“All armies get it wrong at the beginning; the question is who adapts fastest.”
(British military historian Michael Howard quoted by Elliot Cohen, page 100)

‘All Americans make promises but nothing ever happens.’
Iraqi housewife complaining why there was still sewage in the street outside her house 5 years after the Americans invaded and promised to fix it (p.175)

Fiasco, a brief recap

Thomas E. Ricks won acclaim with his award-winning book, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, published in 2006. That book gave an extraordinarily detailed, high-level account of the mind-bogglingly stupid, arrogant, ignorant and incompetent decisions made by senior American officials (Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and under secretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith) in the run-up to the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.

Within a year it had been conclusively proven that a) Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction and b) had no links with al Qaeda, the Islamic terrorist organisation which carried out the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. In other words, the instigators of the invasion (Cheney et al) had grossly misled the US political system, the media, the American public, and the world at large, via its utterly incorrect briefings at the United Nations.

Not just that, though. Ricks’s book is named Fiasco because he shows in excruciating detail, and with extraordinary access to senior officials in the Defence Department, State Department and, above all, the US military, how catastrophically bad decisions were taken all down the line, misjudgements and bad calls which led to the post-invasion ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq quickly degenerating into chaos out if which emerged the anti-occupation insurgency, alongside a civil war which developed between militias from the Sunni and Shia communities.

The stupidity can be boiled down to two main errors:

1. Rumsfeld’s insistence that the invasion and occupation be carried out with far, far too few US troops on the ground; Ricks shows him consistently paring back Army estimates of how many troops on the ground would be needed
2. the complete absence of a detailed plan for the reconstruction’ of Iraq, or even for the aftermath of the war, because the idiots in charge (Cheney et al) thought the Iraqi people would pick themselves up, return to work, set up a functioning government and rebuild their country using their own oil revenue, all within a couple of months of the overthrow of Saddam

These key assumptions and all the individual tactics and plans which were based on them – ‘the botched handling of the first three years of the war’ (p.116) – turned out to be disastrously wrong (p.102), but the entire situation was turned toxic when the man appointed as America’s viceroy in Iraq, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority L. Paul Bremer, took the intemperate (i.e. against a barrage of opposition and informed criticism) and catastrophic decisions:

1. to deprive any member of Saddam’s ruling Ba’ath Party of their jobs, on the analogy of the denazification process applied to post-war Germany
2. to disband the Iraqi Army, police and security services, with the naive idea that US forces would then train new ones, starting from scratch, inculcating democratic values etc

Thus, with the stroke of a pen, over 500,000 highly trained and motivated men and women lost their jobs, their careers and their incomes. After initial protests and appeals many of them went to form the core of the insurgent forces and militias which were to attack US forces and each other for the next 8 years.

More subtly, the Iraqi Army had provided a unifying force in a country made up of fractious ethnic and religious groups, namely (from south to north) Shia and Sunni Muslims, and the Kurds in the north. Removing one of Iraq’s core unifying institutions made the country’s collapse into disparate regions and ethnic civil war far more likely.

Add in the fact that Rumsfeld’s obstinate insistence on sending far fewer US troops than were required led, in the first days and weeks after the invasion, to Iraqi army barracks and ammunition dumps all over the country being left wide open to be looted by would-be terrorists, insurgents and militias, and you could hardly have created a more perfect recipe for a complete shitstorm.

And the shit really hit the fan when the steadily worsening security situation (i.e. widespread lawlessness, robberies, murders, rapes, attacks on occupation forces on a daily basis etc) crystallised into two contemporaneous uprisings: one among the followers of ‘radical’ Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, at first in the eastern slums of Baghdad and then spreading across the Shia south; at the same time as the mostly Sunni city of Falluja to the west of Baghdad was the scene of a massive uprising – both occurring in April and May 2004.

Suddenly the mostly US occupying forces were thrown into more intense urban fighting, with higher casualties, than in the initial invasion back in March and April 2003. And that was the point in the story – with the Fallujah and Sadr City risings – where Ricks ended his first book.

The Gamble

This book is by way of being the sequel to Fiasco, picking up exactly where its predecessor left off. It covers a very specific time period, from autumn 2005 to autumn 2008 – three years – and, although it is, like Fiasco, staggeringly detailed, with extraordinary access to senior military figures who talk with astonishing candour about the political and military foul-up the Americans had landed themselves in – it is, in a sense, a fairly simple story.

