Deluded

[rodeodance]

http://www.newyorker.com/printables/talk/060403ta_talk_coll

Deluded

By Steve Coll
The New Yorker
03 April 2006 Issue

After the fall of Baghdad, three years ago, the United States military began a secret investigation of the decision-making within Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. The study, carried out by the U.S. Joint Forces Command, drew on captured documents and interviews with former Baath Party officials and Iraqi military officers, and when it was completed, last year, it was delivered to President Bush. The full work remains classified, but "Cobra II," a recently published book about the early phases of the war, by the Times reporter Michael Gordon and Lieutenant General Bernard Trainor, has disclosed parts of the study, and the Pentagon has released declassified sections, which Foreign Affairs has posted on its Web site. Reading them, it is easy to imagine why the Administration might resist publication of the full study. The extracts describe how the Iraq invasion, more than any other war in American history, was a construct of delusion. Frustratingly, however, we now understand much more about the textures of fantasy in Saddam's palaces in early 2003 than we do about the self-delusions then prevalent in the West Wing.

.............

When the opposing armies finally crashed into each other in the desert, the professional officers fighting the war had in common a rich disdain for the self-styled strategists who had sent them into battle. Gordon and Trainor's extensive interviews with the Army and Marine generals and colonels who commanded the invasion show that they had almost as little faith in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his aides as their Iraqi counterparts had in Saddam and his sons. Indeed, the American officers featured in "Cobra II" are remarkably open about the war's many errors of conception and execution. Of course, they do not seem to believe that any of the big mistakes were their fault-they blame the C.I.A. for repeatedly getting the battlefield intelligence wrong, and they blame Rumsfeld and his pliant subordinates for sending them to occupy Iraq with a force of inadequate size. The Army and the Marines have paid an extraordinarily high price for the war's compounding blunders, and, presumably, the officers are speaking candidly now not just to settle scores but to avoid such bungling in the future.

As usual, this transparency and self-reflection does not extend to the White House. Bush and Cheney-even with their approval ratings at historic lows and with Iraq veering toward open civil war-and their staffs still apparently find it impossible to admit error. In the week marking the third anniversary of the invasion, the Bush Administration delivered a portfolio of speeches and op-ed essays that seem even more arid and isolated than usual. (The President kept repeating his claim that he had a "strategy for victory," but he sounded as if he were reading texts from 2004 that his staff had forgotten to clear from his desk.) At the same time, the White House reissued a national-security strategy doctrine that blandly reaffirmed Bush's intent to "act pre-emptively," should he see the need, as if there were not a reason in the world to reconsider his assumptions.

The President and the members of his war cabinet now routinely wave at the horizon and speak about the long arc of history's judgment-many years or decades must pass, they suggest, before the overthrow of Saddam and its impact on the Middle East can be properly evaluated. This is not only an evasion; it is bad historiography. Particularly in free societies, botched or unnecessary military invasions are almost always recognized as mistakes by the public and the professional military soon after they happen, and are rarely vindicated by time. This was true of the Boer War, Suez, and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and it will be true of Iraq. At best, when enough time has passed, and the human toll is not so palpable, we may come to think of the invasion, and its tragicomedy of missing weapons, as just another imperial folly, the way we now remember the Spanish-American War or the doomed British invasions of Afghanistan. But that will take a very long time, and it will never pass as vindication.

[Erika]

1. W's attempt at imperialism - failed n/t

[Dunvegan]

2. Defense Secretaries come and go...

...but military lifers are forever.

Kinda of like presidents and Helen Thomas.

They'll talk because they're lifers. Rumsfeld is a flash in the "oil pan."