Allen Lane £25 pp496
This is a terrible story. Thomas Ricks, the highly respected Washington Post defence correspondent, could not be further from the grotesque antics of Michael Moore, yet his scrupulous account of the disaster in Iraq will fill the reader with anger. His research confirms how some extremely clever neocons in Bush’s circle were blinded by arrogance and ideological obstinacy. The degree of their irresponsibility, intellectual dishonesty, incompetence and lack of imagination is almost beyond belief. Virtually every decision they took has played straight into the hands of the West’s deadliest enemies.
The obsession with Saddam Hussein went back to the inconclusive end of the first Gulf war. George Bush Sr’s advisers believed that Saddam would be overthrown. They encouraged the Kurds in the north and the Shias in the south to rise in revolt, but not only did they fail to provide assistance, they did nothing to stop Saddam using his attack helicopters against them. The resulting massacres left a bitter legacy of anti-American distrust. The situation became so terrible in the north that the Americans set up an enclave for the Kurds protected by the US Air Force. Paul Wolfowitz, the leading neocon hawk, was its most fervent proponent. Wolfowitz became carried away with the disastrously misleading historical parallel that Saddam was the new Hitler, and all those who did not want to overthrow him were appeasers. He failed to remember the results of Anthony Eden’s conviction that Nasser was a modern Hitler.
Wolfowitz and his fellow right-wingers argued that Saddam had become more powerful during Bill Clinton’s presidency. They denigrated Clinton’s Operation Desert Fox of December 1998, saying it was launched only to divert attention from his domestic problems, yet the multiple air and cruise strikes came close to destroying the regime. They also put an effective end to the Iraqi WMD programme. Saddam had already started to destroy most of these weapons to avoid being caught out by the UN inspections. He just could not admit to his own people and the rest of the Arab world that he was bowing to pressure. Many of these weapons were secretly concreted into roads.
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After 9/11, Bush and his team (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz) put Iraq in their sights after the Taliban. Links between the Iraqi regime and Al-Qaeda were grossly exaggerated, if not invented entirely. Meanwhile, the highly dubious and contradictory intelligence coming out through Ahmed Chalabi’s organisation was cherry-picked shamelessly to support their claims that Saddam was still developing WMD and even working towards nuclear weapons. After 9/11, hardly anyone in Congress, the CIA or the Pentagon dared to question the grotesquely distorted intelligence reports. One of the few voices of sanity was Anthony Zinni, the Marine Corps general who had supervised the containment of Saddam during the Clinton years. He had run a war game on what could go wrong in a post-Saddam Iraq, and the result was terrifying.
The neocon approach was permeated with paradox. They proposed fighting the new Global War on Terror (GWOT) with a conventional battle against an old-fashioned Arab dictator who styled himself on Joseph Stalin and was loathed by Al-Qaeda. Their basic strategy was what might be called a reverse domino theory. The Vietnam war had been fought to prevent the rest of southeast Asia going communist. In 2002, the neocon rollback idea was that a democratic Iraq would start its own domino effect and turn the Middle East round. The simplistic wishfulness even extended to Wolfowitz claiming that Iraq would be able to pay for its own reconstruction and to police itself.
Rumsfeld was convinced that a speedy military victory would kickstart the whole process, so few troops would be needed. All the warnings, including those of General Norman Schwarzkopf, were dismissed. America was going to war with PowerPoint presentations. Conventional military planning was despised. Then, in February 2003, General Colin Powell was forced into prostituting his own good reputation with a speech to the UN based on a total misrepresentation of the intelligence available.
The war was fought and won, and the peace was lost just as quickly. Rumsfeld’s refusal to send back-up forces meant that there was no security. The country exploded in a rash of looting, which Rumsfeld tried to brush off with that notorious phrase: “Stuff happens”. There had been no coherent planning for the aftermath, and the opportunity to win Iraqi support was thrown away. The situation became far worse when Ambassador Paul Bremer, the Bush administration’s proconsul, decided to disband the army, the one institution that held Iraq together.
Meanwhile, the US Army, trained for “shock and awe” with vast firepower, found itself unprepared for low-intensity operations. With a few honourable exceptions, such as the 101st Airborne Division, US formations went in hard and indiscriminately. They smashed down doors, humiliated householders and arrested so many people who had nothing to offer in the way of intelligence that the notorious prison of Abu Ghraib overflowed. Even Iraqis who had welcomed the overthrow of Saddam began to hate their occupiers.
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Now, three years after the invasion, the country is on the edge of civil war. American troops are sealed off in magnificent bases with nightclubs, internet cafes and burger bars. Lights blaze at all hours, while the Iraqis they are supposed to be protecting still suffer, with no security and only a couple of hours of electricity a day. Worst of all, the neocon strategy has achieved the opposite of what it set out to do. It has made the entire region far more volatile, has opened up a whole new front for Al-Qaeda and has brought it thousands of new recruits. Operation Iraqi Freedom has proved the most disastrous venture in modern times. On putting down this book, one is amazed that no move has yet been made to impeach its architects. But Fiasco is already having a huge effect in America. So who knows where things might lead?
Available at the Books First price of £23 (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585
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books:
The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq
by George Packer
(Faber £14.99)
Balanced account of how America set about changing the history of the Middle East