It describes the agonisingly slow process whereby senior figures in the US Army slowly came to realise that they were fighting the wrong kind of war. The occupying forces were continuing to fight a conventional war in which the aim is to identify your enemy (hopefully wearing a nice identifiable uniform) and kill as many of them, and degrade their military or civilian infrastructure to such an extent, that their leaders are forced to sign a peace treaty, and then You Have Won.

Only slowly, during the course of 2004 and 2005, did senior officers in the large unwieldy Army bureaucracy and the Pentagon, come to heed the voices that had been advising that the army was in fact fighting a completely different kind of conflict: it was battling an insurgency and thus had to completely switch tactics in order to implement a counterinsurgency.

The last 100 or so pages of Fiasco had, in fact, already expressed this idea at some length, repeatedly, and so there is quite a strong feeling of repetition about the start of The Gamble. Once again we are introduced to the gurus of counterinsurgency, from Lawrence of Arabia with his 27 Articles (1917), to the counterinsurgency manual of Frenchman David Galula, ‘Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice’ (1964), and John Nagl’s ‘Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam’ (2002) and then the 2007 paper, ‘Countering Global Insurgency’, by Australian soldier, David Kilcullen, which, amazingly enough, persuaded Petraeus to invite Kilcullen to come and work for him in Iraq as his counterinsurgency adviser.

Ricks repeats (and repeats again) the simple insight at the core of counterinsurgency theory which is that the population is the prize. Insurgents wear no uniforms, move freely among the general population, choose their own opportunities to emerge from the general population to mount ambushes, plant bombs and so on, before melting back into the crowd. They are able to do this in part because they terrorise the general population, often spending as much time killing their own fellow citizens for speaking against them or in any way helping the hated occupier.

So the only way to crush an insurgency is to separate the insurgents from the population and the only way to do that is to win over the general population to your side; and the way you do that is to break up the super-barracks the Americans had built around Iraq, and instead create scores of smaller posts embedded throughout the cities and towns; to patrol regularly and visibly; to create law and order on the streets. It is emphatically not to kick down the doors of then houses of suspected insurgents, terrify everyone inside and humiliate the man of the house in front of all his relatives; that merely adds one more fighter to the insurgency. The way to behave is with elaborate respect for all citizens, assure them of your protection, respect their culture (especially the sacrosanct nature of hospitality and the respect due to male heads of households, communities or tribes). Ditto detainees, who must be treated according to the Geneva Convention and legality.

Above all try to restore the sense of law and order on the streets – which the Americans had so decisively lost in the first few days of wild looting after the conquest of Baghdad – and protection for everyday citizens from violent criminals and homicidal militias.

Ricks’s narrative describes how these ideas were expressed by scattered officers, academics and teachers within the huge Army bureaucracy, and then were taken up by General David Petraeus who, through a series of complex political manoeuvres, was appointed commanding general of the Multi-National Force Iraq in February 2007 and then wangled the resources – i.e. extra money and five brigades of extra troops – to try and implement this complete turnaround in the Army’s policy.

The notable increase in soldiers on the ground came to be referred to, in the media and then more widely, as ‘the Surge’ and an awful lot, from President George Bush’s political career to the reputation of the US Army throughout the Middle East and around the world, came to rest on it.

That’s what the title refers to and the book describes: the enormity of the stakes involved in what amounted to a humongous gamble to try and wrest back control of an Iraq policy and an armed occupation which had spiralled out of control.

Failed hopes of handing over

My summary so far doesn’t refer to two other important points. From the end of the invasion phase in May 2003 onwards the administration (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz) came to cling more and more desperately to two shibboleths: 1) that once the Americans had supervised elections and gotten a democratically elected government in place, the Iraqis would take over their own country; and 2) that this would be done via the Iraqi Army and police force which the Americans were training up. The mantra Bush kept repeating to the press was ‘We step down as they [the Iraqi security forces] step up’.

