The 12th of 20 excerpts from "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq" by Thomas Ricks: One day in the spring of 2004, Maj. Gen. James Mattis was walking out of a mess hall in Asad, western Iraq, when he saw a knot of his troops intently hunched over a television, watching a cable news show. "What's going on?" Mattis asked. It was, he learned, the revelations about Abu Ghraib, along with sickening photos of cruelty and humiliation.
A nineteen-year-old lance corporal glanced up from the television and told the general, "Some assholes have just lost the war for us."
The detainee abuses that would resonate most took place not out of the divisions operating in the provinces, but on the outskirts of the capital, in the Abu Ghraib prison. All of the Army's problems in Iraq in 2003 -- poor planning, clumsy leadership, strategic confusion, counterproductive tactics, undermanning, being overly reactive -- came together in the treatment of prisoners, a wide-ranging scandal that eventually was summarized in the phrase "Abu Ghraib," after the big prison west of Baghdad where many prisoners wound up, and where some were tortured.
There never was supposed to be a problem with detainees, because there weren't supposed to be any, at least in U.S. hands. The war plan had called for the Iraqi population to cheerfully greet the American liberators, quickly establish a new government, and wave farewell to the departing American troops. It was not to be.
"As the need for actionable intelligence arose, the realization dawned [among U.S. commanders] that pre-war planning had not included planning for detainee operations," a subsequent Army report noted. And so a series of steps were taken that ultimately would lead to a scandal that would shake the Army and tarnish the U.S. effort in Iraq. As Gen. Mattis put it a year later, "When you lose the moral high ground, you lose it all."
© 2006, Thomas E. Ricks. All rights reserved.
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