Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

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In Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, Washington Post Senior Pentagon Correspondent Thomas E. Ricks has written a definitive, explosive account of the American military's tragic experience in Iraq. Drawing on the exclusive cooperation of an extraordinary number of American military personnel, including more than one hundred senior officers, and access to more than thirty thousand pages of official documents, many of them never before made public, Fiasco is required reading for anyone who wants to know how this stunning tragedy came about.

Spring 1991

This book's subtitle terms the U.S. effort in Iraq an adventure in the critical sense of adventurism—that is, with the view that 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. None of this was inevitable. It was made possible only through the intellectual acrobatics of simultaneously "worst-casing" the threat presented by Iraq while "best-casing" the subsequent cost and difficulty of occupying the country.

How the U.S. government could launch a preemptive war based on false premises is the subject of the first, relatively short part of this book. Blame must lie foremost with President Bush himself, but his incompetence and arrogance are only part of the story. It takes more than one person to make a mess as big as Iraq. That is, Bush could only take such a careless action because of a series of systemic failures in the American system. Major lapses occurred within the national security bureaucracy, from a weak National Security Council (NSC) to an overweening Pentagon and a confused intelligence apparatus. Larger failures of oversight also occurred in the political system, most notably in Congress, and in the inability of the media to find and present alternate sources of information about Iraq and the threat it did or didn't present to the United States. It is a tragedy in which every major player contributed to the errors, but in which the heroes tend to be anonymous and relatively powerless—the front-line American soldier doing his best in a difficult situation, the Iraqi civilian trying to care for a family amid chaos and violence. They are the people who pay every day with blood and tears for the failures of high officials and powerful institutions.

The run-up to the war is particularly significant because it also laid the shaky foundation for the derelict occupation that followed, and that constitutes the major subject of this book. While the Bush administration—and especially Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and L. Paul Bremer III—bear much of the responsibility for the mishandling of the occupation in 2003 and early 2004, blame also must rest with 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 counterproductive tactics that were employed in unprofessional ignorance of the basic tenets of counterinsurgency warfare.

The undefeated Saddam Hussein of 1991

The 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq can't be viewed in isolation. The chain of events began more than a decade earlier with the botched close of the 1991 Gulf War and then it continued in the U.S. effort to contain Saddam Hussein in the years that followed. "I don't think you can understand how OIF"— the abbreviation for Operation Iraqi Freedom, the U.S. military's term for the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq— "without understanding the end of the '91 war, especially the distrust of Americans" that resulted, said Army Reserve Maj. Michael Eisenstadt, an intelligence officer who in civilian life is an expert on Middle Eastern security issues.

The seeds of the second president Bush's decision to invade were planted by the unfinished nature of the 1991 war, in which the U.S. military expelled Iraq from Kuwait but ended the fighting prematurely and sloppily, without due consideration by the first president Bush and his advisers of what end state they wished to achieve. In February 1991, President Bush gave speeches that encouraged Iraqis "to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein the dictator to step aside." U.S. Air Force aircraft dropped leaflets on fielded Iraqi units urging them to rebel. On March 1, Iraqi army units in Basra began to do just that.

But when the Shiites of cities in the south rose up, U.S. forces stood by, their guns silent. It was Saddam Hussein who continued to fight. He didn't feel defeated, and in a sense, really wasn't. Rather, in the face of the U.S. counterattack into Kuwait, Saddam simply had withdrawn from that front to launch fierce internal offensives against the Shiites in the south of Iraq in early March and then, a few weeks later, against the Kurds in the north when they also rose up. An estimated twenty thousand Shiites died in the aborted uprising. Tens of thousands of Kurds fled their homes and crossed into the mountains of Turkey, where they began to die of exposure.

The U.S. government made three key mistakes in handling the end of the 1991 war. It encouraged the Shiites and Kurds to rebel, but didn't support them. Gen. H.Norman Schwarzkopf, in the euphoria of the war's end, approved an exception to the no-fly rule to permit Iraqi helicopter flights—and Iraqi military helicopters were promptly used to shoot up the streets of the southern cities. Army Capt. Brian McNerney commanded an artillery battery during the 1991 war. "When the Iraqi helicopters started coming out, firing on the Iraqis, that's when we knew it was bullshit," he recalled fifteen years later, when he was serving as a lieutenant colonel in Balad, Iraq. "It was very painful. I was thinking, 'Something is really wrong.' We were sitting in a swamp and it began to feel lousy."

