| Ander Nieuws week 8 / Midden-Oosten 2013 |
The New York Times
February 8, 2013
Andrew J. Bacevich
Two graphs introduce the text of "The Endgame," Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor's instructive yet analytically shallow account of the Iraq war after the fall of Baghdad. The first depicts weekly attacks in Iraq from early 2004 to mid-2010, the second civilian deaths from January 2006 to May 2010. The graphs present identical images: bad news getting worse until early 2007, then pronounced improvement. The message is clear: In early 2007 a decided turn occurred. As with the Civil War after Gettysburg or the war in the Pacific after Midway, a conflict that had been going badly suddenly started heading in the right direction.
In early 2007, of course, Gen. David H. Petraeus had arrived in Baghdad to assume command of all coalition forces. Petraeus brought a revised strategy known as counterinsurgency, or COIN, that he himself had played a key role in formulating (or at least rediscovering). Soon thereafter, additional United States forces began deploying to the war zone. All of this - a new commander, revised strategy, more troops - formed what has since become enshrined as the "surge."
Groups and individuals invested in the proposition that the surge "worked" - many members of the officer corps, most Republicans and virtually all neoconservatives - will welcome "The Endgame" as an account sustaining their conviction that the Iraq war, however belatedly, ended up in the win column. While by no means overlooking the egregious blunders occurring along the way, Gordon and Trainor grant that claim a qualified endorsement. Not insignificantly, they title their concluding chapter "Mission Accomplished." Yet to accept any such verdict - no matter how narrowly defined the mission - is to misconstrue the war's outcome and significance.
As chroniclers of combat, Gordon and Trainor make a formidable team. Both are seasoned journalists, with Trainor having the added credential of being a retired Marine three-star general. Gordon is the chief military correspondent of The New York Times, and Trainor worked for the paper from 1986 to 1990. "The Endgame" completes their Iraq trilogy. The first two volumes - "The Generals' War"(1995), dealing with Operation Desert Storm, and "Cobra II" (2006), which focused on the 2003 invasion - covered events from the battlefield back to the White House, but were notable for their stringent criticism of senior American military leaders. When it comes to evaluating general officer performance, the two are not dazzled by the press-briefing version of events.
Here again their narrative extends from Washington to the fighting front, while drawing on an astonishing array of classified documents. (The arrest of Pfc. Bradley Manning apparently did little to curb the military's penchant for leaking secrets.) "The Endgame" seeks to "provide the most comprehensive account to date" of the events it describes. It achieves that. Even so, where it matters most, the authors come up short.
Future historians may well classify the surge as a myth concocted to perpetuate a fraud. The myth centers on the claim that a strategy devised in Washington and implemented by a brilliant general saved the day. The fraud is that a 20-year military effort to determine the fate of Iraq yielded something approximating a positive outcome. Although "The Endgame"provides an abundance of evidence to demolish the myth, Gordon and Trainor shy away from doing so. With the American public and political elites inclined simply to forget the Iraq war, "The Endgame"provides a rationale for doing just that.
"The paternity of the surge would be long debated," Gordon and Trainor write, "all the more so once it became clear that it succeeded militarily." They are surprisingly reluctant to resolve that debate. More surprising still is their willingness to accept the verdict of success.
In fact, the term used to describe the campaign that American forces pursued beginning in 2007 is a misnomer. Rather than a "surge," something like an "accommodation" is more apt, capturing the shift to buying off insurgents instead of seeking to defeat them. As Gordon and Trainor make clear, the impetus for the so-called Sunni Awakening came from the bottom up rather than the top down. "In practice," they write, "it was not generals but leaders at the battalion and company level" who took the initiative in cutting deals with warlords. Paying off the enemy did not appear among the principles touted by General Petraeus's famous counterinsurgency manual. His contribution was to put his seal of approval on actions instigated by subordinates wrestling with earlier failures of American generalship.
Meanwhile, responsibility for killing those who could not be bought - chiefly foreign fighters filling the ranks of Al Qaeda in Iraq - fell increasingly to the special operations forces commanded by Gen. Stanley McChrystal. As Gordon and Trainor make clear, and as McChrystal's memoir "My Share of the Task" recounts in graphic detail, the process of honing "black ops" capabilities had begun long before the surge. Here too, Petraeus inherited and exploited improvements for which others also deserve credit.
Taking command at a moment when American efforts in Iraq were manifestly failing, Petraeus identified a path that avoided abject defeat. This rates as no small achievement. Yet avoiding defeat should not be confused with winning.
