Failures in Lebanon and Iraq

Two articles well-worth reading:

1) "Spy Lessons From Israel"

Israel has been forced to improvise furiously on the battlefield after discovering how much it did not know about the fighters and the strategic arsenal that Hezbollah had amassed in southern Lebanon. Americans should watch closely what will happen in Israel once the smoke of this battle clears.

What will happen will be a thorough and bureaucratically impartial inquiry into the causes of this intelligence failure -- an inquiry of the kind that the United States seems unable to produce even in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, or the calamitous failure of U.S. occupation troops and spies to secure Iraq in the wake of the 2003 invasion...

The intelligence failures by the Israelis in Lebanon and by the Americans in Iraq are separate but related. They stem from the incomplete transformation of espionage establishments originally shaped by the demands of large-unit conventional warfare. The loose-jointed networks of terrorist groups and insurgents who hide and fight and then hide again among civilian populations are much harder to find and destroy than were Soviet or Egyptian bombers parked on airstrips...

2) "The March of Folly" (a review of Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, by Thomas E. Ricks)

So who's to blame? It is fast becoming established wisdom that it was the Pentagon's political leaders -- especially Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, his neoconservative first-term deputy Paul Wolfowitz, and the cocksure chief of their policy shop, Douglas J. Feith -- who, above all, led us down the road to disaster in Iraq. But it's too neat to pin the culpability on the Defense Department's pinstripe-wearing civilian leaders and ignore the blunders of the uniformed top brass or, for that matter, the rest of the U.S. government; as they did in Vietnam, the nation's military and civilian leaderships share the responsibility for what's gone wrong...

..what's far less well-known is the bungling of the senior military leadership. With devastating detail, Ricks documents how U.S. generals misunderstood the problems they faced in Iraq and shows how poorly prepared the Army was for the unanticipated danger of a postwar Sunni rebellion. For ignoring the risks of an insurgency after Saddam Hussein's fall, Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, "flunks strategy," Ricks writes; the war's commanding general designed "perhaps the worst war plan in American history." Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the invasion, and his deputy, Gen. Peter Pace (who's since been promoted to take Myers's old job), come off as smiling yes-men who went along with amateurish impulses from the Bush administration's political leadership and who forsook their duty to offer detached, professional judgments, acting instead as administration flacks in both private and public.

As a result of the lapses of the top brass and the haughtiness of Rumsfeld's men, the U.S. military came into Iraq inadequately prepared -- and hard-pressed to adapt. From the start, it failed to recognize that ensuring public order was the key to postwar success...

Mark C.

Posted by markc at July 30, 2006 02:07 PM