But both policies hit big snags. Not one but two elections were held in Iraq in 2005, in January and December, but had almost entirely negative consequences: The January one was to create a transitional government which would draft a constitution for a successive vote. But in January 1) much of the minority Sunni population boycotted them (voter turnout was as low as 2% in the Sunni Triangle of Al Anbar province) thus confirming what was likely anyway, which was that most elected officials and the government itself was dominated by Iraq’s Shia majority; 2) which, instead of defusing, crystallised and exacerbated sectarian divisions (and violence) across the country (p.32). Just during the January election there were more than 100 armed attacks on polling places including nine suicide bombers, killing at least 44 people.

(Reading statistic like this again and again and again and again makes you marvel at the Iraqis’ dedication and commitment to murdering as many of their fellow citizens, fellow Arabs and fellow Muslims as possible, and utterly screwing up their country as much as they could. It was the scale of the mayhem which prompted Petraeus’s adviser Emma Sky in 2007 to call Iraq a failing state, p.147.)

The same level of violence accompanied the December 2005 election, alongside accusations of fraud and vote-rigging, and extremist language from countless clerics denouncing democracy as an evil alien ideology. Just a few months later, on 22 February 2006, the bombing of the Golden Dome Mosque in Samarra, an important Shia shrine, really kicked off the hyper-violent sectarian conflict (p.32).

But while a violent civil war was kicking off, 3) it took Iraq’s squabbling political class five months to cobble together a ‘government of national unity’ under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. a) The excruciating slowness of the process, while car bombs and murders and kidnappings ran out of control across the country disillusioned many with the concept of democracy, which just seemed to be a synonym for inaction and corruption, and b) al-Maliki was in hock to his Shia supporters and, in Ricks’s narrative, becomes part of the problem for protecting the Shia militias carrying our murderous ethnic cleansing of Baghdad’s Sunni districts.

In Sunni neighbourhoods that had been ethnically cleansed, patrolling soldiers often found piles of executed bodies and vacant houses with blood smeared on the walls.(p.166)

Far from solving the problem, the Shia-dominated government turned out to compound the problem. One example: the Ministry of Health employed Shia militiamen who murdered Sunnis who applied for medical care (p.156). Another example: American officials meeting Iraqi government ministers could never be sure whether the ministers had tipped off the militias who would then try to assassinate the Americans en route to the meeting (p.158). Not really the beacon of democracy Cheney and Rumsfeld swore Iraq would become in a matter of months.

The neo-conservatives’ other hope was that ‘as they stand up, we can stand down’ i.e. as the Iraqi Army and police were trained and began serving, the Americans could reduce their involvement and begin to draw down their forces i.e. leave. This assumption (like all the neo-cons’ assumptions) turned out to be grotesquely flawed because the Iraqi Army and police force turned out to be useless. Army units refused to deploy anywhere but their home district – Ricks describes several occasions on which newly qualified Army units mutinied, tore off their uniforms and deserted their barracks rather than be shipped to another part of the country to support or replace American forces. And they were caught up in the sectarian division of the country i.e. were Sunni or Shia first and Iraqis second. And the police in particular, as well as turning a blind eye to militias from their own ‘side’ were breath-takingly corrupt. In Baghdad US forces found they had to ban the Shia-dominated police from even entering Sunni areas where they were regarded as murderers (p.168), reminiscent of Northern Ireland and Yugoslavia where the security forces ceased to operate above the conflict but became completely identified with one side.

Both these strategies came, by the new boys (Petraeus and his commander in chief Ray Ordieno and their council of advisers) to be referred to pejoratively as ‘rushing to failure’. They had to be dropped.

So George Bush’s decision to acquiesce to mounting calls to change strategy in Iraq referred not only to a change of narrow military doctrine (from war to counterinsurgency) but a wider acknowledgement that the policy of waiting for Iraqi politicians and security forces to take charge of their own country was also not working.

