Two bestsellers ask why it has all gone so wrong

BY VIVEK VISWANATHAN

We’ll succeed unless we quit.” So declared President Bush when, during a recent stop in Hanoi, he was asked about the lessons of the Vietnam War.

The intellectual shortcut that allows a president to reduce the long, convoluted, wrenching experience of America in Vietnam to a stale five-word sound-bite—and one of dubious historical merit at that—is a telling example of the shortsighted thinking that has ensnared us in Iraq. And so we owe it to ourselves to carefully review how, exactly, such a dreadful course of events in Iraq came to pass. It is a story of false hopes, hidebound decision-making, breathtaking incompetence, protracted stubbornness, and, above all, a staggering unwillingness to confront and adapt to reality. And it has so repulsed two of our nation’s most seasoned journalists, Thomas E. Ricks and Bob Woodward, that they did not even attempt to disguise their visceral disgust.

A Foreign Policy Blunder

As a first draft of military history, Ricks’ Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq is devastating. Ricks, who has for years served as a senior military correspondent, does not mince words, beginning his book by declaring that the invasion of Iraq may be viewed by future generations as one of the “most profligate actions in the history of American foreign policy.”

Having lived through this recent history, we are aware of the chaos in Iraq and, yet, tend not to fully grasp how exactly it all unfolded, recalling it only in flashpoints: Mission Accomplished; Abu Ghraib; Fallujah. In a giant sweep that begins at the end of the first Gulf War, Ricks briefly studies the competing paradigms of Iraq throughout the 1990s, and then plunges into the core of a war that has embroiled us for longer than did World War II, providing an astonishing analysis of just how Iraq fell, after the expense of tens of billions of dollars and thousands of lives, into such infernal disrepair.

Strategic Blindness

At the heart of Ricks’ incisive account is his grasp of strategy, honed over his decades as a chronicler of military affairs. Strategy, Ricks writes, is a “grand-sounding” but often misused word that has a simple, precise definition. It results from a coherent answer to four interlocking questions: “Who are we, and what are we ultimately trying to do here? How will we do it, and what resources and means will we employ in doing it?” Ricks notes that by this standard, the Iraq invasion was based on “perhaps the worst war plan in American history.” The military “fought the battle it wanted to fight, mistakenly believing it would be the only battle it faced.”

The military’s strategic blindness proved most deadly when officers confronted the small but steadily rising insurgent activity in the summer and fall of 2003. Ricks’ rock-solid understanding of counterinsurgency warfare resonates throughout the narrative. Taking us swiftly from engagement to engagement, Ricks shows how the military’s heavy-handed response to initial guerrilla attacks, and its unwillingness to re-examine its strategy even as its efforts backfired, fueled the insurgency, and brought us to our current predicament.

It is useful, as a general rule, to be wary of books on current affairs that sport one-word titles: Bias, Slander, and Lies come to mind. But when reading Fiasco, one gets the sense that there is not a senior military officer Ricks has not interviewed, nor an after-action think tank report he has not read, nor a facet of military culture that he does not understand. If he occasionally overreaches in making his point, he also tempers this saddening tale with stories of inspiring, if sparse, successes that we can learn from. When Ricks sheds the formalities of journalism and calls a spade a spade—deeming Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers’ response to a question “unworthy of his position as the nation’s top military officer”—it is in the context of the cool, detached, heavily-researched, and sobering reporting that characterizes this work.

The Buck Stops Where?

The responsibility for the situation in Iraq cannot, however, be primarily assigned to military leaders. War, Clausewitz reminds us, is about politics. Top Washington officials are tasked with establishing broad political objectives in war, taking care that those objectives are reflected in military strategy, and ensuring that that strategy is continually adapting to changing conditions. And the president is indeed, as Bush infamously declared, the “decider.” Ricks’ reporting demonstrates the danger of military strategy disconnected from political objectives and intelligent civilian oversight. But Ricks is, ultimately, a military reporter.

Enter Bob Woodward, the Watergate legend, whose books are known for their tales of Washington inner-sanctum intrigue. Woodward is uniquely placed to convey the workings of Bush administration as the seeds of the insurgency were planted in Iraq. Washington-watchers will salivate as they read how Chief of Staff Andrew Card angled for months to get Donald Rumsfeld fired. Critics will assert that Woodward was excessively harsh in his treatment of Bush to compensate for perceived favoritism in his previous two books. But no matter the motive, Woodward’s exhaustive research and his unparalleled access in Washington make State of Denial a stunning evisceration of the true ineptitude among top officials in the Bush administration.

Death by Arrogance

The larger-than-life character in this story is Rumsfeld, and it is difficult to read the book without concluding that he was an absolute disaster. From his condescension toward strong, independent military advice to the president to his gee-whiz attitude regarding Iraqi reconstruction to his insufferable pettiness, his actions isolated Bush from independent assessments of the situation in Iraq as the insurgency picked up strength. State of Denial is so rankling an account not simply because of the mistakes made, but because of the carefree neglect with which they were made. As a former four-star general recounted in Fiasco, Bush’s officials “were making simplistic assumptions and refused to put them to the test…These are educated men, they are smart men. But they are not wise men.”

Leaders in positions like Bush’s must actively seek information and constantly look for warning signs that are lost in the walls of the military and civilian bureaucracies. Instead, writes Woodward, the Oval Office atmosphere “too often resembled a royal court, with Cheney and Rice in attendance, some upbeat stories, exaggerated good news, and a good time had by all.”

State of Denial belies the standard criticism of Woodward—that he writes as if he were a novelist, without drawing critical historical judgments. The conversations that Woodward illuminates reinforce his conviction that with all of his “upbeat talk and optimism,” Bush had not told Americans “the truth about what Iraq had become.” And Woodward dolefully notes the visible ego boost that Bush received from his re-election, in a year in which the number of attacks in the summer of 2004 outstripped the summer of 2003 by a factor of nine. Indeed, it is such mini-observations, the smallest details in Fiasco and State of Denial, that are often the most aggravating—the demonstrations of excessive pride, the unwillingness to consider alternative sequences of events, the constant declaration that we have a “strategy for victory” in Iraq (What else would we have a strategy for?), and the steady and agonizing refrain that the “good news” was not being reported.

A Cautionary Tale

Officials will no doubt quibble with the specifics of certain recollections in these two books. But the portrait painted, from the gripping accounts of battle and strategy in Fiasco to the blithe incompetence of Bush administration officials in State of Denial, is a damning one, and one that all Americans who wish to understand how we reached the current state of affairs in Iraq should read.

One caveat, however, is in order. Those who supported the invasion of Iraq will find tempting the chance to attribute our current troubles in Iraq solely to bungled management, rather than admit a lapse in judgment. These books certainly provide an array of ammunition for those of us who wish to make such an argument. Historians will debate whether the difficulties of occupying Iraq were intractable or flowed more from America’s own doing. But it seems, given the arc of events in Iraq, that if we are to challenge the assumptions that inform the judgment of others, we should take care to re-think our own.