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OCCUPATIONAL HAZARDS
By Stephen Graubard

Financial Times (UK)
November 3, 2006

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/d5f8e758-6a40-11db-8ae5-0000779e2340.html

[Review of The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World by Rupert Smith (Penguin) £9.99, 448 pages; State of Denial by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster) £18.99, 576 pages; Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin) £25, 420 pages; Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor (Atlantic) £25, 603 pages; The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End by Peter Galbraith (Simon & Schuster) £17.99, 272 pages.]

President George W. Bush declared victory in the Iraq war on May 1, 2003, but the killings go on with no end in sight. Almost 3,000 U.S. and British soldiers and marines lie dead; thousands more have been wounded and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed and maimed.

America's war in Iraq, even more than Vietnam, has generated instant journalistic history. The first books on the conflict were written within months of its start. But only a few writers are able to step away from the immediacy of events to consider the broader context of the current entanglement.

The most distinguished of the recent books on military intervention is the work of a British retired general, Sir Rupert Smith, former commander of the United Nations forces in Bosnia and deputy supreme commander of NATO. As a British military figure -- rather than a journalist or politician -- Smith has an unusual command of the subject. In The Utility of Force he surveys all the major wars of the 20th century, and argues that a certain kind of warfare that originated with Napoleon survived into the Second World War. His first sentences are memorable; he writes: "War no longer exists. Confrontation, conflict, and combat undoubtedly exist all round the world . . . and states still have armed forces which they use as symbols of power. None the less, war as cognitively known to most non-combatants, war as battle between men and machinery, war as a massive deciding event in a dispute in international affairs: such war no longer exists."

What, then, is the character of modern conflict? The First and Second World Wars were essentially wars of armies. These inter-state industrial wars, aiming at the destruction of the opponent's army, are now historical anachronisms. In their place, Smith says, has emerged "war amongst the people." For Smith, the Cold War was an "extended confrontation" rather than a war. The old paradigm "peace-crisis-war-resolution, resulting in peace again, with . . . the military action being the deciding factor" is today obsolete. In his analysis, modern war is a "continuous criss-crossing between confrontation and conflict, whilst peace is not necessarily either the starting or the end point."

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Iraq. Smith concludes that the war in Iraq was wrongly conceived and wrongly fought. He knows that the situation cannot be resolved with military force alone, but that other "levers of power" must be employed. Knowing how to represent and deal with the theater of operations in contemporary conflict is all-important -- a skill not much in evidence recently.

Smith insists that military force still serves its purpose -- but that it must be clear about its objectives, linked to the rule of law, and conscious always that conflict today is increasingly fought not on battlefields, but among civilian populations. Is there any evidence that U.S. and British politicians and military leaders understood this when they prepared for their disastrous incursions into Iraq?

For many writers, the journalistic imperative of analyzing recent events -- and siding with one group against another -- means that little thought is given to the changing nature of modern warfare or how to resolve the tragic situation we now find ourselves in. Most recent books concentrate on the personalities and the power-play -- what went wrong rather than what lessons may be learned from the debacle. Many analyses of Iraq consider the theater of political misdoing, rather than Iraq itself. Yet if we look at these within the context of modern warfare, we see that the failure is often at every level -- from the politicians particularly, but also from the mistaken strategies of military planning.

The Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, who exposed Watergate, recently published his third volume on Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Once a great admirer of the president and his civilian crew, Woodward has made a complete U-turn in State of Denial, choosing not to acknowledge his total reversal.

In his 2002 book, Bush at War, Woodward portrayed the president as strong, determined, and in charge. In Plan of Attack, two years later, the president remained the skilled leader of a successful administration. In State of Denial no such compliments are awarded. For his first book Woodward interviewed both Bush and Donald Rumsfeld for more than three hours, and boasted of his discussions with unnamed sources in the war cabinet, the White House staff, the State and Defense departments and the CIA. The president and the secretary of defense are no longer cited as sources for his most recent, more critical book.

In Plan of Attack, Woodward offered up various pieces of supposedly privileged information not generally known at the time. Thus, for example, Bush purportedly took Rumsfeld aside 72 days after September 11, 2001, and asked what the Defense Department's war plans were for Iraq. General Tommy Franks, already heavily engaged in Afghanistan, could only respond with: "Goddamn, what the fuck are they talking about?" Other such disclosures are even more common in Bush at War, the more salacious ones generally unattributed.

