In the Ranks of Death

In the Ranks of Death

It is clear that the most salient reasons given by the British and U.S. governments for going to war turn out to have been a great deal less than compelling. They seem to have been largely wrong about the scale, danger and battlefield availability of Saddam Hussein's vaunted weapons of mass destruction, albeit wrong in the company of U.S. and British and Israeli (and French and German) intelligence. Does this rob the war of legitimacy? Not for anyone who saw Iraqis kiss British tanks in Basra and hail the weary Marines in Baghdad, nor even for those reporters who stayed on to chronicle Saddam's torture chambers and the mass graves that remain the most pungent and enduring monument to the Ozymandias of Baghdad.

There was, in those thrilling moments in April, a mood of liberation in much of Iraq, however much it may have become squandered since, in large part because of the rather endearing fact that Americans, to their credit, do not make natural imperialists. And many of those who initially supported the war--witness several of the Democrat presidential candidates--have subsequently taken advantage of postwar occupation setbacks to modify their views. Wesley Clark has been accused of this, unfairly in my view, on the basis of several conversations in the spring and summer of 2002 when Clark and I both served on a team examining the principles of coalition warfare that was organized by the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. His view then consistently echoed Churchill's celebrated line that the only thing worse than fighting with allies is fighting without them--despite the inevitable costs in diplomatic or operational compromise.

Clark's book, Winning Modern Wars, is schizoid. The first half is a highly competent summary and analysis of the war. The second half is largely a garrulous and not entirely coherent political campaign manifesto--rendered largely irrelevant because of his political implosion--that attacks the Bush Administration's foreign policy record and offers much bromide in its place.

The book has come in for considerable criticism, notably Max Frankel's New York Times review which called it "a polemic" and sneered that it was "obviously designed to abet the swift transformation of a once embittered warrior and armchair television analyst into a hard-driving, platitudinous candidate for president." But Clark has a point when he concludes that

"[T]he strategy was flawed, out of balance; too much effort against Iraq, not enough against the terrorists themselves. . . . The Bush Administration's focus on Iraq had thus far weakened our counterterrorist efforts, diverting attention, resources and leadership, alienating allied supporters, and serving as a rallying point for anyone wishing harm to the United States and Americans."

The most striking note in Clark's book comes when he acts as a reporter, visiting the Pentagon in November, 2001, and using his old military contacts to chat with

"one of the senior military staff officers. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they meant when they talk about draining the swamp. . . . It seemed that we were being taken into a strategy more likely to make us the enemy--encouraging what could look like a clash of civilizations--not a good strategy for winning the war on terror."

Evidently, Clark was writing before the capture of Saddam Hussein, before the British, French and German foreign ministers succeeded in persuading Iran to submit to the intensified inspections of its nuclear facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency, before Libya's Qaddafi agreed to drop his nuclear ambitions and accept inspection by British and American experts, and before President George W. Bush's important speech on encouraging the Arab world towards democratic reforms. Bush has dared to cut through the Gordian knot of decades of failed policy in the region to argue that "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe." The Bush Administration's grand strategy now looks considerably more coherent, if still highly daunting.

Intelligence and War

The problem that remains--and persists on several different levels--is that neither the White House nor the Pentagon (the faults of the State Department and the CIA are less clear) seems particularly well informed about Iraq and the region generally. The ugly truth of the brilliant military victory over Saddam Hussein's reluctant forces is that the U.S. experienced a series of intelligence failures, tactical as well as strategic. The most obvious concerns Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction. The most strategically embarrassing was the misjudgment over the impact of the Turkish election and the presence of a new and moderately Islamist government on the Pentagon plan to invade Iraq on two fronts with the 4th Division attacking from the north through Turkey. In the event, the Turkish parliament failed to approve the plan.

Tactically, the most telling comment on the inadequacy of U.S. Intelligence (cited in Murray and Sales) comes from Major General James Mattis, commanding the 1st Marine Division, who noted that "T. E. Lawrence had a better idea of the personality and capability of his Turkish adversaries in World War I" than he, Mattis, was ever able to get from U.S. intelligence concerning the Iraqis. The use of the Saddam Fedayeen against the U.S. supply lines at Nasariyah came as a nasty surprise, despite abundant evidence in the Iraqi media that Saddam's sons were organizing just such a force. The reluctance of the Shi'a in the South to embrace their liberators, until they were convinced they would not be abandoned as they were in 1991, was equally unexpected, as was the ability of a relatively small group of Ba'athi militants to maintain their authority in Basra.

Politically, the reliance on the Iraqi exiles led by Ahmed Chalabi, and the acceptance of their biased advice to purge all known Ba'athi and dismantle the Iraqi Army, has put formidable obstacles in the path of postwar stabilization. The failure (or perhaps refusal) of the Pentagon to make use of the State Department's impressive multi-volume plan for postwar reconstruction was at best ill-informed, but it was just one element in an evident breach of understanding between these two grand institutions of the American state for which the president and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, bear the ultimate responsibility. Throw in the bureaucratic civil war over intelligence between the CIA and the Pentagon and there were times, before and after the war, when the Bush Administration appeared seriously and alarmingly dysfunctional. The final intelligence failure was to underestimate the potential for postwar resistance.

None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who has read Sir John Keegan's new book, Intelligence in War. In a spirited gallop through Admiral Nelson's Mediterranean campaign; Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley; the wireless-dependent naval battles of Coronel and the Falklands in 1914; and Crete, Midway, the Battle of the Atlantic and the issue of Hitler's secret weapons in World War II, Sir John points out the endemic uncertainty and misuse of necessarily flawed intelligence. In the real world of battle, it is a critical but often misleading tool. Whatever the claims of the spooks (who usually tend to be more dubious than the political customers like to hear), infallibility is not a human quality. Generals and statesmen can never do everything with intelligence, even if they can seldom achieve much without it.

This is a most useful corrective to the delusion that has emerged since the revelations of the Ultra system at Bletchley, which read encrypted German signals, that intelligence can win wars. Take the classic case of Crete, in which General Freyburg's garrison of British regulars and good Australian and New Zealand troops heavily outnumbered the German 7th Parachute Division and 5th Mountain Division attackers. Thanks to Ultra decrypts, Freyburg knew when and where the Germans were coming but was still defeated because his reading of the intelligence was faulty (he kept expecting a further seaborne invasion) and because he could not fully envisage the losses the elite German troops were prepared to take to seize control of the crucial airfield. Throw in some flawed tactical decisions by local commanders, and Crete was lost. And all the skill of the American naval cryptologists in predicting the Japanese attack on Midway might not have staved off defeat but for the sheer good fortune of the last flight of American warplanes in finding Admiral Nagumo's carriers with their decks still in easily inflammable chaos from the hasty attempt to re-arm the strike aircraft to attack American ships rather than land installations. Sir John concludes:

"In the last resort, intelligence is a weak form of attack. . . . Foreknowledge is no protection against disaster. Even real-time intelligence is never real enough. Only force finally counts."

The force of that judgment is amply corroborated in Abraham Rabinovich's excellent The Yom Kippur War. Indeed, his dismaying account of the monumental failure of AMAN (Israeli Military Intelligence) to predict the joint Syrian-Egyptian attack in October 1973 demonstrates the Keegan rule. The Israelis won all the same, even though the three main advantages on which they counted each proved flawed.

Essay Types: Essay