Analysis: Iraq war history hits Bush hard

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Analysis: Iraq war history hits Bush hard

By MARTIN SIEFF
UPI Senior News Analyst

WASHINGTON, March 13 (UPI) -- Rows between victorious generals are nothing new. The battle after the battle as to who was really responsible for the victory -- or the defeat -- is as old as war itself. But the latest "war of the generals" now erupting over the conduct of the 2003 Iraq War comes at a very bad time for President George W. Bush and may well have significant lasting political consequences.

Reporters Michael R. Gordon of The New York Times and Gen. Bernard Trainor are publishing a new book on the Iraq War entitled "Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq." And in the second of two articles published in The New York Times Monday, they write of an especially bitter row between four star Gen. Tommy Franks and his hard-charging V Corps commander, three-star Lt. Gen. William Wallace, whose forces drove overland to Baghdad in the face of unexpectedly heavy resistance. The dispute between them is not of mere historic or technical military interest: It continues to have profound strategic and political repercussions on the insurgency that continues to blaze in Iraq to this day.

"The unexpected tenacity of the Fedayeen in the battles of Nasiriyah, Samawa, Najaf and other towns on the road to Baghdad was an early indication that the adversary was not merely Saddam Hussein's vaunted Republican Guard," Gordon and Trainor write.

"But while many officers in the field assessed the Fedayeen as a dogged foe, Gen. Franks and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld saw them as little more than speed bumps on the way to Baghdad," they write.

The new book, The New York Times article and their disclosures come at a time when Rumsfeld is more vulnerable and discredited than at any previous time during his more than five years as secretary of defense. His most trusted, handpicked lieutenants like former Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith have long gone, with lower profile, far less colorful, charismatic, abrasive and controversial veteran administrators like current Deputy Secretary Gordon England trying to pick up the pieces from the failures and fiascoes of so many of their vaunted initiatives. England and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., have even been mentioned as possible successors to Rumsfeld in the Pentagon.

For more than two years after a wave of massive bomb attacks in August 2003 heralded the formidable, lethal ferocity of the escalating insurgency, Rumsfeld remained slow to respond to it and slow to move, if at all, to prioritize the sending of better armored vehicles and individual armored protection to the hard-pressed U.S. forces in Iraq.

He remained deeply reluctant to send significant larger numbers of American forces to combat the insurgency and showed every indication of being far more passionately involved with the Department of Defense's high-tech, futuristic, exceptionally expensive new space weapons programs than with dealing with the nuts and bolts of the continuing insurgency.

Gordon and Trainor's documented disclosures will give much more ammunition to Rumsfeld's many critics. They write how Franks, the clear political favorite of President Bush, wanted to fire Gen. Wallace even at the moment of his greatest triumph because Wallace recognized the scale of the insurgent threat even then and wanted to smash the irregular forces, then described as Fedayeen, even if it delayed his drive to Baghdad.

Significantly, Wallace's boss, Land Forces Commander Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, refused to fire Wallace despite Franks' pressure to do so.

The article also documents how Rumsfeld refused to send the powerful and mobile First Cavalry Division to Iraq to help prevent the chaos and suffering that swamped Iraq in the early days of the occupation in spring 2003 after Saddam Hussein was toppled. Gen. McKiernan, anticipating these problems, "was unhappy with the decision, which was made at a time when ground forces were needed to deal with the chaos in Iraq," Gordon and Trainor write.

Gordon and Trainor also add flesh and bone details to the longstanding criticisms of Rumsfeld and his civilian team at the Pentagon. They note that Rumsfeld was sympathetic to Monday Morning Quarterbacking and armchair criticism of his hard-pressed field generals from friends like former House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich -- who had never served in the U.S. armed forces -- and military commentator, retired Col. Douglas Macgregor, author of "Breaking the Phalanx."

When Gingrich forwarded to Rumsfeld a blistering article by Macgregor assailing top Army commanders like Wallace and McKiernan for not advancing fast enough, Gordon and Trainor wrote that Rumsfeld replied to Gingrich, "Thanks for the Macgregor piece. Nobody up here is thinking like that."

Gordon and Trainor also document the exaggerated hopes Rumsfeld and Franks had in Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi and how these hopes came to nothing -- not because senior Army officers or the CIA sabotaged Chalabi, but because he could not deliver.

In late March, they write, Chalabi claimed and Gen. Franks believed that he could deliver 1,000 fighters to aid U.S. forces. But by the time the airlift to fly them in as support forces was ready on April 27 Chalabi still only had 570 men.

Chalabi, taking advantage of his personal links ties to Wolfowitz, also defied the objections of U.S. Army generals and flew out with his fighters to Talil Air Base, south of Nasiriyah. "His fighters would never play any meaningful role in the war," Gordon and Trainor write. "They arrived without their arms and were not well supervised by the United States Special Forces."

At a time when President Bush's approval ratings have sunk into a disastrous range, Gordon and Trainor 's new book looks like providing a lot of fresh ammunition for the president and the administration's many critics who charge that have been disastrously inept in their Iraq policies from the very start.