Authors: Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor

ISBN: 9781400075393

 

    "Cobra II" was the code name for the land operations plan formulated for the invasion of Iraq. In the Vintage paperback version of the book by that title, 569 pages are devoted to the authors' minute detail of every  military aspect of what happened to that plan, with much lesser space devoted to political aspects.  The reader who is not a military buff probably will not be interested enough to wade through all of it, and mainly will be rewarded by the epilogue and an afterword that has been added to the original book.

 

   It should come as no surprise to anyone who watches television and reads newspapers to learn that President George W. Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and the commander of operations, General Tommy R. Franks, were advised by U.S. Army officers in the field that there was no need to invade Iraq because the regime of Saddam Hussein had been contained and that inspections designed to determine whether or not there were hidden weapons of mass destruction were working well. Since those officers were ignored, authors Michael R. Gordon (chief military correspondent for the New York Times) and retired U.S. Marine Corps Lieutenant General Bernard E. Trainor explain, all they could do to head off the impending disaster they foresaw was to offer the further advice that if the decision was to invade, the size of the invading force at absolute minimum would have to be several hundred thousand so as to be able to contain a predictable internal uprising in the aftermath of a military victory.

    As is also well known by now, the Bush/Rumsfeld theory was that size did not matter; "speed, agility, and precision" (the formula as Rumsfeld expressed it) provided the winning combination. The main object of operations was to put on a display of American power which in itself would be sufficient to set a democracy in place in the middle of the region and touch off further democratic regimes.

    "But President Bush and his team committed five grievous errors," Gordon and Trainor explain. "They underestimated their opponent and failed to understand the welter of ethnic groups and tribes that is Iraq. They did not bring the right tools to the fight and put too much confidence in technology. They failed to adapt to developments on the ground and remained wedded to their prewar analysis even after Iraqis showed their penchant for guerrilla tactics in the first days of the war. They presided over a system in which differing military and political perspectives were discouraged. Finally, they turned their back on the nation-building lessons from the Balkans and other crisis zones and fashioned a plan that unrealistically sought to shift much of the burden onto a defeated and ethnically diverse population and allied nations that were enormously ambivalent about the invasion. Instead of making plans to fight a counterinsurgency, the president and his team drew up plans to bring the troops home and all but declared the war won."

    The results of this blindness, the authors continue, were these: "There were not sufficient troops to seal the borders, guard the copious arms caches, and dominate the terrain," all of which allowed major parts of Iraq "to become a sanctuary for insurgents." More of this blindness than has been mentioned in mass media analysis is attributed to operations commander Franks, whom the authors depict as a Neanderthal militarily and generally. "Tommy Franks never acknowledged the enemy he faced nor did he comprehend the nature of the war he was directing," they write. When his subordinates told him he was facing an entirely different enemy than the one he had contemplated and a drastic change in tactics was needed, Franks told them to shut up and threatened to fire them if they disobeyed.

    Though I understand that the authors intended to limit the focus of their book, nevertheless there are two vitally important aspects of the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath that they should have discussed at least briefly in some depth: the lies of President Bush and his cronies, and the abysmal failure of the mass media to explain to the public what was happening and why. Otherwise, their book is and will remain for a long time a valuable source for future historians.

The above review was contributed by: Burton H. Wolfe: Burton is an award winning journalist and the author of hundreds of published articles and of books such The Hippies (New American Library), Hitler and the Nazis (Putnam), and Pileup on Death Row (Doubleday).  Wolfe publishes an occasional newsletter called "Burton Wolfe's Internet Rag" and maintains a web site.