General Barry McCaffrey (USA ret) made a trip to Iraq last April 13-20 and set out his observations in a widely circulated PDF summarized in the press reports
here and
here. While a verbatim copy has not been posted on the Web a reader has been kind enough to send the full text. MSNBC described McCaffrey as skeptic on the war as early as 2003. The New Republic called General McCaffrey Secretary Rumsfeld's "most outspoken critic" in 2004. McCaffrey made an earlier observation trip to Iraq in June 2005 whose findings are summarized in a memorandum to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Therefore McCaffrey's recent 2006 impressions can be directly compared to those of the previous year. And bear in mind that McCaffrey was no fan of the original OIF plan....
In 2005 McCaffrey believed that the US military was handling the insurgency but the challenge was to build Iraqi civil institutions...
But while he had confidence in the military outcome and hope for the political result in Iraq in 2005, he was less sanguine about whether OIF was being won in Western public opinion. With reporters unable to roam freely through the country and unwilling to spend weeks and months embedded with military units the war was in danger of being mis-reported...
All the same McCaffrey believed the Iraq state would start to turn the corner in 2006. He stated his prediction in a series of bullet-points given within the context of what he believed were the principal developments to that point...
Whatever one thinks of McCaffrey's 2005 and 2006 Iraqi memos, the observation that "armies do not fight wars - countries fight wars" should be non-controversial. One of the themes of the 2005 memorandum, re-emphasized in 2006, was that while military systems have adapted, two key political systems -- the political and economic reconstruction mechanism; and public diplomacy, including the press -- have not. The first failure is manifested by the inability of civilian agencies to deploy personnel able to "live and work with their Iraqi counterparts" in the manner of the military or to adapt to the challenges of providing economic development assistance in a terrorist-threatened environment. The institutional failure of the Press is no less signal. Unable to cover Iraq in the normal way; unwilling to assign its stars for long periods of embedding with the US military, it has been "degraded to reporting based on secondary sources, press briefings which they do not believe, and alarmist video of the aftermath of suicide bombings obtained from Iraqi employees of unknown reliability". And if it is true that countries, not armies fight wars, then it is a depressing commentary that only one of three legs has adapted to the exigencies of combat. "The bottom line is that only the CIA and the U.S. Armed Forces are at war. This situation cries out for remedy."
Whether or not Donald Rumsfeld has been going about it the right way he may have been conceptually correct in emphasizing the transformation of the US Armed Forces even at the expense of accepting certain risks. The question is why other agencies have not followed suit. When Secretary Rice announced her intention to transform the State Department in January 2006, it was given scant coverage and treated largely as a non-event...
And that's why they haven't followed suit. Rice's efforts are a testimony to how hard it is to transform an institution as large as the State Department, where it is only possible to shift "100 positions" in a work that will last a "generation". It's reasonable to assume that if the Secretary of State had forced the pace of change in the first year of the war instead of the fifth that there might now be an Ambassador's Mutiny calling for the Secretary's head, because there is a definite tradeoff between the changing to meet the future and performing the job at hand. And what of the Press? How has it adapted to covering the news in the terrorist age? Well, maybe General McCaffrey will make another trip to Iraq next year and let us know how they've come along because if countries, not armies fight wars it will take more than just the military to win against global terrorism.
The McCaffrey Trip Report
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