Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq - Hardcover

Gordon, Michael R.; Trainor, Bernard E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375422625 ISBN 13: 9780375422621

Publisher: Pantheon, 2006

Synopsis

Informed by unparalleled access to still–secret documents, interviews with top field commanders, and a review of the military’s own internal after–action reports, Cobra II is the definitive chronicle of America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq—a conflict that could not be lost but one that the United States failed to win decisively. From the Pentagon to the White House to the American command centers in the field, the book reveals the inside story of how the war was actually planned and fought. Drawing on classified United States government intelligence, it also provides a unique account of how Saddam Hussein and his high command developed and prosecuted their war strategy.

Written by Michael R. Gordon, the chief military correspondent for The New York Times, who spent the war with the Allied land command, and Bernard E. Trainor, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general and former director of the National Security Program at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, Cobra II traces the interactions among the generals, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and President George W. Bush. It dramatically reconstructs the principal battles from interviews with those who fought them, providing reliable accounts of the clashes waged by conventional and Special Operations forces. It documents with precision the failures of American intelligence and the mistakes in administering postwar Iraq.

Unimpeachably sourced, Cobra II describes how the American rush to Baghdad provided the opportunity for the virulent insurgency that followed. The brutal aftermath in Iraq was not inevitable and was a surprise to the generals on both sides; Cobra II provides the first authoritative account as to why. It is a book of enduring importance and incisive analysis—a comprehensive account of the most reported yet least understood war in American history.

About this title

About the Author

Michael R. Gordon is the chief military correspondent for The New York Times, where he has worked since 1985. He is the coauthor, with Lieutenant General Bernard E. Trainor, of The Generals’ War. He has covered the Iraq War, the American intervention in Afghanistan, the Kosovo conflict, the Russian war in Chechnya, the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and the American invasion of Panama. He lives in the Washington, D.C., area.

Bernard E. Trainor, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general, was a military correspondent for The New York Times from 1986 to 1990. He was director of the National Security Program at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government from 1990 to 1996. Currently a military analyst for NBC, Trainor lives in Potomac Falls, Virginia.

Reviews

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made headlines last week by conceding that the Bush administration had made "tactical errors, thousands" in waging the war in Iraq. But, she argued, the administration pursued the right underlying strategy in toppling Saddam Hussein, and history's judgment will be based on whether "you make the right strategic decisions."

In their "inside story" of the war, Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard E. Trainor stand Rice's assertion on its head. They show that the U.S. military's tactical brilliance during the war's early stages came despite the strategic miscalculations of senior civilian and military leaders -- and that the Bush team's misjudgments made the current situation in Iraq far worse than it need have been. As it turns out, in addition to the war with Iraq's tyrant, there was an ongoing war between U.S. field commanders, their own senior commander (Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of Central Command) and civilian leaders in Washington.

The Bush administration's two major strategic miscalculations are by now familiar: first, a broad-based intelligence failure regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the viability of its economic infrastructure and the reception Iraqis would give invading U.S. forces; and second, underestimating the challenge of stabilizing post-invasion Iraq. Gordon and Trainor -- respectively a New York Times reporter and a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general, and collectively the authors of a widely hailed 1995 book on Operation Desert Storm, The Generals' War -- go beyond these issues to focus on logical flaws in prewar planning that should have raised eyebrows among senior U.S. officials. For example, they report that when the CIA identified nearly 950 suspected WMD sites, military planners argued for additional troops to secure them lest the terrorists purportedly in league with Saddam Hussein spirit the WMD away during the chaos of war, thereby producing the very outcome the administration was trying to avoid. But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was determined to attack with a "lean force."

The book's core, however, centers not on Beltway deliberations but on the dash to Baghdad by the Army and the Marines.The authors do a fine job making one of the most lop-sided campaigns in memory interesting, but the surprises that the Americans encounter turn out to be even more compelling. Senior U.S. field commanders soon realize that their principal enemy is not the Iraqi army but irregular forces -- many of them foreigners -- employing guerrilla tactics. These are portents of the full-blown insurgency to come, but no one back in Washington proves capable of connecting the dots.

While U.S. soldiers and Marines shifted their focus on the fly, the Bush administration failed to recast its strategy for the postwar endgame. Consequently, once American forces seized Baghdad, U.S. troop deployments were curtailed and units were instructed to prepare for a rapid drawdown -- even while the Iraqi police and military forces that the administration expected to preserve order were being disbanded.

While Gordon and Trainor recount the misjudgments of many senior civilian and military leaders, Gen. Franks fares the worst. Many of his statements defy explanation, including his mystifying declaration that "I am not gratified by enough forces on the ground" and his fondness for terms like "functional componency" and "strategic exposure." The general's battlefield guidance is often, well, general; he tells his commanders to take "action on all fronts," which, as the authors note, is "no better than issuing no guidance at all." The authors conclude, scathingly, that Franks "never acknowledged the enemy he faced nor did he comprehend the nature of the war he was directing."