Fastabend’s essay

General David Petraeus was appointed senior military leader Iraq early in 2007. Lt General Ray Ordieno was appointed his number 2, in charge of day to day operations. Major-General David Fastabend was appointed director of strategic operations to Petraeus. He wrote an essay listing some of the complete turnarounds in American policy which were required:

• there was a hole in the centre of the Iraqi state where the government should be, providing law and order but wasn’t; the militias had stepped in to provide it but the Americans had to occupy that space
• eliminate extremists not by killing them (more will spring up) but working with them; convert them from terrorists and militia into neighbourhood watches – this was pursued by putting over 100,000 former Sunni insurgents onto the US payroll as ‘the Sons of Iraq’ (p.204)
• reach out to the radical firebrand oppositionist Shia leader Moqtada al-Sadr – this succeeded when al-Sadr declared a ceasefire in mid-2007 (p.201)
• ignore the national politicians; work at regional and local level to reconcile Sunni and Shia

Another way of conceptualising the US failure in Iraq is that it fought the war it wanted and not the war that was needed. Dazzled by their status as sole superpower and shiny weaponry and sexy drones and laser-guided missiles and supercomputers, the Yanks thought their technological superiority guaranteed victory in any war. I.e. they lost sight of the fact that war is about people. And war in a catastrophically failed state is about working with the people, over the very long term, to rebuild the state one village, one town, one tribe, one region at a time. Long-term, low-tech, high manpower commitment. ‘Slow, ambiguous operations built not around technology but around human interactions’ (p.162).

America’s reluctance to commit troops and resources, its reluctance to lose even one soldier in combat, its reluctance to admit to itself that it is now an empire, is the subject of Michael Ignatieff’s incisive criticism in Empire Lite.

Points of interest

‘There are two kinds of plan, those that fail and those that just might work’ (p.159).

Rather than recap the entire narrative, I’ll select points of interest:

Ethnic cleansing

I hadn’t realised that in 2005, 2006 and 2007 the Iraqis were practicing ethnic cleansing identical to that in former Yugoslavia: in Baghdad in early 2006 Shia militias carried out car bomb attacks and massacres on Sunni communities and Sunni militias struck back on a daily basis killing 20, 30, 40 civilians every day.

Abbreviations

The group within the National Security Council lobbying for an increase in US troops in Iraq called themselves ‘the surgios‘.

MAMs = middle-aged males, an army category of detainee or prisoner (p.107).

AQI = al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Wasta – Iraqi term for clout, pull, connections, the power to get things done, which in turn generates respect.

Communitarian values

The Americans at all levels were obsessed with their own Western mindset of one-man, one-vote democracy based on the primacy of the atomised individualism produced by advanced capitalist societies. Iraqi society, on the contrary, was based around communitarian values based on respect and dignity, ‘dignity and respect, the core values of Iraqi culture’ (p.213). It took the Americans four years to understand this.

Stability over democracy

Part of the rethink was recalibrating the goals; instead of the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz aim of setting up Iraq as a beacon of democracy and transforming the entire Middle East, the new Petraeus doctrine was to stop Iraq disintegrating into civil war which spilled over into a regional bloodbath (explained on p.164 and p.224).

Victory and Liberty were replaced as goals by stability and accommodation. Realistic minimalism of the army versus the maximalist rhetoric of the poltroon politicians. (Ahead of his April 2008 testimony to Congress Petraeus referred to himself as a ‘minimalist’, p.287.)

Stability became the goal. Controversially, this involved assessing whether ‘democracy’ contributed to or undermined ‘stability’ and it turned out to be the latter. In other words, the Americans talked their way round to understanding why a failing state like Iraq needs a strong, Saddam-like leader. In fact, American tacticians consulted with Iraqi leaders on just how Saddam had controlled his unruly population and began to borrow his techniques, for example siting many of the troops just outside Baghdad, which is where Saddam based his Revolutionary Guards. Odierno asks himself: ‘What would Saddam do?’ (p.165)

Doing deals

Similarly, a central plank of the surge, and prime cause why violence against US forces fell off, is because the Americans did deals with local Sunni leaders. Many were sick to death of the violence of (Sunni) al Qaeda in Iraq. Interrogations or just conversations with many former insurgents revealed that most of them were hard-up and planted bombs etc for as little as $10 a day. Petraeus organised schemes to take Sunni insurgents onto the payroll which eventually were costing $30 million a month.

But a criticism was that this was also a tactic undertaken by Saddam, who bought off tribal opponents with bribes, allowing sheikhs to create their own tribal armies complete with RPGs, AK47s and so on (p.216). Insoluble problems of Iraqi society.

Examples of Iraqi on Iraqi violence on pages 32, 180, 185, 186, 221, 228, 241.