The great revelation in Woodward's third volume is that Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state, now aged 83, has been meeting regularly with Bush, and that the vice-president, Dick Cheney, esteems him. Since Bush's White House is filled with obsequious courtiers, it is curious that he should feel the need to seek support for his Iraq policies from outside the fortress gates. Woodward, knowing that many of his readers loathe Kissinger, imagines that his revelations will provide one more explanation for the fatal errors being made in Iraq.

Here, Woodward may be the victim of his own bias. Since the president, vice-president, and Kissinger have not divulged the nature of their conversations, it is possible that Bush and Cheney invite him principally because of his close relations with Russian and Chinese leaders, notably Putin, and that larger geopolitical subjects figure in their conversations.

Kissinger's views on Iraq are well known from his newspaper columns -- his central message is that the U.S. must not cut and run as it did in Vietnam. The lessons of Vietnam may in fact be inconsequential but the bold diplomatic and political initiatives taken by Kissinger and Nixon in respect to communist China are relevant to today's Iraq. Regrettably, Kissinger seems unaware of this.

In a private conversation with me decades ago in Washington, Kissinger suggested that "anyone in this town who falls from the political trapeze will find nothing but a concrete floor below." Will this be Bush's fate? Woodward is non-committal, saying only that he has not "told the public the truth about what Iraq had become."

Two other recent books by American journalists merit greater attention: Thomas E. Ricks's Fiasco, and Cobra II, by the New York Times correspondent Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general. Both are excellent instant journalistic histories. Both, however, succumb to the same temptation as Woodward: they focus on individual errors at the expense of the more fundamental failure to confront the changing nature of warfare.

Ricks has written a less glitzy report than Woodward, his colleague on the Washington Post, but it is more reliable. Depending less on anonymous sources whose authority cannot be established, Ricks sees the invasion of Iraq as "based perhaps on the worst war plan in American history."

Baghdad, considered by the U.S. military as a latter-day Saigon, carried the seeds of future disasters. Rumsfeld understood nothing of the significance of the widespread looting that followed the fall of Saddam, nor did he recognize his mistakes in imagining that the war could be won cheaply, with a limited troop engagement. Paul Bremer, his choice to succeed the ill-fated General Jay Garner as the U.S.'s top envoy to Iraq, knew little about the country, its society, or politics. His errors were legion, as much in his de-Ba'athification policies as in the dissolution of the Iraqi armed forces.

Even more than Fiasco, Cobra II focuses on the detailed intelligence failures. Cobra II is a more sober book, but the authors show no hesitation in representing Rumsfeld as a crafty control freak and bitter foe of Colin Powell. Bush is described in effect as a liar, though that four-letter word is scrupulously avoided. The most interesting revelations relate to Saddam Hussein, who in December 2002 informed his Revolutionary Command Council, Ba'ath party aides and top military commanders that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction -- a surprise for many of them.

Because Cheney never challenged Rumsfeld's optimism, the mythology created around the so-called "coalition" concealed the fact that U.S. and British forces were virtually alone in carrying out the burdens of the occupation. Until recent weeks the White House was still referring to the "coalition of the willing."

The mistakes made by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies are minutely noted in Cobra II, but the most damning observation is that U.S. military training was for the wrong kind of war, imagined as a replay of the successful Gulf war. The authors acknowledge that the nature of war has changed, but never explores fully what this must mean for the future.

When we turn to personal history, Peter Galbraith's The End of Iraq is the account of an ardent Democrat who knew Iraq well from his long service with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He has observed Hussein's devastation of the Kurds and Shia -- and Bush Senior's inability to devise policies to protect either. Galbraith understands that Iraq, as constituted after the First World War, is now extinct. The Kurds are virtually autonomous and will never again accept Sunni domination. The Shia are likely to demand a state of their own, and a three-state solution is conceivable.

Recounting the errors of Republican administrations since President Reagan, Galbraith shows little sympathy for small-fry such as David Frum, the proud author of the phrase "axis of evil." Unwilling to be dismissed as a starry-eyed liberal, Galbraith pays great attention to the role of the militias, Syria, and Iran in today's bloodbath. "The war's architects believed they could change the Middle East," Galbraith writes. "And so they did" -- but clearly not in the way intended.

Rupert Smith's The Utility of Force remains the seminal work on this subject. While others have added invaluable data, and must be commended for this, they fail to understand as Smith does that we live in a new era. Our new world is made not by terrorists or Muslim fundamentalists, but by the absence in the major democracies, most obviously in the U.S. and the U.K., of serious and informed foreign policy discussion on the changing nature of war and international relations. We seem to require British generals to instruct us in what American and British politicians have too long ignored, and what scholars have not yet addressed sufficiently.

--Stephen Graubard is the author of The Presidents< (Penguin).