A work of prodigious research, Cobra II will likely become the benchmark by which other histories of the Iraq invasion are measured. Note the word invasion. Cobra II was the name US commanders gave the operation to depose Saddam Hussein's regime. It is the story of the planning, execution and immediate aftermath of that invasion that is related by Michael Gordon, The New York Times' chief military correspondent, and Bernard Trainor, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general and former military correspondent for The Times, in Cobra II.
The book's title is therefore more apt than its subtitle -- The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq -- which is only half accurate. Because the narrative essentially ends in the summer of 2003, this book is not a history of the counterinsurgency campaign that the US has been waging in Iraq since then. It is, however, a penetrating examination of how and why the US got itself into that mess.
Considering the wealth of detail it contains, Cobra II is a smooth read, but a passing familiarity with the military and the events in question will help the reader. In a work of such scope, some issues inevitably receive less attention than some might think they merit. The rescue of Private First Class Jessica Lynch and the way the US Defense Department misinformed the press about her situation receives no mention. The impact of the Pentagon's unprecedented decision to facilitate the embedding of hundreds of reporters goes similarly unexplored. The text also contains a few mistakes -- the British Special Air Service is misnamed at one point. But these are few and far between, and largely inconsequential.
The bulk of the book is taken up with a near-comprehensive blow-by-blow account of the fighting that occurred over four weeks in March and April 2003. But while these chapters shed new light on several important facets of the war, and demonstrate how realities on the ground did not match US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's theories of military transformation, the book's beginning and ending sections are the most valuable. Here the authors explain how the administration of US President George W. Bush drove the nation to war in Iraq, and how decisions made before the invasion and immediately following Saddam's ouster precipitated the vicious insurgency now wracking that country.
It makes for unsettling reading. In richly detailed, almost dispass-ionate prose, the authors present a damning indictment of the Bush administration's national security team.
Gordon and Trainor recount in granular detail the behind-the-scenes maneuvering as the invasion plan came together, making it clear not only that by the end of 2001 the administration's focus had shifted from Afghanistan to Baghdad, but also that planning for an invasion was already at an advanced stage.
The authors contrast the feverish preparations for war with Iraq taking place in 2002 at the Pentagon and the US Central Command under General Tommy Franks with the misleading statements emanating from senior officials. "I have no war plans on my desk," Bush told a May 23, 2002, news conference. Given that planning for the war had been under way for six months, "the president's statement was true in only the most literal and trivial sense," the authors write. Franks, the authors note, went even further. When a radio reporter asked him that same month how many troops he would need to invade Iraq, he replied that Rumsfeld "has not yet asked me to put together a plan to do that." If even half of what Gordon and Trainor report about the state of planning by late May 2002 is true, this was a lie.
Obsessed with minimizing the size of the invading force, Rumsfeld dismissed advice from experts inside and outside government who argued for a larger contingent than the 140,000 or so troops sent into Iraq. His efforts "played havoc" with the military's preparations, according to the authors, and sowed the seeds for the anarchy that followed the fall of the Hussein regime. The plan that Central Command wrote under Rumsfeld's close supervision was also based on hopelessly optimistic Central Intelligence Agency predictions that Iraqi units would capitulate -- ie. not merely surrender but also change sides. "Rarely has a military plan depended on such a bold assumption," the authors write.
But although planning for the Iraq invasion began within weeks of al-Qaeda's Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the US, a combination of hubris, arrogance, naivete and sheer incompetence meant that little attention was paid to what the military terms "Phase IV," or post-conflict operations. Rumsfeld insisted on the Defense Department being in charge of Phase IV. But Franks, whose responsibility it was to ensure that the US military was prepared for the occupation, "seemed content to leave the lion's share of the Phase IV planning to others in the government," the authors write. As late as Feb. 20, 2003, barely a month before the invasion, "there was no plan" for Phase IV, recalled a colonel on the staff of Jay Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general, whom Rumsfeld charged with overseeing the early phase of the occupation.
Cobra II provides fascinating insights into what went wrong in the first critical weeks after the fall of Baghdad. What stands out in particular is the frustration of the military leaders on the ground with decisions taken by their political bosses. Garner's replacement, Ambassador Paul Bremer, not only made the error of abolishing the Iraqi army, but compounded it by preventing the US military from holding local elections for fear that "the wrong guy" might win.
The consensus of the military leaders quoted in Cobra II is that these decisions, combined with the lack of enough troops to restore order, caused the US to miss a window of opportunity and lose the initiative in the weeks following the invasion. In a reference to the insurgency that erupted in the power vacuum created by these mistakes, Gordon and Trainor conclude that "none of this was inevitable."
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