Back in Washington, the Bush administration was intent on pretending otherwise. To shore up flagging public support for the war, it published a White Paper entitled "The National Strategy for Victory in Iraq," based on "the mantra of clear, hold and build." But this was, according to Gordon and Trainor, simply "an egregious bit of deceptive advertising" cooked up by the White House staff. Coined to suggest that the administration had finally formulated a coherent blueprint for success, it amounted to little more than "an elaborate bumper sticker."
In truth, victory no longer defined the objective. In overthrowing Saddam Hussein, Bush had sought to "upset the established order to spread the gospel of freedom." By 2007, the administration had deep-sixed such grand ambitions. "Behind closed doors, defeating the insurgency was not the goal," the authors write. "Rather, the goal was to whittle it down to manageable proportions so that the Iraqi forces could handle the fight for a protracted period." This accurately describes what Petraeus and his successors achieved: they "tamped down the violence," thereby "tamping down the sectarian infighting," which enabled them to "tamp down the crisis." In short, the surge stanched the bleeding, allowing the White House to congratulate itself on a job well done.
To distract attention from the mistakes and consequences of the war, the administration - with eager news media collaboration - elevated Petraeus to the status of cult figure. The retired Army general Jack Keane, a behind-the-scenes promoter of the surge and of Petraeus himself, "had argued that with so much going wrong in the war the American public needed a hero." For such a role, the shrewd Petraeus, equally adept at cultivating journalists and courting politicians, came right out of central casting. Installing him alongside the likes of Ulysses S. Grant and George Patton in the pantheon of American greats helped refurbish an image of United States military prowess badly battered by actual events in Iraq. That "The Endgame"includes no graphs tallying cumulative war costs and casualties or correlating recent American economic woes with the Iraq war's duration qualifies as somehow fitting.
After a brief gestation period, the misbegotten Iraq war gave birth to its own misbegotten offspring, namely, naïve faith in the generalissimo as war-redeemer. The principal beneficiary and victim of this idea was McChrystal, tapped by President Obama in 2009 to save the day in Afghanistan as Petraeus had purportedly done in Iraq. Heralded at the time of his appointment as cut from the Petraeus mold, McChrystal lasted barely a year in the job, felled by - take your pick - a) an unethical reporter with an ax to grind; or b) his own obtuseness. In either case, before he had effected an Afghan turnaround, McChrystal's military career came to a crashing halt. "My Share of the Task" offers little to suggest that success was in the offing regardless of how long he might have stayed in the job.
Over the course of five years spent fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq, McChrystal had demonstrated an impressive aptitude for military tactics. Afghanistan, however, required something more. Job 1 was to design a comprehensive campaign that was political as well as military. Persuaded (mistakenly) that counterinsurgency had produced magical results in Iraq, McChrystal set out to apply a similar formula in Afghanistan (which resembled Iraq about as much as New Jersey resembles New Mexico). The key to success, he believed, lay in forging "durable, genuine friendships" with Afghan and Pakistani leaders willing to pursue an American-engineered plan for nation-building. Although McChrystal cajoled - or maneuvered - President Obama into giving this a shot, progress by the time he departed Afghanistan was far from clear. His successor in command, Petraeus, fared little better. With Petraeus having since given way to Gen. John R. Allen, scheduled to be replaced in the coming weeks by Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the infatuation with counterinsurgency has now run its course, and four-star generals have returned to the ranks of mere mortals, a process punctuated by Petraeus's own recent fall from grace.
Of the several occasions when he himself attracted critical attention - the Pat Tillman affair, for example, or the leaking of his Afghan strategic assessment - McChrystal offers explanations that fall somewhere between perfunctory and disingenuous. The truth is that he comes across as a skilled craftsman perhaps but an astonishingly unreflective architect. Few if any senior American officers have spent more time than McChrystal in the post-9/11 combat theaters. Yet as to what those wars have wrought and at what cost to the United States or to others, he is essentially mute. Like Gordon and Trainor, McChrystal represses any inclination to probe too deeply.
THE ENDGAME
The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, From George W. Bush to Barack Obama
By Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor
Illustrated. 779 pp. Pantheon Books. $35.
MY SHARE OF THE TASK
A Memoir
By Stanley McChrystal
Illustrated. 451 pp. Portfolio/Penguin. $29.95.
Andrew J. Bacevich teaches at Boston University. An updated edition of his book "The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War" will appear next month.
© 2013 The New York Times Company
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