Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq
Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor. New York: Pantheon Books, 2006. 603 pp. $27.95.
Reviewed by Ernest B. "Pat" Furgurson
Seldom has the public had access to such an authoritative, detailed examination of a war while it still straggled on. Gordon, the New York Times' chief military correspondent, and Trainor, a former Marine lieutenant general, have made full use of the contacts and confidence built in years on the job to examine the planning and execution of the continuing campaign in Iraq. The heart of the book is a clearly written combat narrative, based on hundreds of interviews and first-hand material from participants ranging from four-star commanders to truck drivers and hospital corpsmen. The narrative is sandwiched by hard-headed analysis, using previously classified documents from both sides of the conflict.
The authors dissect how we went to war, but do not get bogged down in the argument over whether we should have gone in the first place. Nor do they deal with the wider effect of the grinding war and its surrounding controversies on America's image in the world, or on our readiness to meet crisis elsewhere, for example in Korea or the Formosa Strait. But they do help explain why U.S. decision makers got it so wrong about those weapons of mass destruction.
Iraqi documents and interrogation of Iraqi officials disclose that Saddam Hussein intentionally kept the absence of those weapons a secret from the West and even from most of his own generals. He was willing to risk an American attack, because he did not believe it would come all the way to Baghdad and remove him from power. But he was mainly concerned about Iran-he wanted Tehran to think he had vicious weapons and was willing to use them again, as he had in the Iran-Iraq war.
The authors' intensive interviewing found memorable moments in the current war once it started, as when General Tommy Franks gathered his generals at field headquarters 19 days after fighting began and told them to hold hands and offer thanks to God for the imminent victory. The capture of Baghdad, Franks believed, would be the effective end of the war, with only a little sweeping up to do afterward. Gordon and Trainor offer this scene in a single deadpan sentence and then move on, but it is a neat capsule of the whole story. Repeatedly, those who asked Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld why he did not send more troops were told that the generals were not asking for more. It is easy to see why.
Rumsfeld was determined to justify his campaign to slim down the military, to rely on speed and high-tech weapons instead of more boots on the ground. Thus he scoffed at the existing contingency plan that called for 400,000-plus men and women to defeat Hussein and control Iraq. Franks, head of Central Command, complied by reducing that estimate, then reducing it again and again before the attack began.
By the time U.S. tanks were approaching Baghdad, Franks' little thanksgiving ceremony seemed appropriate. Rumsfeld's "shock and awe" theory was proving itself. Franks would get credit for quickly toppling Hussein, and what happened afterward was not his problem. Making Iraq a democratic model for the region would be a simple task, handled by the State Department, our allies, and the Iraqis themselves, aided by only a minimal American force. According to the authors, Franks felt that "anything other than warfighting was an unglamorous and thankless burden." He "was already considering retiring and negotiating a multimillion-dollar deal to write his memoirs, much as Schwarzkopf had done after the Gulf war." (In fact, within six weeks he announced his retirement. His book came out the next year as he prepared to campaign for George W. Bush's re-election.)
The bottom line, as Gordon and Trainor state flatly, is that "There's a direct link between the way the Iraq War was planned and the bitter insurgency the Americanled coalition subsequently confronted. The ambitious plans that the president announced to transform American defense proved to be at odds with his bold plan to transform a region."
The authors' questioning of an immense cast of captains, colonels, and generals turned up little or no interservice rivalry. They found that troops in the field adapted to shifting battle conditions with much higher professionalism than was demonstrated at the Pentagon or in Tampa, headquarters of CentCom. Despite Trainer's 30-plus years of active duty as a Marine, there is no hint of favoritism in his account (although he does manage to slip in two mentions of the Corps' first hero, Lieutenant Presley O'Bannon of the Barbary Wars).
About every six months, another commendable book about the Iraq war comes along and overtakes those before, each adding to the sum of our knowledge. None so far has surpassed this one, and it is unlikely that any will exceed its thorough reporting and analysis until well after it is over and records still classified are open to view.