Contractors

Ricks barely mentions the tens of thousands of security contractors who made a tidy living in Iraq, because they are outside the military and therefore his frame of reference. It is bleakly funny to learn that many contractors paid hefty bribes to local militias to ensure the safety of themselves and those they were protecting, and that the militias then used this money to buy more weapons and ammo to attack the conventional US army – Americans paying militias to kill Americans; terrific system (p.168). At the peak of the surge there were some 156,000 US troops in Iraq but this was beaten by the 180,000 contractors (p.187).

The JAMsters

JAM = Jaysh al-Mahdi, the militia of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, responsible for widespread ethnic cleansing i.e. massacring Sunnis; its members nicknamed JAMsters by many Americans (p.173). Being Arabs, or Muslims, or Iraqis, or just angry young men, JAM factions often fought among themselves. Ricks describes a situation in the Hurriyah neighbourhood of Baghdad when four factions of Jaysh were fighting each other, being Noble JAM, Golden JAM, criminal JAM and ordinary JAM. The Americans called JAM HQ in Najaf and asked them to come and sort it out. This worked because they were paying the JAM authorities respect.

Fear is the key

In Blood and Belonging Michael Ignatieff explains how ethnic nationalism arises when you no longer trust the police or security services to protect you but instead start to fear they will persecute you. Fear is the key motivator, as when, in Iraq, the national police became indistinguishable from the Shiite militias. Who can you turn to to protect you? People like you, ‘your people’, from your tribe or clan or ethnicity or religion. Once this starts to happen it is a downward spiral into tit for tat killings which push communities further apart. Eventually all you can do is physically partition the rival sides to stop them killing each other. Ricks describes the Americans building high concrete blast walls around the remaining Sunni communities in Baghdad to stop Shiite militias carrying out attacks. Peace walls. He appears not to have heard of the similar walls built in Northern Irish cities in the 1980s, the policed checkpoints needed between Serb and Muslim parts of Kosovo (p.173).

Asked in November 2008 what one word best describes Iraq [Ambassador Ryan Crocker] didn’t hesitate: ‘Fear.’ (p.310)

The Brits

The British are only mentioned 3 or 4 times, in the most striking instance when a senior American officer says they’ve basically ‘lost’ in the South i.e. Basra (p.177). As of 28 February 2014 the number of UK personnel deployed to Iraq was 141,640. 179 British Armed Forces personnel or MOD civilians died. Yet by the summer of 2008 Ricks says the Brits had just 4,100 troops at Basra airport ‘doing almost nothing’ (p.268). The dismal British performance is analysed pages 277 to 289.

Darwinian evolution of the insurgents

The insurgents and militias were smart, learned American tactics and behaviours and how and when best to attack. US troops liked to joke that all the stupid and amateurish fighters had been killed off early in the insurgency, leaving the smartest and most adaptive to fight on, becoming steadily smarter and more effective (p.180).

Iraqification

In the kind of high-level conceptualisation which makes his journalism so enjoyable, Ricks suggests that the ‘surge’ (and deals with Sunni insurgents) of 2007 represented the Iraqification of the war. For four years the Americans had been trying to Americanise Iraq; now, at last, they realised they had to let Iraq be Iraq (bloody, tribal, violent) and let themselves be Iraqified (p.219).

Murder board

Petraeus prepared for his September 2007 appearance before Congress by having his inner team submit him to a ‘murder board’ i.e. hit him with the hardest, weaselest questions they could think of (p.245).

Sayings

Good tactics can’t fix a bad strategy (p.160).

An old military aphorism has it that amateurs talk tactics but professionals talk logistics (p.197).

Andrew Krepinevich’s law of the conservation of enemies: Never make more enemies at one time than you absolutely need to (p.223).

It is axiomatic in military affairs that every strength carries its own weakness (p.255).

The cost

By early 2008 the Iraq War, which Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz had said would pay for itself, had cost the United States $650 billion, at minimum (p.292).

Afterwards

There are two problems, not so much with the book itself as its place in modern history. The obvious one is that Ricks’s account stops at the end of 2008 (with an 8-page epilogue taking us up to late 2009) and with the whole situation in Iraq profoundly unresolved.