The senior military leadership in Washington comes off little better; they are depicted as a bunch of empty suits. Then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard B. Myers, is portrayed as a reflexive team player incapable of expressing an independent view. The Army chief of staff at the time, Gen. Eric Shinseki, warned before the war that projected U.S. troop levels were too low to stabilize Iraq, but the authors report that he failed to press home his case once his views were dismissed by senior civilian leaders around Rumsfeld and his then-deputy, Paul Wolfowitz.

Unfortunately, the focus of Cobra II (which takes its title from the Army name for the drive to Baghdad) is limited by Gordon's experiences as a reporter embedded at the U.S.-dominated coalition's land command during the invasion. The book thus emphasizes ground combat; the "shock and awe" air campaign, for example, receives far less attention than it deserves. Moreover, while the book's subtitle claims to cover the occupation of Iraq, the narrative essentially ends in the summer of 2003. Finally, key policymakers such as Vice President Cheney and Rumsfeld declined the authors' requests for interviews; Franks offered only an hour. Thus the views of those at the center of the war were often not captured. Still, Cobra II stands as the best account of the war to date.

Toward the end of the book, some Marines fighting to capture Baghdad come upon a group of Iraqis outside a walled compound who keep waving their hands at knee level. Initially confused, the Marines break into the compound to find that the Iraqis had been trying to signal that it housed children: more than 100 of them, dirty, bruised and malnourished, apparently imprisoned by the regime for their families' supposed disloyalty. The episode comes as a chilling reminder of the horrors of Baathist rule. When Rice speaks of the "strategic" decision to depose Saddam Hussein and his barbaric regime, she is referring to a laudable goal, not a strategy. The war is not over, and good strategy is still very much needed. Cobra II offers an instructive lesson on the consequences of inadequate strategic planning. If its message is heeded, Americans may yet look back on this conflict and recall the words of Georges Clemenceau, France's leader during World War I: "War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory."

Reviewed by Andrew F. Krepinevich
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1
Snowflakes from the Secretary

In late 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld summoned the senior military leadership to his office on the E-ring of the Pentagon. It had been an extraordinarily eventful period for the administration of George W. Bush. Kabul had recently fallen. U.S. commandos and Pashtun commanders in southern Afghanistan were on the hunt for Osama bin Laden. In Bonn, Germany, the United States and diplomats from allied nations were prepared to anoint a new group of Afghan leaders.

During his short tenure at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld had established himself as an indomitable bureaucratic presence. It was a commonplace among the Bush team that the military needed stronger civilian oversight, and Rumsfeld exercised control with the iron determination of a former corporate executive. He had a restless mind and was given to boast that he was genetically impatient.

When he arrived at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld made clear that his goal was nothing less than to remake the U.S. military to fashion a leaner and more lethal force. Notepads were strewn throughout his outsized office. When the defense secretary had an idea he scribbled it down. Four-star generals and high-ranking aides were accustomed to receiving snowflakes: terse memos that captured his latest brainstorm or query and that landed with a thud.

Rusmsfeld had been receiving his daily CIA briefing shortly before the American Airlines plane plowed into the building on September 11. Afterward, he had staked out a clear position on how the Bush team should respond. The United States should take the fight to the Taliban and Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, but it would not end there. The Pentagon needed to take an even more forceful step that would let its enemies know that the United States was now involved in a global war against the terrorists and the renegade states that helped them. The U.S. needed to land a series of blows well beyond Afghanistan. The question was where and when to strike.

The defense secretary’s meeting had been called to ponder the war plan for another potential adversary. General Richard B. Myers, the pliable chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) who was picked by Rumsfeld because of his reputation as a team player, was there. So was Peter Pace, the ambitious vice chairman who was already being talked about as an officer who might follow in Myers’s footsteps. Greg Newbold, the three-star general who served as chief operations deputy for the JCS, had the main assignment for the session. He was to outline Central Command’s OPLAN 1003-98, the military’s contingency plan in the event of a war with Iraq.

Newbold was armed with a pile of slides as the generals and Rumsfeld sat around a conference table. As Newbold outlined the plan, which called for as many as 500,000 troops, it was clear that Rumsfeld was growing increasingly irritated. For Rumsfeld, the plan required too many troops and supplies and took far too long to execute. It was, Rumsfeld declared, the product of old thinking and the embodiment of everything that was wrong with the military.

Myers asked Rumsfeld how many troops he thought might be needed. The defense secretary said in exasperation that he did not see why more than 125,000 troops would be required and even that was probably too many. Rumsfeld’s reaction was dutifully passed to the United States Central Command.1

“My regret is that at the time I did not say, ‘Mr. Secretary, if you try to put a number on a mission like this you may cause enormous mistakes,’ ” Newbold later recalled. “Give the military the task, give the military what you would like to see them do, and then let them come up with it. I was the junior military guy in the room, but I regret not saying it.”2

The 1003 plan was ripe for review and was based on the assumption that it would be Iraq that would start the fight. Nonetheless, the plan, which had been regularly exercised in war games, reflected long-standing military principles about the force levels that were needed to defeat Iraq, control a population of more than 24 million, and secure a nation the size of California with porous borders. Rumsfeld’s numbers, in contrast, seemed to be pulled out of thin air. He had dismissed one of the military’s long-standing plans and suggested his own force level without any of the generals raising a cautionary flag.

