FIASCO: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. By Thomas E. Ricks. Penguin Books, New York, 2006, ISBN 159420103X, 481 pp., $27.95. (Member $25.15)
This is an autopsy, not a book. In Fiasco, veteran Pentagon reporter Tom Ricks painstakingly dissects the American planning for and conduct of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM (OIF). This forensic examination is dispassionately professional and excruciatingly detailed. Many will disagree with this reviewer’s assessment of America’s Iraq policy and operations as moribund. But after reading this book, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the patient, the administration’s aspirations for the Middle East, has died due to a combination of incompetent diagnosis and malpractice on the operating table. At best the current coalition posture in Iraq is little more than a life support system, and when we pull the plug, the patient will flat line. One cannot overlook the innumerable acts of great valor demonstrated for a noble cause, but the patient is just beyond saving.
Tom Ricks’ written work is well known among Marines. His stints at The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post cover more than two decades of insightful defense reporting. He has been a member of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams for national reporting. Both of his books, Making the Corps (Scribner, 1997) and A Soldier’s Duty (Random House, 2001), reflect his deep understanding of the culture of America’s Armed Forces. The former captured the incredible transformation of Marine enlistees at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, while also raising concerns about the growing rift between our society and the U.S. military. Fiasco will further extend Ricks’ reputation due to his balanced and carefully crafted prose and his ability to exploit the collective observations of a vast network of Pentagon contacts and national security experts.
Fiasco traces the development and conduct of current U.S. policy in Iraq from its roots in the messy endgame of Operation DESERT STORM in 1991 to the present postconflict situation. You do not have to cut through layers of history to get to the author’s thesis. On the very first page the author summarizes his conclusions. The U.S.-led invasion was launched recklessly, with a flawed plan for war and a worse approach to occupation. Spooked by its own false conclusions about the threat, the Bush administration hurried its diplomacy, short-circuited its war planning, and assembled an agonizingly incompetent occupation.
The front portion of the book makes it very clear that the civilian policymakers were incompetent and arrogant in the extreme and that the current situation in Iraq can be laid at the feet of America’s highest officials. Several other books have already assessed prewar policy lapses and intelligence shortfalls. But the bulk of this book is oriented on delving much deeper into the subject’s vital organs, including the:
. . . leadership of the U.S. military, who didn’t prepare the U.S. Army for the challenge it faced, and then wasted a year by using counter-productive tactics that were employed in unprofessional ignorance of the basic tenets of counterinsurgency warfare.
The policy debacle is attributed to the many senior civilian and military officials responsible for intelligently assessing the nature of the Iraqi threat, and for devising an appropriate strategy. Ricks provides a number of concise vignettes in which the personality flaws of the characters in this American tragedy are pithily summarized. The serial exercise in self-deception and maldeployment of American military might that comes from this collection of personal interactions produces a grim toxicology report. It now seems more likely that history’s judgment will be that the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003 was based on perhaps the worst war plan in American history. It was a campaign for a few battles, not a plan to prevail and secure victory. Its incompleteness helped create the conditions for the difficult occupation that followed.
Marine readers will find much to agree with, including Ricks’ characterization of many Marine leaders. Both retired Gen Anthony C. Zinni’s and retired LtGen Gregory S. Newbold’s well-founded reservations about U.S. policy before the war are chronicled. So too is the impressive combat performance of I Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF) in 2003 led by LtGen James T. Conway, then-MajGen James N. Mattis, and then-MajGen James F. “Tamer” Amos. The performance of the California-based Marines in the tenuous postconflict phases is not given its due, but the planning and execution in both fights for Fallujah in April and November of 2004 are well covered.
One interesting portion of the book deals with the different styles and operating methods used by the Army and the Marine Corps during the postconflict phases. This difference bubbled up from time to time in the media in late 2003 as I MEF was preparing to return to Iraq and is very evident in Fiasco. Those Marines who made the first deployment to Iraq believed that the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) they employed in their 4-month extended postconflict period proved the merits of a more constrained and comprehensive approach. These TTP reflect an ethos that is derived from the Marines’ classic Small Wars Manual and from ideas absorbed from British counterinsurgency experts. Lessons learned from OIF emphasized the need to transition to more culture-sensitive and less firepower-oriented tactics in order to swing the neutral portion of the population toward the coalition and the fledgling Iraqi Government.
Members of the U.S. Army resented the implications of the so-called “velvet glove” approach when it appeared in the media in mid- to late 2003. The impression that the Marines were better prepared for complex contingencies was seen as a bit unseemly, especially since the Marines had previously worked largely in Shi’ite areas, and in the Army’s view may not have had a perfect picture on the volatile nature of Al Anbar Province. By the time Mattis’ team arrived in theater in March 2004, with the assistance of the 82d Airborne Division, the Marines had realized the true nature of the adversary in Iraq’s “wild west.”
Ricks lauds the overall approach of a population-centric and kinetically disciplined style that was successfully implemented by then-MG David H. Petraeus, USA in Mosul in 2003 and in Tall Afar by the 3d Armored Combat Regiment later in 2005. Ironically, abetted by a small cadre of institutional insurgents within the U.S. Army, LTG Petraeus has now incorporated the velvet glove approach into the Army’s latest doctrine. While a bit harsh with the Army early in the book, later Ricks shows that the Army is substantially overhauling its education system to better cope with the nature of unconventional conflict.
There is little doubt that the planning failures and heavy-handed transition period through the end of 2003 contributed to the growth of a nascent insurgency. Large unit sweeps by American forces and mass detentions helped elements of the former regime to recruit, arm, and train the underemployed youth and disaffected elements of Iraq for a protracted insurgency. However, Ricks’ depiction of the insurgency as a monolithic entity has limits. Likewise, his endorsement of classical counterinsurgency principles and insights from Mao-inspired rural insurgencies begs for amplification about the more complex mosaic in Iraq. The direct extrapolation of David Galula’s observations from Algeria in the 1960s, or lessons learned from El Salvador in the 1980s, should be applied with some judgment regarding the peculiar nature of this war.
While Ricks is absolutely correct in his assessment that the enduring principles of effective counterinsurgency were not applied, further exploration of the discontinuities is warranted. There is a need for what Anthony Cordesman, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, calls “ruthless objectivity” when studying past cases of counterinsurgency for key lessons or models. As stated in the Small Wars Manual, “to a greater degree is each small war somewhat different from anything which has preceded it.” Thanks to globalization, the Internet, and Islam’s internal divisions, this conflict is certainly different in many respects. How different is a wonderful subject for a historian—or in this case, perhaps a pathologist.
This book is a well-documented postmortem, not a compelling operational history. Contrary to the publisher’s dust jacket, “gripping accounts of battle” are not this book’s real strength. Ultimately, Fiasco relentlessly documents a badly flawed policy decision, inappropriate operational planning, and counterproductive tactics. Most Marines will be more comfortable with Bing West and MajGen Ray L. Smith’s The March Up (Bantam, 2003) and its riveting narrative about I MEF’s blitzkrieg in Mesopotamia. Fiasco will appeal primarily to military professionals and students of national security affairs who want to look past the battles and see how these are matched to policy aims and desired effects. Look elsewhere for what military force actually achieved under heroic conditions. If you want to find out how senior policymakers deluded themselves with an inexplicable paradox of worst-case threat scenarios and best-case planning assumptions, delve deeply into this remarkable book.
LtCol Hoffman, a frequent contributor to MCG, is a Research Fellow, Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities, Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, Quantico.
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