Mr. Furgurson, a Civil War historian, was a Marine lieutenant in the 1950s and a Vietnam correspondent in the 1960s. His latest book is Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War (Knopf, 2004).
War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare from World War I to al-Qaeda
Jonathan B. Tucker. New York: Pantheon Books, 2006. 479 pp. 111. $30.00.
Reviewed by William J. Astore
In 18 tightly-written chapters, Dr. Tucker provides a comprehensive and sobering account of the development and deployment of chemical weapons from World War I to the present day. He devotes a brief chapter to chemical weapons in World War I, including chlorine, phosgene, and mustard gases, noting that "more than 124,000 metric tons of 39 different toxic agents" were used in this war, resulting in a million casualties. However, he does not assess whether chemical weapons had a decisive impact on the war, as Albert Palazzo has argued in seeking Victory on the Western Front. Tucker then devotes three chapters to the development of nerve agents by IG Farben and the German chemical industry before and during World War II. Far more toxic and difficult to detect than earlier chemical weapons, German nerve agents like Tabun and Sarin would have inflicted severe casualties on Allied soldiers and civilians had they been used. However. Hitler vacillated (he himself had been a chemical casualty in 1918), and the German high command, fearing the Allies had developed equivalent nerve agents (they had not), decided against using them.
Tucker next recounts the "fight for the spoils" among the Allies for German chemical expertise, which began well before V-E Day in May 1945. With the Soviets apparently having seized the post-war lead (they captured, dismantled, and shipped German Tabun and Sarin production plants to Stalingrad, together with many German scientists), the British and Americans pressed ahead with their own development of nerve agents, relying like the Soviets on captured German stocks and experienced German scientists. In passing. Tucker notes that the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) had a budget of $1 billion dollars in 1942 as well as a network of 13 manufacturing facilities, a fact he could have developed further. Indeed, the CWS was second only to the Manhattan Project in scale, its main research and development center at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland being supplemented by a sophisticated development laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Like the much better known Manhattan Project, the CWS helped to establish "big science" and the growing influence and power of the military-academic-industrial complex that President Eisenhower cited in his farewell speech in 1961.
The institutional momentum acquired by the CWS, further catalyzed by the Cold War, ensured massive U.S. efforts to produce large quantities of Sarin and other nerve agents such as VX. The result, Tucker notes, was a "chemical arms race" with a dynamic similar to the nuclear arms race that ran in parallel. It was a dangerous business, with the accidental spread of VX nerve agent to Skull Valley in Utah in 1968 killing several thousand sheep. Most galling to ranchers and outside investigators was the U.S. Army's "stonewalling" (Tucker's word) tactics and its refusal to take responsibility for this accident. A further cautionary tale is provided by the death of Ronald Maddison. a young Royal Air Force engineer who volunteered for a "safe" test of Sarin in 1953. Only in 2004 did the British government admit culpability for a test that had been unsafe, unlawful, and ultimately unconscionable.
With respect to U.S. Navy participation in chemical warfare, Tucker cites the Navy's consistent reluctance to get involved. Storing chemical weapons in the tight confines of ships was at best problematic and at worst potentially fatal to the crew. But the Navy did hold tests with nerve agents as part of the Shipboard Hazard and Defense (SHAD) program in the 1960s. Tucker briefly discusses the nature of these tests without commenting on their results.
Tucker carries the story forward into the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s with chapters on binary chemical weapons. Iraqi use of nerve agents in the Iran-Iraq War and the fear in 1991 that Iraqi Scud missiles aimed at Israel carried nerve agents, the use of Sarin by terrorists in an attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995, and U.S. and Russian efforts today to secure and destroy dangerous stockpiles of deteriorating chemical weapons. Finally, he turns to current efforts by the Bush administration to inhibit chemical weapons proliferation in the context of the Global War on Terrorism.