US forces were, in the event, to remain in the country until the very end of 2011 – but even then they left a country in crisis, with the supposedly democratically elected Shia government alienating much of the Sunni population. And this in any case proved to be a brief hiatus since, in summer 2014, US forces had to return to Iraq to combat the new threat of the Islamic State group, which declared a caliphate across parts of north-west Iraq and Syria. US forces were to remain in Iraq for a further seven years (!), from 2014 to 2021.

Written and published so close to the events it’s describing, I had the gnawing sense that The Gamble had been superseded by 15 years of subsequent events, and that therefore many of its judgments might have been rendered obsolete.

This seems particularly true of the second problem which is that, if you Google ‘counterinsurgency+iraq’ you get quite a few articles referring to the whole doctrine Ricks praises being discredited. This is a bummer because the final third of Fiasco is devoted to describing and praising counterinsurgency (COIN) as the way forward, and The Gamble is entirely premised on this military doctrine. If COIN has, indeed, been discredited, then so has the basis of both Ricks’s books.

Whatever detailed, modern (2023) assessments of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq conclude, there’s no doubt that they didn’t work in the sense of securing long-term security for their countries, especially Afghanistan, where we all saw the US-trained army and security forces collapse and the Taliban surge back to power in little more than a week in August 2021.

Four thoughts

1. The complexity of the US military machine

As Ricks introduces us to members of the US Army at all levels, of all ranks, in Iraq, back in the States, to serving generals and retired generals, members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to educators at West Point and Fort Leavenworth School of Advanced Military Studies, to officials within the White House, the Pentagon, the National Security Council and the State Department, to members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, all kinds of other bodies such as the Defence Policy Board, the American Enterprise Institute, the Iraq Study Group, as well as to academic experts on military history and strategy at place like the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, to commentators and specialist journalists — he builds up a picture of the extraordinarily complicated ecosystem which makes up the US political-military machine. And that’s without mentioning the other two services, the air force and the navy which, of course, have their own vast bureaucracies and hierarchies.

Ricks’s narrative shows that, not only is the US military establishment huge and complex and byzantine, but it is riven with politics and personalities, arguments and ambition, rivalries and debates, which add elements of complication and confusion at every level from the White House downwards.

Reading Rick’s portrait of this vast, lumbering, multi-faceted behemoth helps you really understand how difficult it is to mount a campaign in the first place, and then helps explain the manifold failings and setbacks and false promises and crap strategies which the army of the richest country in the world keeps experiencing.

2. PhDs in the US military

As a footnote to the above, it is also a bit staggering how well educated a lot of these army types are. A lot of the army officers have degrees (impressive) but a surprising number also have PhDs (very impressive). Ricks lists the PhDs in the team Petraeus built around him on page 135. Reminding me of Michael Ignatieff’s comment in ‘The Lesser Evil’ that the US Army is overflowing with frustrated intellectuals. Who’d have thought.

So how does an organisation bulging with over-educated, cleverclogs manage to foul up so often? See point 1. I’ve worked for a number of UK government departments and agencies and have seen at first hand the magical, almost supernatural way in which, the more you fill a room with clever medium and senior-level managers, the dumber the discussion and the worse the outputs.

I personally have sat in a meeting of board members and the chief executive and watched them discussing results which I, the most junior person in the room, charged with monitoring the stats and producing weekl reports, knew to be factually incorrect or were being distorted for political reasons, both internal and external (I mean real politics, deriving from Cabinet and the government).

Should I, the lowliest person in the room, interrupt the presentation being given by the Head of Strategy to the Board and the Chief Executive, and thus embarrass my boss and his boss and his boss; be put on the spot in front of the entire board of the organisation; and with no alternative strategy to propose, just negatively pointing out errors and inaccuracies? Am I likely to speak up in that situation? No, and so I repeatedly watched decisions being boldly taken based on incorrect data and misleading stats.

This is why I enjoyed both Ricks’s books so much, because they really dig down into the psychological reasons behind clichéd expressions such as ‘bureaucratic inertia’ to show why that kind of thing arises and is so hard to combat in practice. It boils down to people being scared of stepping out of the groupthink, being the only one in the room to point out that the emperor is naked, of any sane person preferring to avoid ridicule and rejection, and so going along with decisions they know to be wrong.

