COBRA II:The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq
........Michael R. Gordon and Bernard Trainor, ........Pantheon Books, New York, 2006
........603 pages, including Notes, Appendix, .........and Index

The instant you open the book you know that you will be in for a long stretch of reading–even before the “Foreword,” there are 19 pages of maps of Iraq with many marks on them to indicate where various battles were fought.

The “Foreword” offers the following background of the invasion:

We wrote this book to provide an inside look at how a military campaign that was so successful in toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime set the conditions for the insurgency that followed. The Iraq war was a war of choice, not of necessity. It was also one of the most covered but least understood episodes in American history.

Then it goes into a five-paragraph dissertation as to how the authors researched the myriad aspects of the war:

For three years, we have done exhaustive research on all...fronts...We assembled the history from the ground up...by reviewing the contemporaneous and unpublished notes of participants and through repeated interviews with senior officials, generals, and their staffs.

The “Foreword” concludes:

The Iraq war is a story of hubris and heroism, of high technology wizardry and cultural ignorance. The bitter insurgency American and British forces confront today was not preordained. There were lost opportunities, military and political, along the way.

The first 496 pages of the book provide very detailed descriptions of the campaign, beginning with the decision-making by the Bush administration--focusing mainly on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld--prior to the invasion, and then with all the military action up to the book’s publication in early 2006 (again in very great detail and with 18 black-and-white photographs). While these battlefield reports are probably of great interest to military historians, I scanned them to get a sense of the war effort but, at the same time, to not get bogged down in the minutia.

I found the most impressive part of the book the 11-page final chapter, “Epilogue.” On its first page it says:

...President Bush and his team committed five grievous errors. They underestimated their opponent and failed to understand the welter of ethnic groups and tribes that is Iraq. They did not bring the right tools to the fight and put too much confidence in technology. They failed to adapt to the developments on the ground and remained wedded to their prewar analysis even after Iraqis showed their penchant for guerilla tactics in the first days of the war. They presided over a system in which differing military and political perspectives were discouraged...Instead of making plans to fight a counterinsurgency, the president and his team drew up plans to bring the troops home and all but declared the war won.

Later it says:

The war planning took about eighteen months. The postwar planning began in earnest only a couple of months before the invasion. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Franks (General Tommy Franks, who headed the invasion) spent most of their time and energy on the least demanding task–defeating Saddam’s weakened conventional forces–and the least amount on the most demanding–rehabilitation of and security for the new Iraq.

(Curiously, none other than Vice President Dick Cheney is among those who plug the book on its dust jacket. Identified as “former Secretary of Defense,” he is quoted as saying: “A fascinating account of the war. I recommend it to my friends as something that gives them a different element of some of the key decisions that were made.” That seems a bit like Ken Lay praising Conspiracy of Fools, by Kurt Eichenwald, a book which excoriates the Enron management.)

To anyone who would criticize the conclusions of the book’s authors as Monday-morning quarterbacking, or hindsight with 20-20 vision, I say such criticism might be appropriate if our invasion of Iraq were clearly a war of necessity, such as World War II following the attack on us by Japan. In such a case, our defensive reaction probably would include some unwise tactics brought about by human fallibility. But the invasion of Iraq was not such a war; whether or not it was meritorious, it was an elective war–not one that had to be. Because of that, those who planned and implemented it are far more deserving of criticism for their mistakes.

Another interesting slant on the Iraq war is that expressed in a review of the book by Steve Coll in the 4/3/06 issue of The New Yorker:

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.