Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor's book about the invasion of Iraq, "Cobra II," is everything that the Bush administration's plan for the war was not. It is meticulously organized, shuns bluff and bombast for lapidary statements, and is largely impervious to attack. Like their widely acclaimed book about the first gulf war, "The Generals' War," published in 1995, it is based on stupendous research. Once again, the authors seem to have been everywhere and talked to everybody. No Pentagon source appears to have been too minor to track down, no plan too recondite to assess, no military acronym too obscure to explain. Gordon, a longtime military correspondent for The New York Times who was embedded with Lt. Gen. David McKiernan's Coalition Forces Land Component Command, and Trainor, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general and former correspondent for The Times, have produced another must-read.
But there the similarities between the two books end. "The Generals' War" appeared at the apogee of American power. Gordon and Trainor's sequel, by contrast, chronicles the crimes, follies and misfortunes of the second gulf war until the summer of 2003. By minutely recounting the tensions between Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the military in the run-up to the war and during it, the authors seek to explain how Iraq, which was supposed to be the birthplace of the democratic crusade, has become its graveyard. Whether their explanation is completely satisfying is another matter...
Gordon and Trainor offer the fullest depiction yet of Rumsfeld's obsession with using Iraq to show that a Slim-Fast military, equipped with the latest technological gizmos, could defeat a foe overnight. Again and again, Rumsfeld pooh-poohed concerns about the hazards of an eventual occupation as preposterous. Nation-building was sissy stuff, dating to what he saw as the Clinton administration's needlessly protracted and costly deployment of troops in the Balkans. In contrast, Iraq, an oil-rich country, would be a snap to get back on its feet, even easier than Afghanistan. "With Iraq," Rumsfeld announced publicly on Feb. 14, 2003, "there has been time to prepare." Yet Rumsfeld seems to have viewed preparations for the aftermath as themselves a sign of defeatism. Gordon and Trainor inform us that the commander of the Great Lakes and Ohio Division of the Army Corps of Engineers, who was deputed in December 2002 to come up with a plan for a postwar civilian administration, didn't receive his own budget and was forced to head to "a trade fair at the base to scrounge up office supplies. He went from booth to booth, appropriating pads, pens and staplers — not an auspicious start for an organization charged with smoothing the path to a new Iraq."
Nor does Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the invasion, come off well. No doubt there are always tensions in wartime between a commander and his generals, but Gordon and Trainor draw on the observations of Franks's subordinates to telling effect. Enraged that the Marines weren't moving more quickly to destroy Iraqi divisions toward the end of March 2003, Franks acted as though he were in charge of a bunch of modern-day McClellans. At one meeting, Franks declared that he didn't want to hear about casualties, the authors report, "even though no one had mentioned any. At that point, he put his hand to his mouth and made a yawning motion, as if to suggest that some casualties were not of major consequence to the attack."...
The Rumsfeld Doctrine
Bookmarks