3. Iraqi voices but no Iraqi perspective

It’s an obvious point, but this is the account of a man who has for decades been a leading journalist on the Pentagon and the US military. His contacts, his quotes, his grasp of the internal politics and debates within the US Army, the Defence Department, the State Department, the White House, are exceptional.

So there’s lots and lots and lots about the situation in Iraq and America’s military strategy in Iraq and bringing democracy to Iraq and making Iraq a free nation and rebuilding Iraq and the history of Iraq and the religious and ethnic groups of Iraq – all seen from an American point of view, by lots and lots and lots of well-educated US military – but actual voices of actual Iraqis?

Well, it would be false to say there aren’t any, there are – a fair number, in fact, al-Maliki is quoted a lot, as are his advisers, other politicians, al-Sadr, and numerous sheikhs. BUT they are all quoted commenting on American initiatives and American plans and American shortcomings. For a real sense of the Iraqi experience, Iraqi history, Iraq’s political, religious and ethnic challenges, how the Iraqis see it – you’d have to go elsewhere. At the moment I’ve no idea where.

4. Ethnic nationalism

Ricks’s narrative is about the Big Shift within the extended behemoth which is the US political-military machine from a mindset based on winning a war to the mindset of counterinsurgency, which he repeats again and again and again. But my reading of the situation he’s describing is heavily influenced by having just reread Michael Ignatieff’s books about ethnic nationalism and Anthony Loyd’s books about the wars in former Yugoslavia. So what I see is that, while Ricks is praising his heroes for turning the supertanker of American policy in a completely new direction, from 1. a strategy of war-winning to a completely different 2. strategy of counterinsurgency; in the meantime the situation had already passed that point into 3. a civil war between ethnic or religious groups (Sunni versus Shia).

You know the old joke about the late-Victorian British government’s attempts to solve ‘the Irish Question’, that every time the British government thought it had found an answer, the Irish changed the question. Same here. It’s more complicated than that, and Ricks knows more about Iraq than I ever will, but I wonder whether, while he praises Petraeus et al for moving from approach 1 to approach 2, the Iraqis had outmanoeuvred them by moving on to zone 3.

And the thing can be posited about civil wars, especially when they reflect profound ethnic or religious divisions – as in Bosnia or Northern Ireland or Sri Lanka or Sudan – that they are very, very difficult to end, not without partition of the country (as in Ireland and Sudan) or extermination of one party (as when the Sri Lankan government wiped out the Tamil Tigers).

Obviously a huge factor is the well-known leftist position that most of the countries in the Middle East, as in Africa, are the impractical creation of ignorant bureaucrats back in the capital cities of European Empires (especially the British and French) who drew arbitrary borders dividing homogeneous groups and forcing together into new ‘states’ ethnic and religious groups who have nothing in common.

Classically, such naturally fissiparous ‘states’ have to be held together by authoritarian leaders and, when those strongmen are removed, show a strong tendency to collapse into smaller units dominated by one or other ethnic or religious group. Thus Yugoslavia after Tito died. Thus Iraq after Saddam was overthrown. Thus Libya after Qaddafi’s ouster.

Part of the arrogant ignorance of Bush Junior, Cheney and Rumsfeld was thinking Iraq was like Nazi-occupied France; all you had to do was kick out the Nazis and an integrated European nation with a strong secular identity, a citizenry with advanced awareness of their civic rights and responsibilities, would revert to being a peaceful democracy.

But Michael Ignatieff’s visits to the trouble spots he chronicles in his books highlight the problem with this assumption. Ignatieff’s investigations show that such a sophisticated sense of political rights and duties, a widespread sense of civic responsibility, the complex matrix of what development experts call ‘civil society’, take centuries to develop and simply don’t exist in many, probably most, countries in the world.

The Americans removed the dictator and instead of getting a generation of keen young citizens springing up to create a vibrant democracy they got hundreds of thousands of angry militiamen, insurgents and terrorists whose main aim became to massacre as many of the infidel invader or their fellow citizens as possible, in an escalating cycle of tit-for-tat terrorist atrocities.