General Tommy Franks, the CENTCOM commander, would draw up the new plan, but Rumsfeld would poke, prod, and question the military at every turn. Defense Department civilians would move into Franks’s planning cells to monitor his work, and the general would be summoned to Washington repeatedly to present his evolving plan and receive new guidance from his civilian master. The JCS chairman and his staff would be little more than onlookers. Two momentous signals had been sent at Newbold’s briefing. Iraq would be the next phase in the Bush administration’s self-declared “global war on terror” and the defense secretary would insist on an entirely new kind of Iraq war plan.


When he was running for president, George W. Bush had signaled that he wanted to overhaul the U.S. military. His father’s earlier victory in the Persian Gulf, Bush said in a 1999 speech at the Citadel, was an impressive accomplishment, but also one that had taken six months of planning, amassing of military forces and supplies, and preparation. That was too long for the sole remaining superpower to project its power throughout the world. Bush pledged to develop lighter, more mobile, and more lethal forces.

Nor did Bush see the need for the sort of lengthy peacekeeping operations or difficult nation-building missions that the administration of Bill Clinton had undertaken in the Balkans. The purpose of the military, Bush argued, was to fight and win the nation’s wars, not to linger to bring stability to newly ordained states. A strong secretary of defense would be appointed and he would have a broad mandate to develop a new military structure. Generals and admirals who supported the new program would be promoted. Billions of dollars in new spending would be channeled for the research and development of missile defense and other high-
technology military systems.3

The speech was drafted by some of the so-called Vulcans, the cluster of conservative former national security officials who had formed the nucleus of a shadow government during the Clinton years and would later find a place at the top of the new administration. The idea of using advanced reconnaissance systems, command and control networks, and precision weapons to strip away the fog of war and strike the enemy with devastating effect had attracted a small, but influential, group of adherents, and the Vulcans were among them. It was supposed to be nothing less than a revolution in military affairs that would reduce the requirement for large land armies, and with Bush’s election some of the self-proclaimed revolutionaries would be in charge.

Once in office, Bush made good on the pledge to support a powerful defense secretary, settling on Rumsfeld, a choice that was strongly endorsed by Vice President Dick Cheney, who sensed that his former mentor would not only have a strong hand at the tiller but would serve as an ally in policy debates.

At sixty-eight, Rumsfeld was full of energy and brimming with confidence. He had been a wrestler in college, a combative and solitary sport, run with the bulls in Spain, followed his father into the Navy, been NATO ambassador, won a seat in Congress, earned a small fortune as the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, and run two government commissions: one on ballistic missile threats from Third World countries and the other on space policy. Rumsfeld was both the youngest and the oldest person to serve as defense secretary, having served as the Pentagon chief under President Gerald Ford. He had not been among the drafters of the Citadel speech, but he wholly supported the theme.

As Rumsfeld prepared to take on his responsibilities at the Pentagon he met with William S. Cohen, the Maine Republican who served as Bill Clinton’s secretary of defense. Cohen, who had traveled widely in the post, advised Rumsfeld to go to Wehrkunde, the premier European security conference, which was held annually in Munich over a February weekend. Rumsfeld, he said, needed to get to know the European allies, as otherwise there would not be another opportunity to do so until a NATO meeting the following June. Rumsfeld resisted the idea, arguing that he could not afford to loosen his grip on the Pentagon even for a weekend. Rumsfeld eventually relented and went to Munich, delivered a speech on missile defense, pronounced allied unease about the project to be utterly incomprehensible, and rushed back. The episode was telling: Rumsfeld’s principal battleground was the Pentagon, his concern over relations with the allies was secondary, and he was uneasy leaving others in charge even for a day.

At the Defense Department, Rumsfeld was quick to demonstrate and solidify his authority. Each month, the defense secretary was required to approve sensitive reconnaissance operations. The missions were listed in a top secret binder, and once when an action officer came in to get Rumsfeld’s okay he noted in passing that the State Department had already reviewed the list and had not seen any problems. The innocent comment was like waving a red flag before a bull. Rumsfeld refused to sign, saying he would need to study the binder first. For several days, there was a mysterious lull in reconnaissance operations as the new defense secretary made clear that the building he was trying to bend to his will could not take him for granted. There were small changes that sent a message as well. The elaborate honor ceremonies for visiting dignitaries were declared to be an unnecessary frill and cut back.4

As Rumsfeld saw it, the biggest obstacles to his authority and vision we...

Edition details

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375422625
• ISBN 13: 9780375422621
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 640