Well-researched and clearly written, Tucker's book is an incisive primer on the history of chemical weaponry and warfare. Fair and balanced in its coverage, it should stimulate serious reflection among its readers, hopefully "strengthening the legal and moral barriers against the use of chemistry for hostile purposes," the noble goal with which he concludes his book.
Dr. Astore is an associate professor at the Pennsylvania College of Technology in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. He has also taught at the USAF Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School.
A Carrier at War: On Board the USS Kitty Hawk in the Iraq War
Richard F. Miller. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005. 242 pp. Index. $26.95.
Reviewed by John Allen Williams
During the first Gulf War neither the Navy nor the Army took full advantage of the public relations opportunities presented by the rapid and successful military operations. Only the Air Force, with daily "Star Wars" videos of smart munitions sailing into windows of Iraqi targets, and the Marine Corps, typically wise in such matters and with few restrictions on embedded reporters, did it right. The next time around, both the Navy and the Army followed the Marine Corps example, embedding reporters in operating units and facilitating the transmission of their stories.
The author spent the immediate two weeks before the 2003 Iraq War as an embedded reporter on board USS Kitty Hawk (CV-63), along with some 30 other correspondents from the United States and abroad-including a representative of the Chinese news agency Xinhua. On Kitty Hawk the reporters were free to mingle with both officer and enlisted personnel and report their impressions.
Reporting as a correspondent for an independent talk radio network. Miller brought an eclectic mix of experience from his non-journalistic background as an attorney, investment banker, and Civil War historian that enlivened his account of daily life aboard a warship on the brink of war. References to his faith and occasional quotations from the Torah provided an interesting perspective from which to view his experiences.
Academic studies of the military often miss the daily interactions of service members. Roaming around the ship and taking readers with him. the author has a first-timer's exuberance about all he sees, including the precise choreography of flight deck operations. He also tried to understand the larger context in which the details he was observing were set. Aided by his training and experience as an historian, he wrote that he was interested in the continuing issues of civil-military relations: ". . . the influence of class, race, local community, ethnicity, and religion on combat morale and unit cohesion." The book is greatly assisted by his historical flashbacks, from the hyper-tolerant Dutch society of 1609 to the American Civil War. His conclusions: the most important things don't change too much and a shared historical memory is important for unit cohesion.
Mr. Miller, an avid cigar smoker who picked up a number of Havanas before the trip, got some of his most interesting reports by discussions with sailors on the smoking sponson-"the living laboratory of naval life." Conversations covered their reasons for enlisting, jobs on the ship, and thoughts about the Navy. These, together with more structured interviews with officers such as the Captain, the chaplain, and the ship's doctor, were the basis of his reports and this book. He found a variety of opinions as one would expect of a military drawn from a democratic civilian society.
The author formed strong impressions of Kitty Hawk as a floating university whose youngest members hold positions of crucial importance. He noted, ". . . the military is managed by the old but run by the young and, by the look of things, the very young." Other observations included clear evidence that the Navy was taking seriously the prospect of chemical or biological war, the extraordinary degree of authority and accountability of a commanding officer, the incredible skill displayed by sailors, a remarkable comfort level among the races yet a lower one between the genders, problems of stress, and the lack of confidentiality if a sailor expresses his or her homosexuality to a counselor other than a chaplain.
Some readers may be put off by the author's conservatism and occasional references to "the lefties." He noted, "Peaceniks might not like it, but when combined with its power and technology, the aircraft carrier was perhaps one of the highest forms of American civilization."
The book does not take a position on the wisdom of the war, but the author is unabashedly proud and supportive of the men and women serving in it. In his historian hat he remarked, "Other wars lasted for years, and everybody knew an uncle, brother, husband, wife, boyfriend, lover, sports idol, or movie star who wore some kind of uniform. But this war was being waged by a relatively small force of volunteer professionals. And if the war lasts the couple of months that Rummy and Company are publicly predicting, there won't be much time for the public to bond with the conflict."