This sounds exactly like the Bosnia and Kosovo described so vividly by Ignatieff and Anthony Loyd, except so much worse, because exacerbated by the deeply tribal and clan-based nature of Arab culture. It isn’t just the Bosnians against the Serbs as in Yugoslavia; Ricks portrays Iraq as a land with thousands of tribes who all have feuds and vendettas against each other, where tribal or clan loyalty, religious and ethnic allegiance come a long, long way before any thought of the ‘democracy’ or ‘civil rights’ spouted by the invader and their corrupt politicians in faraway Baghdad.

• ‘One of the mistakes we made early on was not understanding the importance of the tribes,’ Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno (p.110)
• ‘Tribal society makes up the tectonic plates in Iraq on which everything rests,’ Brigadier General John Allen (p.219)
• ‘the most powerful socio-cultural dynamic in Iraq, the tribal system…’ Adam Silverman, political adviser to a brigade of the 1st Armoured Division (p.329)

Which begs the really basic question: can such a society ever become a peaceful democracy, as we in the West know it? To which my short answer is, no. Ricks ends his book with a string of first-person testimony from US officers who worked closely with Iraqi politicians, senior police or army officers. Without exception they describe individuals steeped in intimidation, fear and violence who were just waiting for the Americans to leave so they could set about exterminating their enemies. Many of the experts he spoke to predicted a return to civil war, a military coup, or the rise of a Saddam-like dictator.

Here’s highlights of the current Foreign Office advice about travel to Iraq:

The Foreign Office advises against all travel to Iraq and all but essential travel to the Kurdish provinces…Protests [in Baghdad] can, and sometimes do, escalate into violence…Iraq remains subject to regional tensions…You should remain vigilant, have robust security arrangements and contingency plans in place…Terrorists are still very likely to try to carry out attacks in Iraq. You should remain vigilant…There’s also a high threat of kidnapping throughout the country, including from both Daesh and other terrorist and militant groups, which can be motivated by criminality or terrorism.

In a 2006 Senate debate conservative Republican Lindsey Graham said: ‘The American people are beginning to wonder if the Iraqi people can get this right.’ (quoted on page 59). The police chief of Fallujah, a former insurgent named Faisal Ismail al-Zobaie put it simply: ‘No democracy in Iraq. Ever.’ (p.209). Were they right?

Since then

So where is Iraq today? This article gives a brief overview of the current situation. Twenty years after the coalition invasion there are some 2,500 U.S. troops still in Iraq. According to the article this is for two reasons:

1. to help Iraqi forces in ongoing conflict with the remnants of ISIL in the north-west
2. to disrupt supply lines from Iran in the east through Iraq, to Lebanon and its ally there, Hezbollah, where Iranian arms could be used in Hezbollah’s ongoing conflict against Israel

Maybe it’s just an awful part of the world and people born in Iraq are condemned to live their entire lives in a violent country, plagued by terrorist atrocities, criminality and continual, low-level religious conflict. So far from the naive imaginings of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz as to be surreal.

Iran

The darkly funniest thing about the whole sorry story is that Saddam’s Iraq had up till the invasion provided a strong, Sunni, Arab bulwark against the power of Shia Iran. With Iraq greatly weakened by the American invasion, Iran has been able to extend its power into Iraq (via tame Shiite politicians and militias) and onwards throughout the region. The biggest single outcome of the American invasion of Iraq has been the empowering of one of America’s bitterest enemies, Iran.

International affairs is undertaken by utopian idiots (Bush, Blair), sorted out by embattled realists (Petraeus), and provides endless black humour to armchair ironists (us).

Humanity

These are the best products of the richest, most powerful nation the world has ever known. Their net achievement? Stupidity leading to mind-boggling violence leading to complete strategic failure.

After immersing yourself in this swamp of arrogant incompetence I don’t see how anyone can believe the rhetoric you hear all the time about ‘combating climate change’ or ‘building a better, fairer world’. The richest, most powerful country in the world spent over a trillion dollars, lost thousands of lives, spent nearly 20 years, and still couldn’t even fix one medium-sized nation among the world’s 200 countries. Nobody is going to save us from our own stupidity.

Credit

The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006 to 2008 by Thomas E. Ricks was published by Penguin Books in 2009.

Related links

• US Army manual: Insurgencies and Countering Insurgencies

New World Disorder reviews

• New World Disorder reviews