of the US military in Iraq, it feels like a big piece of the jigsaw is missing in that he only occasionally mentions that the US was fighting a whole other war, in Afghanistan, at the same time.

I would expect that the commitment to Afghanistan caused all kinds of problems for the Army planners mapping out the plans for Iraq, but you don’t get any detail on that. I would also have expected lessons learned in one place to be applied to the other i.e. there must have been dialogue between the occupying forces in both countries, but Ricks gives no sign of it.

Relevance to Ignatieff’s theories

The aim of Michael Ignatieff’s 2003 book Empire Lite is to argue that, given the chaos which has engulfed numerous weak and failing states in the light of the withdrawal of the two superpowers from their imperial dominance at the end of the Cold War, America, if it wants to achieve geopolitical security, needs to really commit to imperial intervention in the worst of these failing states and to ‘state building’ there.

Some countries, Ignatieff argues, can only conceivably be saved by imperial intervention, by which he means long-running and deep commitment to put troops on the ground and stay the course, to establish peace between warring ethnic groups and build the apparatus of a state, not just the usual guff about ‘internationally supervised democratic elections’, but the infrastructure stuff which really counts, from education to clean water.

My reply to Ignatieff is that the Americans tried to do this – in a reasonably planned way in Afghanistan, for a good 20 years, in a far more chaotic, make-it-up-as-they-went-along way in Iraq. And the point is that they failed in both. America’s engagement in both countries amount to two different but extended and very expensive attempts to implement Ignatieff’s proposal for longer, deeper Western involvement in developing countries riven by ethnic conflict and civil war. Surely the conclusion of both experiments is that such extensive and expensive commitment by the West does not work.

In reality America, and her half-hearted allies in NATO, are committed to trying to control situations in a huge number of countries round the world:

• the US controls about 750 bases in at least 80 countries
• in 2020 the US had around 173,000 troops deployed in 159 countries (source: al Jazeera)

But never again will the US and its allies invade a country with the blithe confidence that it can impose western norms of law, politics and democracy.

Iran triumphans

According to a 2019 US Army study, the only country to emerge as victor of the Iraq war was America’s long-time nemesis, Iran. Although they make up a majority of the population of Iraq, Shia Muslims were liable to repression and imprisonment under the rule of Saddam, a Sunni Muslim, especially in light of the terrible Iran Iraq war (1980 to 1988). The overthrow of Saddam and American promises to implement democracy immediately placed Shia parties in a commanding position. This led to internecine fighting between Shias and Sunnis with entire areas of Baghdad ethnically cleansed at the cost of much torture and bloodshed. It led to the sudden rise to prominence of Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

But above all it meant that, whichever party won power, which ever government ran Iraq, would include figures who had been in exile in Iran, were mentored by Iran, were under the control of the Iranian government. Twenty years later Iraqi politics remain fraught and complex but the one unqualified winner to emerge from the whole shambles was Iran. And it was the increased ‘threat’ from Shia Iran which hardened hawkish attitudes in Sunni Saudi Arabia, and which explains why Iran and Saudi Arabia are fighting proxy wars against each other in Yemen and Syria.

Back to Ricks who cites an unnamed US intelligence officer drolly commenting that:

‘The difference between Tommy Franks and Tehran was that the Iranians had a good Phase IV plan.’ (p.123)

Credit

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks was published by Penguin Books in 2006. References are to the 2007 paperback edition.

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