Unfortunately, there has been plenty of time for such bonding and the responsibility for fighting has spread beyond the active military and deep into the reserves. This was not entirely unforeseen on board Kitty Hawk, as shown by a prescient comment from a commander who realized that winning the initial battles would be the easy part. He commented, ". . . where I have trouble is what comes after the war, when we're stuck in Iraq."
Dr. Williams is a professor of political science at Loyola University Chicago and a retired captain in the U.S. Navy Reserve. He is chair and president of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society.
Stephen Decatur: American Naval Hero, 1779-1820
Robert. J. Allison. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. 221 pp. Illus. Notes. Index. $34.95.
Reviewed by Frederick C. Leiner
In 1995, Robert Allison, a history professor at Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts, wrote The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776-1815, a book which stood the traditional understanding of Christian slavery in Muslim North Africa on its head. Allison depicted the Americans held captive in the Muslim world as "kinless strangers," and the slavery itself as not brutal but more of an attitude, not so much harsh as "unnatural." With that revisionism in mind, a reader picking up Stephen Decatur: American Naval Hero, 1779-1820, might wonder if Allison's biography of the iconic Decatur would be similarly "modern," perhaps the very use of the word "hero" in the subtitle meant to be facetious.
In fact, the Allison biography is an excellent, old-fashioned chronological story of the life and times of Stephen Decatur. Allison has an unforced, flowing style, free of colloquialisms. Even though much of the material is familiar, Allison ably describes wonderful scenes: his account of an exhausted young officer, Archibald Hamilton, bringing the news of the capture of the British frigate Macedonian, along with its battle flag, into a crowded Washington ball, is spine-tingling. Allison has covered all the major aspects of Decatur's short but storied life, from his burning of the captured frigate Philadelphia in Tripoli harbor in 1804 (a feat that made Decatur a captain and national hero at age 25), to his command of the frigate United States in the capture of the Macedonian in October 1812, to his blitzkrieg-like naval and diplomatic campaign in the Mediterranean in 1815, to his death (at age 41) in a duel with Commodore James Barren off the Bladensburg, Maryland, road in March 1820, which shocked and appalled the nation.
Along the way, Allison provides some valuable insights and makes some connections that earlier biographers neglected or minimized. First, almost alone among the sailing navy's officers, Decatur believed in the experiments of Robert Fulton, and encouraged his "torpedoes" (mines) and a prototype steam-propelled warship, even becoming Fulton's business partner. Even more striking, Allison notes that Decatur was undaunted by Nelson's tactics at Trafalgar, where the British relied on a direct approach at the French fleet and the resulting melee for achieving decisive victory. Decatur believed that accurate long-range gunnery would have pulverized the British ships, and he became a tireless advocate of practicing the "great guns": the United States dismasted the Macedonian with long-range cannon fire. Allison also details Decatur's long-term frustration with the people of New London, Connecticut, who so sympathized with the enemy in 1813 that they signaled the offshore British squadron when Decatur was about to sortie to slip out past the British blockade.
Allison's biography is not without flaws, however. First, he is too credulous about some of the sources; he accepts unquestioningly one account of the U.S. squadron's battle against an Algerine frigate in the 1815 war written in private letters by Joseph Causten, the captain's clerk on the frigate Constellation, whose version (marked by antipathy to Decatur) flies in the face of other contemporary accounts (apparently unseen by Allison). Second, inexplicably, the book lacks a bibliography, which hopefully was a penny-pinching decision by the publisher, rather than the author's doing. Finally, there are a distressing number of errors of fact which are perhaps minor individually but, taken together, weaken the authority of the book.
Nonetheless, Robert Allison's Stephen Decatur: American Naval Hero, 17791820, is a worthy addition to the historiography of the sailing navy; an insightful, concise, and stirring account of one of the Navy's greatest leaders.
Mr. Leiner, a lawyer who lives in Baltimore, is the author of Millions for Defense: The Subscription Warships of 1798 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2000) and The End of Barbary Terror: America's 1815 War Against the Pirates of North Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).