Understanding how the U.S. got entangled in Iraq

The flurry of studies and reports on the war in Iraq may or may not lead to a new course of action. Decisions taken as a result may or may not limit the severe damage to the position of the United States in the world caused by the Bush-Cheney rush to war in the first place. But they share one common feature.

All of them point to the incompetence of the decision-making at the very top, starting with the president and vice president and including a clutch of neoconservative ideologues who are now running for cover.

Dozens of new books also document the strategic miscalculations and reckless mismanagement of the aftermath of the invasion, and the resulting instability in a region so vital to U.S. interests that this war, as Gen. John Keane recently put it, is “exponentially worse” for America than Vietnam.

For a better understanding of this part of the world and how we got to where we are, I’d like to recommend five authoritative works, including one written long before the Iraq imbroglio. Together, they lay out an instructive mosaic of history, decision-making in the Bush and earlier administrations and sound recommendations of a new way for the U.S. to act as a sole superpower.

There are dozens of excellent books on the history of the Middle East. But if you can read only one, it should be David Fromkin’s 1989 “A Peace to End All Peace” on the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and creation of the modern Middle East. He outlines key events and mistakes made by the leading superpower of the time – collectively, the British governments in London, Cairo and New Delhi and their misreading of the region’s complexity. One can say if only George W. Bush had read this book – or, if only Tony Blair knew his own country’s history.

Fromkin notes, “the modern belief in secular civil government is an alien creed in a region most of whose inhabitants, for more than a thousand years, have avowed faith in a Holy Law that governs all of life, including government and politics.” At another point, a British adviser is told, “You are flying in the face of four millenniums of history if you try to draw a line around Iraq and call it a political entity.” This was 1920.

A second book, “Rise of the Vulcans,” by James Mann (2004), is a revealing composite biography of George W. Bush’s inner circle: Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Richard Armitage.

Mann, a veteran journalist, explores the collective mind-set and antagonisms of this small group and how their expansive and moralistic use of American military supremacy led them to pursue a unilateralist foreign policy. The book is not judgmental or partisan, but explains how, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, these leaders concluded American dominance was so great that it “no longer needed to make compromises or accommodations … with any other nation or groups of countries.”

The author of “The New American Militarism” (2005), Andrew Bacevich, is a West Point graduate, a Vietnam veteran and a conservative. His book is an articulate critique of the remaking of the U.S. military after the disaster of Vietnam and the failures of recent presidents to lay out a clear-eyed vision of the national interest and a strategy consistent with American values and principles.

His short book describes the incremental, often inconsistent steps by which various presidents intervened in the Middle East with increasing clumsiness. It has astute judgments about the strategic shortcomings of Carter and Reagan, Clinton and George W. Bush. He punctures the Bush administration’s 2002 National Security Strategy that endorsed “preemptive war” as a case of imperial overstretch that undercuts true “national defense.” And he makes credible recommendations: toughen Congress; treat allies as partners, not vassals; control defense spending; and this shocker: develop a sound energy policy so the U.S. is not hostage to the political vagaries of the Middle East. “One question sure to puzzle future historians,” Bacevich writes, “is how a problem of such self-evident seriousness induced such an unserious response.”

“The Assassin’s Gate,” by George Packer, covers the first two years of the Iraq war. A compelling account of disastrous decision-making by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et. al., it stands out because Packer focuses on the tragedy that befell ordinary Iraqis (including many who hoped for great things from America), on the administration’s refusal to listen to warnings from experts in the State Department, on the role of a phantom vice president who keeps saying that the insurgency “is in its last throes.”

The most thorough, up-to-date account is “Fiasco,” by Thomas Ricks. While saying blame lies foremost with President Bush’s “incompetence and arrogance,” it delivers on the dust jacket’s judgment “that some of America’s most powerful and honored civilian and military leaders were derelict in their duty.” It is almost painful to read the warnings against this unreasoning rush to war and utter lack of preparation for its aftermath from respected experts such as Brent Scowcroft and Gen. Tony Zinni.

If that’s not enough to tie you up in January, I will make it an even dozen. To my mind, the other “must read” works, briefly, are: “The Looming Tower,” by Lawrence Wright, a gripping account of the al-Qaida conspiracy to launch the Sept. 11 attacks; “Peace Process: American Diplomacy toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict since 1967,” by William Quandt, a book on the critical historical role, rejected by Bush, of the United States as an honest broker; “Dereliction of Duty,” by H.R. McMaster, a colonel now in Iraq who masterfully describes the failure of professional military leaders to speak truth to power in Vietnam (look for a sequel); Daniel Yergin’s “The Prize” on the vast oil resources which have drawn us and so many others to the region; “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” a devastating account of the U.S. occupation authority by Rajiv Chandrasekeran; Thomas Friedman’s “From Beirut to Jerusalem”; and Ken Pollack’s “The Persian Puzzle,” on U.S.-Iranian relations.

There are many others, of course – especially biographies of visionary leaders such as Yihtzak Rabin and Anwar Sadat. If that’s not enough to keep you busy until winter’s end, it will at least enhance understanding of why the Bush administration is groping to find something more successful than its original and terribly misguided “Bring ’em on” strategy in Iraq.

Fred Hill is a former foreign correspondent and editorial writer for The Baltimore Sun, and has worked on national security issues on Capitol Hill and in the State Department. He lives in Arrowsic, and can be reached at hill207@juno.com.