Second, the U.S. government assumed that Saddam's regime was so damaged that his fall was inevitable. "We were disappointed that Saddam's defeat did not break his hold on power, as... we had come to expect," the first president Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, wrote in their 1998 joint memoir, A World Transformed. Third, the U.S. military didn't undercut the core of Saddam Hussein's power. Much of his army, especially elite Republican Guard units, were allowed to leave Kuwait relatively untouched. Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, who fought in one of the 1991 conflict's crucial battles, later called the outcome a "hollow" victory. "Despite the overwhelming force President George H.W. Bush provided, Desert Storm's most important objective, the destruction of the Republican Guard corps, was not accomplished," he wrote years later. "Instead, perhaps as many as 80,000 Iraqi Republican Guards, along with hundreds of tanks, armored fighting vehicles, and armed helicopters escaped to mercilessly crush uprisings across Iraq with a ruthlessness not seen since Stalin."

Having incited a rebellion against Saddam Hussein, the U.S. government stood by while the rebels were slaughtered. This failure would haunt the U.S. occupation twelve years later, when U.S. commanders were met not with cordial welcomes in the south but with cold distrust. In retrospect, Macgregor concluded, the 1991 war amounted to a "strategic defeat" for the United States.

Wolfowitz objects

The most senior official in the first Bush administration urging that more be done in the spring of 1991 to help the rebellious Shiites was Paul Wolfowitz, then the under secretary of defense for policy. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, Joint Chiefs chairman Colin Powell, and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft disagreed—and so thousands of Shiites were killed as U.S. troops sat not many miles away. This is one reason that many neoconservatives would later view Powell not as the moral paragon many Americans do but rather as someone willing to sit on his hands as Iraqis (and later, Bosnians) were killed on his watch.

Back then Powell was more often than not an ally of Cheney, who then was an unquestioned member of the hard-nosed realist school of foreign policy. "I was not an enthusiast about getting U.S. forces and going into Iraq," Cheney later said. "We were there in the southern part of Iraq to the extent we needed to be there to defeat his forces and to get him out of Kuwait, but the idea of going into Baghdad, for example, or trying to topple the regime wasn't anything I was enthusiastic about. I felt there was a real danger here that you would get bogged down in a long drawn-out conflict, that this was a dangerous, difficult part of the world." Sounding like a determined foreign policy pragmatist, Cheney said that Americans needed to accept that "Saddam is just one more irritant, but there's a long list of irritants in that part of the world." To actually invade Iraq, he said, "I don't think it would have been worth it."

Likewise, Schwarzkopf would write in his 1992 autobiography, "I am certain that had we taken all of Iraq, we would have been like the dinosaur in the tar pit— we would still be there, and we, not the United Nations, would be bearing the costs of that occupation."

Wolfowitz, for his part, penned an essay on the 1991 war two years later that listed the errors committed in its termination. "With hindsight it does seem like a mistake to have announced, even before the war was over, that we would not go to Baghdad, or to give Saddam the reassurance of the dignified cease-fire ceremony at Safwan," he wrote in 1993. "Even at the time it seemed unwise to allow Iraq to fly its helicopters, and all the more so to continue allowing them to do so when it became clear that their main objective was to slaughter Kurds in the North and Shia in the South." He pointed the finger at unnamed members of that Bush administration—"some U.S. government officials at the time"—who seemed to believe that a Shia-dominated Iraq would be an unacceptable outcome. And, he added, it was "clearly a mistake" not to have created a demilitarized zone in the south that would have been off-limits to Saddam's forces and maintained steady pressure on him. Finally, he cast some ominous aspersions on the motivations of unnamed senior U.S. military leaders—presumably Powell and Schwarzkopf. The failure to better protect the Kurds and Shiites, he charged, "in no small part re- flected a miscalculation by some of our military commanders that a rapid disengagement was essential to preserve the luster of victory, and to avoid getting stuck with postwar objectives that would prevent us from ever disengaging."

