What Went Wrong In Iraq -- And How To Make It Right -- Joh..

"Why Victory Still Proves Elusive"

"What went wrong in Iraq -- and how to make it right."

BY JOHN KEEGAN

Wednesday, August 16, 2006
The Wall Street Journal

"The mystery of the Iraq War is to explain how a brilliantly executed
invasion turned into a messy counterinsurgency struggle. Part of the
explanation, at least, is a lack of troops, a fault for which the Defense
Department has been responsible. The current policy has its roots in the
desire of Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, to wean the Army away from
its decades of indulgence, when it routinely planned to win conflicts by
confronting enemies with mass--masses of soldiers, masses of equipment
(particularly tanks and armored vehicles) and masses of ground-attack
aircraft.

Mr. Rumsfeld disliked the concept of mass because it carried huge financial
costs but also because it locked the Army into a style of war-making that
sought victory through firepower rather than through speedy maneuver. He had
supporters in the civilian side of the Pentagon, notably his deputy, Paul
Wolfowitz, and a man the rank below, Douglas Feith. Both also wanted to slim
the Army down.

The result of their efforts to do so led to the expeditionary force sent to
Iraq in 2003 being considerably weaker than that which had fought the Gulf
War of 1991. The initial outcome, though, was similar: the rapid collapse of
Iraqi resistance at only slight cost in American lives, a result that seemed
to justify Mr. Rumsfeld's force policies and his belief that "speed kills."

For several months the second Iraq War seemed a triumph. Then the American
army of occupation, whose continuing presence was dedicated to the political
transformation of the country, began to come under low-grade attack by Iraqi
guerrillas. American soldiers began to die, and attempts to create a
successor regime, organized on democratic principles, failed to take root.
Political instability was accompanied by rising military difficulty, until
by 2005 a full-scale insurgency was in swing, with dozens of American
soldiers dying every month and the numbers of insurgents growing
proportionately.

In "Fiasco," Thomas Ricks traces this familiar history and attempts to
explain its reasons, interviewing various military experts and reporting
from the fighting in Iraq itself. He has severely critical views of Mr.
Rumsfeld, Mr. Wolfowitz and Mr. Feith, but he does not heap all the blame on
their preinvasion policy. He also points to the mistakes made by American
leaders of the postwar administration in Iraq, notably Paul Bremer, who
became head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in May 2003.

Mr. Bremer's prime mistakes, according to Mr. Ricks, were to disband the
Iraqi army and to bar former members of the Baath party from positions in
government. Disbanding the army released tens of thousands of trained
fighters into unemployment; barring Baathists from administrative positions
robbed the new governing coalition of the service of the very people it
needed to restore order and good government. These mistakes, Mr. Ricks
thinks, ensured that the initial failure of the occupation would persist and
worsen.

Few would disagree with the analysis in "Fiasco." It is not, however, a
complete explanation of what went wrong. Mr. Ricks makes several convincing
points about what underlay the insurgency, notably the supreme importance of
the value of respect for personal dignity in Arab society. He notes how, at
least in the early stages of the occupation, American forces too often
showed unconcern for Iraqi dignity--by performing too many tasks and
conducting too many operations unilaterally. But he does not take account of
what may underlie the whole insurgency, which is the rise of Islamic
militancy across the Muslim world.

America was so certain that what it had to offer--modern government in an
incorrupt and democratic form--was so obviously desirable that it failed
altogether to understand that the Iraqis wanted something else, which is
self-government in an Islamic form. It is too late now to start again.

All that can be hoped is that the U.S. Army will prevail in its
counterinsurgency and, as Mr. Ricks's gripping accounts of the troops in
action suggest, it may still. His description of Marines "attacking into an
ambush" leaves one in no doubt that American soldiers know combat secrets
that their enemies do not and cannot match. Whether pure military skills
will win the war, however, cannot be predicted."

"Mr. Keegan is the author of "The Face of Battle," "The Iraq War" and many
other books.
----------------------------------------

DSH

Lux et Veritas et Libertas

Deus Vult

On Wed, 16 Aug 2006 17:41:35 +0100, D. Spencer Hines wrote:

> "Why Victory Still Proves Elusive"
>
> "What went wrong in Iraq -- and how to make it right."

Nothing can be done to make it right. The US invaded the wrong country.
Should have invaded Saudi Arabia, which is the source of the terrorism.
They've been paying off the Ayatollahs since the Shah stopped doing it.
They control Bin Laden. Do you really think that Bin Laden does anything
Saud doesn't want done, when he can hold his 19 brothers and sisters
hostage? When he can cut their balls, tits, and heads off? Are these
'leaders' idiots? Are they children? How can 'experts' like Mr.
Keegan be so stupid and naive? What do they think they're playing at?
It's just incredible. daveA