Iraq & The Generals: When Will They Ever Learn?

Most criticism of the war in Iraq has focused on America's own Axis of Evil -- President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. But Thomas Ricks' devastating new book on the war belatedly shifts much of the blame to where it has belonged all along -- the generals who turned the lighting quick invasion triumph into an occupation that three years on has plunged Iraq into civil war and gone a long way to destabilizing the Middle East.

The main lesson of the U.S. military's failure in Vietnam was that it had to learn to fight counterinsurgency wars.

As Ricks hammers home in "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq," the generals fighting the Iraq war, starting with it's tactical chief, Tommy Franks, decided to avoid confronting that ghost of Vietnam past by simply avoiding that style of warfare.

The results have been predictably disastrous and are about to get worse, with 35 Iraqi troops being moved into Baghdad dying on Tuesday alone. Five civilians also died in the attacks.

Writes Brookings Institute senior fellow Michael O'Hanlon in a Slate commentary on "Fisaco":

Ricks has a fairly convincing body of evidence to substantiate this allegation, including the testimonies of several important Army leaders and intellectuals who confirm that field manuals and other doctrine have not placed any real focus on counterinsurgency in the 30 years since Vietnam ended. As a student of the military myself, I would concur with this judgment. Peacekeeping of the type done in the Balkans in the 1990s was hardly the same thing, so our recent experiences there did little to alleviate the problem (except to the extent they may have influenced the education of the Petraeuses of the world at the individual level).

The substantive heart of Ricks' critique is that [Generals] Franks, Odierno, Myers, and Sanchez failed to understand counterinsurgency warfare; repeated many of the mistakes made in Vietnam, including the overuse of destructive force; and put America as well as its coalition partners on a path that may well lead to defeat

What makes all of this so awful is that U.S. has now painted itself into a bloody corner and will be forced to fight precisely the kind of war it has intentionally not trained for in carrying out a new guaranteed to fail strategic initiative to fail to rid Baghdad of militias.

Observes Andrew Sullivan in the Sunday Times of London:

Today the security situation is so dire that some experts argue that half a million troops would be needed to wrest control of the situation. That won’t happen. If it had been done at the beginning, as so many military commanders argued for, we might be facing a whole new and far more hopeful scenario.

But we’re not. So some are thinking through forms of military withdrawal or redeployment, leaving the Sunni-Shi’ite Iraqi civil war to intensify (just as it flares anew elsewhere in the region). Getting the American public to send its boys to police an internal Muslim civil war, inflamed still further by Hezbollah, is simply unsellable.

ANOTHER RUMSFELD MOMENT

Newsweek editor Fareed Zakaria had this piece of advice for Democrats about the defense secretary on ABC's "This Week":

I would make up a campaign commercial almost entirely of Donald Rumsfeld’s press conferences, because the man is looking — I mean, it’s not just that he seems like a bad Secretary. He seems literally in a parallel universe and slightly deranged. If you listen to what he said last week about Iraq, he’s living in a different world, not a different country.

So what did Rumsfeld say last week? How about this response to a question about whether he thought Iraq was getting closer to civil war:

Oh, I don’t know. You know, I thought about that last night, and just musing over the words, the phrase, and what constitutes it. If you think of our Civil War, this is really very different. If you think of civil wars in other countries, this is really quite different. There is - there is a good deal of violence in Baghdad and two or three other provinces, and yet in 14 other provinces there’s very little violence or numbers of incidents. So it’s a - it’s a highly concentrated thing. It clearly is being stimulated by people who would like to have what could be characterized as a civil war and win it, but I’m not going to be the one to decide if, when or at all.

Rummy may not know, but I do:

When the police forces, militias and insurgents in the five Iraqi provinces with major populations are in open warfare that several hundred thousand U.S. and Iraqi troops are helpless to stop and the other provinces have more goats than people, then that's a civil war, folks.

Remember also that the Brits have effectively ceded control of Basra to militants, will wink wink nod nod, declare victory with a stiff upper lip and "ta ta" and then withdraw, while the Kuridsh north doesn't count because it has keep the rest of Iraq at arm's length.