Wolfowitz seemed at this point to be determined that if he ever again got the chance to deal with Iraq policy, he would not defer to such military judgments about the perceived need to avoid getting stuck in Iraq. A decade later he would play a crucial role in the second Bush administration's drive to war, and this book will return repeatedly to examine his statements and actions. It is unusual for so much attention to be focused on a second-level official of sub-cabinet rank, but Wolfowitz was destined to play an unusually central role on Iraq policy. Andrew Bacevich, a Boston University foreign policy expert, is better placed than most to understand Wolfowitz, having first served a full career in the Army, and then taught at Johns Hopkins University's school of international affairs while Wolfowitz was its dean." More than any of the other dramatis personae in contemporary Washington, Wolfowitz embodies the central convictions to which the United States in the age of Bush subscribes," Bacevich wrote in 2005. He singled out "in particular, an extraordinary certainty in the righteousness of American actions married to an extraordinary confidence in the efficacy of American arms."

Operation Provide Comfort

There was one bright point for Wolfowitz in the muddled outcome of the 1991 war: the U.S.-led relief operation in northern Iraq. As it celebrated its swift triumph, the Bush administration grew increasingly embarrassed at seeing Saddam Hussein's relentless assault on the Kurds drive hordes of refugees into the snowy mountains along the Turkish-Iraqi border. The United States responded with a hastily improvised relief operation that gradually grew into a major effort, bringing tens of thousands of Kurds down from the mountains, and at first feeding and sheltering them, and later bringing them home. Largely conducted out of public view, Operation Provide Comfort was historically significant in several ways. It was the U.S. military's first major humanitarian relief operation after the Cold War, and it brought home the point that with the Soviet rivalry gone, it would be far easier to use U.S. forces overseas, even in sensitive areas on or near former Eastern Bloc territory. It involved moving some Marine Corps forces hundreds of miles inland in the Mideast, far from their traditional coastal areas of operation—a precursor of the way the Marines would be used in Afghanistan a decade later. It employed unmanned aerial vehicles to gather intelligence. In another wave of the future for the U.S. military establishment, it was extremely joint—that is, involving the Army, Marine Corps, Air Force, Navy, Special Operations troops, and allied forces. But most significantly, it was the first major long term U.S. military operation on Iraqi soil. And in that way it would come to provide Wolfowitz with a notion of how U.S. policy in Iraq might be redeemed after the messy end of the 1991 war. In retrospect, Provide Comfort also becomes striking because it brought together so many American military men who later would play a role in the U.S. occupation of Iraq in 2003.

Provide Comfort began somewhat haphazardly, without clear strategic goals. It was initiated as an effort simply to keep Iraqi Kurds alive in the mountains, and so at first was seen just as a matter of air-dropping supplies for about ten days to stranded refugees. Next came a plan to build tent camps to house those people. But United Nations officials counseled strongly against setting up refugee camps in Turkey for fear they would become like the Palestinian camps in Lebanon that never went away. So U.S. forces first tried to create a space back in Iraq where the refugees could go, and ultimately decided simply to push back the Iraqi military sufficiently to permit the Kurds to return to their homes.

"And we carved out that area in the north," recalled Anthony Zinni, then a Marine brigadier general who was chief of staff of Provide Comfort. Once that last step had been taken, he said, it became clear that "we were saddling ourselves with an open-ended commitment to protect them in that environment."

Wolfowitz meets Zinni

Wolfowitz flew out to northern Iraq to see the operation. "We were pushing the Iraqis real hard," then Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the commander of the operation, would recall. The leading edge of the U.S. push was a light infantry battalion commanded by an unusual Arabic-speaking lieutenant colonel named John Abizaid, who in mid-2003 would become the commander of U.S. military operations in the Mideast. Abizaid was fighting what he would later call a "dynamic 'war' of maneuver." He was operating aggressively but generally without shooting to carve out a safe area for the Kurds by moving around Iraqi army outposts. He also had the advantage of having U.S. Air Force warplanes circling overhead, ready to attack. Wary of having American troops behind them, with routes of retreat cut off by the planes overhead, the Iraqi forces would then fall back and yield control of territory. "We moved our ground and air forces around the Iraqis in such a way that they could fight or leave—and they left," Abizaid said later.

