The New Road

Cobra II

I finished Cobra II last night. If you haven't heard Cobra II is a book that covers the entire history of Operation Iraqi Freedom from it's operational mandate, two days after 9/11 to several months after the "end of major combat operations". I found the book very even handed. The vast majority of the book tracks the movement and actions of particular units and has more of a History Channel feel.

Of specific interest to me were the sections that covered the planning, and the final few chapters and the Epilogue, which covered the Coalition Provisional Authority, Paul Bremer, and some lessons learned from the mistakes made.

I found certain thematic elements in the book very interesting. First the distrust of the generals associated with the Clinton era and the techniques used in the successful Bosnia campaign. Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney have a strong ideological belief that Bosnia was handled poorly and that we should have useda much smaller force for a much briefer period. That's something that they pushed and pushed onto Franks and his staff in preparation for Iraq and Afghanistan and the results are clear. It's something that continues until today. This notion that they 'listen to the generals on the ground' couldn't be further from the truth. From the outset they pushed back against every request for new troops.

Another interesting thing that I learned was that we have been fighting the insurgency from the first day of the ground campaign. At one point during the push to Baghdad our ground commanders went back to the generals and said that we aren't fighting army regulars but a trained guerilla force with a different set of tactic. The response was to avoid the problem and push to Baghdad, which merely delayed the inevitable. Saddam had set up this Fedyeen force because he didn't trust the loyalty of his regular army and Republican Guard troops.

When it came to the aftermath of the war the concensus is that we had an opportuniy for three weeks after the fall of Baghdad to really hold the country together but that we squandered it. In particular Bremer's de-baathification drive and his dissolution of the army (along with associated payments for doing nothing) that created the unrest and eventually added the bulk of the force that we now see as the insurgency.

This is a great read. I thoroughly enjoyed it, even though I found some of the battle scenes a little hard to follow.