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.
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