American troops were pushing farther and farther south into Iraq. Alarms went off in Washington when officials at the State Department and National Security Council learned just how far south U.S. forces had thrust. In the words of the Army's official history of Provide Comfort, "They expressed concern that the operation was getting out of hand." In the words of Gen. Garner, looking back, "The State Department went berserk." Orders soon arrived from the Pentagon to pull Abizaid's battalion back to the town of Dahuk.

Zinni recalled that Wolfowitz was interested in seeing how this nervy mission was being conducted. With Garner, the two met briefly at an airfield built for Saddam Hussein at Sirsenk in far northern Iraq.How was the U.S. military operating? Wolfowitz asked. Well, Zinni explained, this Lt. Col.Abizaid is pushing out the Iraqi forces, and we've got more and more space here inside Iraq for the Kurds, and we've kind of created a "security zone," or enclave, of some thirty-six hundred square miles. "I started giving the brief and he really, really got into it," recalled Zinni. "This was capturing him in some way, this was turning some lights on in his head. He was very interested in it. He was very excited about what we were doing there, in a way that I didn't quite understand." Zinni was puzzled. He had thought of the effort as a humanitarian mission—worth doing but without much political meaning. Wolfowitz saw it differently. "It struck me that he saw more in this than was there," Zinni said. Carving out parts of Iraq for anti-Saddam Iraqis would become a pet idea of Wolfowitz's in the coming years.

That meeting in Sirsenk would be one of the few times that Zinni and Wolfowitz would meet. But over the next fourteen years the two men would become the yin and yang of American policy on Iraq, with one working near the top of the U.S. military establishment while the other would be a sharp critic of the policy the first was implementing. Wolfowitz departed the Pentagon not long after his review of Provide Comfort, when the first Bush administration left office, and returned to academia.

Zinni went fairly quickly from being chief of staff in northern Iraq to deputy commander at Central Command, and then to the top job in that headquarters, overseeing U.S. military operations in Iraq and the surrounding region, from the Horn of Africa to Central Asia. In his command his main task was overseeing the containment of Iraq. In that capacity, he would be "kind of a groundbreaker for Marine four stars," showing that a Marine could handle the job of being a "CinC" (commander in chief), or regional military commander, an Air Force general recalled. Other Marines had held those top slots, but until Zinni none had really distinguished himself in handling strategic issues.

Wolfowitz, by contrast, spent the 1990s in opposition. His path intertwined briefly with Zinni's in the 2000 presidential election campaign, when both endorsed the Bush-Cheney ticket, though for very different reasons. After a year, Zinni would go into opposition against the Bush administration's drive toward war with Iraq, while Wolfowitz would became one of the architects of that war. They are very different men: Zinni is a Marine's Marine who still speaks in the accents of working-class Philadelphia, while Wolfowitz is a soft-spoken Ivy League political scientist, the son of an Ivy League mathematician. Yet both men are bright and articulate and utterly sincere. Retired Col. Gary Anderson, who knew Zinni in the Marines and later consulted with Wolfowitz on Iraq policy, said it was this very similarity between the two men that so divided them. "They both believe in their bones what they are saying," he observed. "Neither one is in any way disingenuous."

Former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, who has worked closely with both and who has been an ideological ally of Wolfowitz but a close friend of Zinni, when asked to compare the two, said, "They have more similarities than differences." Both are smart and tenacious, and both have strong interests in the Muslim world, from the Mideast to Indonesia—the latter a country in which both have done some work. "The main difference," Armitage continued, "is that Tony Zinni has been to war, and he's been to war a lot. So he understands what it is to ask a man to lose a limb for his country."

Wolfowitz later would say that "realists" such as Zinni did not understand that their policies were prodding the Mideast toward terrorism. If you liked 9/11, he would say after that event, just keep up policies such as the containment of Iraq. Zinni, for his part, would come to view Wolfowitz as a dangerous idealist who knew little about Iraq and had spent no real time on the ground there. Zinni would warn that Wolfowitz's advocacy of toppling Saddam Hussein through supporting Iraqi rebels was a dangerous and naive approach whose consequences hadn't been adequately considered. Largely unnoticed by most Americans during the 1990s, these contrasting views amounted to a prototype of the debate that would later occur over the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.