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Blind Into Baghdad: America's War in Iraq

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I like James Fallows. I doubt we would be on the same side of the political aisle, but he would not care, and it does not matter. He is more objective than most writers, and I have liked his books since I read his work on national defense years ago.

This book confirms what I have come to fear. The war in Iraq was a huge mistake. It never should have been considered, much less launched. Afghanistan was one thing. It needed to invaded, and the Taliban needed to be kicked out. Maybe its not too late to get it right. Iraq, I fear, is the proverbial quagmire.

There were many in the administration who did not want the damned war. Many in the Pentagon felt the same way. The dismal history of Britain's involvement after WWI should have been a clue. Hubris, on the part of a few, blinded Bush--and others-- in their decision making. The Bush crowd seemed to act like Johnson's wizards getting us into Vietnam.

Perhaps the rapid victory in Afghanistan put the administration on a new high of self-confidence--excessive self-confidence. It appears they rapidly came to see themselves as a winning team, the super warriors--able to overrun a country between lunch and breakfast.

Problem is, they put no thought into what would occur once they had Baghdad. Colin Powell warned Bush. So did others. Its one thing to take a country, another to run it.

I believed there were "weapons of mass destruction." Maybe there were. Maybe they were moved to Syria. If so, the invasion made things worse. Now, the Syrians might have them. If not, being in Baghdad with not enough troops, and the vain hope of democracy taking hold, is pretty thin gruel. Bush got us into it, but God only knows how we will get out. And while we try to find a way out, our military is spread thin, our reputation is wearing away, and the nation is unable to project power elsewhere.

Fallows fills in some gaps. I wondered what happened. Why did Colin Powell bail as Secretary of State after four years? I think I know why. He was ignored. Why did we only hear from a few in the administration? Others were over-ruled, and being quiet. They had Thoreau's feelings of "quiet desperation." They feared the war, and they were right to fear it.

I recommend this book. I WAS a Bush supporter, and I still recommend this book. Fallows writes some pretty stern stuff but its worth reading.

This book has an unpromising premise: Publish a book based largely on essays that have already been published as articles in the Atlantic Monthly from 2002 through 2005. Despite that, this book ends up working far better than one might expect.

Fallows himself begins by describing the book's perspective (page x):

"The subject of the book is America's preparation for and conduct of its war in Iraq, whose combat phase began in March 2003. because that war played so large a part in the U. S. government response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, assessing the war naturally raises questions about the wisdom, competence, and effectiveness of the overall strategy against Islamic terrorism.

The cumulative argument of the book is that this strategy was gravely flawed in both design and execution."

The chapters cover various aspects of the Iraqi invasion and its aftermath. The chapter entitled "The Fifty-First State?" is based on interviews with knowledgeable players before the invasion of Iraq. The focus was on what was likely to happen after the invasion, since all assumed that the American forces would walk over the Iraqi army. The essay's predictions do not all pan out (and Fallows adds footnotes to note more current information). However, it is interesting to see how a number of these predictions did come to fruition.

Other chapters explore Paul Bremer's terminating the Iraqi Army and his extreme de-Baathification program, how George Bush's original war on terror focusing on Afghanistan began to lose focus with the invasion of Iraq, and so on.

His conclusions are exceedingly harsh and may irritate many readers. He notes, to provide a flavor of his reflections, that (page 229):

"The country failed because individuals who led it failed. They made the wrong choices; they did not learn or listen; they were fools. No one responsible for these errors was dismissed from the administration. No senior officer was relieved or reprimanded."

In the final analysis, because of the approach, some of the material does appear dated. However, this perspective also provides an interesting test of how well (or poorly) Fallows and those people whom he interviewed perceived accurately what the longer term situation would actually be.

James Fallows is unique for giving us the only "before and after" book on Iraq. This book, while it consists of a collection of articles published in the run-up to the war on Iraq, is exemplary for showing what was known before the war, and how a combination of ideological bias, bureaucratic timidity, confusion, and general incompetence actually allowed this Nation to be led to an elective war of devastating consequence and cost.

The author provides both an introduction and a conclusion to the book that are unique to the book and set the articles in harmony as a whole.

There are other books that excel as retrospective reconstruction and finger-pointing, among which I would include HUBRIS, Squandered Victory, The End of Iraq, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, and most recently, State of Denial, but this is the only book to focus on all that we knew prior to the war about the daunting difficulties facing us in making the peace, and why the political leadership of the Executive did not want us to think about that, and why the political leadership of the Congress refused to play its role as a co-equal branch with the power of both the purse and the declaration of war exclusive to it.

James Fallows documents how virtually every sensible element of the federal government, from the military to the diplomats to the commerce and treasury and agriculture and others, all KNEW that invading Iraq was going to open a Pandora's box of sectarian violence, ethic conflict over resources, a collapse of good order, the failure of infrastructure the US would not be able to repair quickly enough, and on and on and on and on!

Objective observers, including the British, considered the claims of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz with respect to the ease with which Iraq qould be liberated, to be the "ruminations of insane people."

The author's bottom line is clear: the bureaucracy did its job and anticipated every single reason for not going to war, every single calamity that would befall us in Iraq. Where government failed was at the political level, with Dick Cheney closing out the policy process, spoon feeding the President lies from convicted thief and liar Chalabi, and with a full-court press backed by Wall Street and the media, to declare dissent to be treason--hence General Tony Zinni, former Commander in Chief for the Central Command, being called a traitor for sharing his knowledge.

The author and The Atlantic Monthly did not rely only on open sources. They sponsored a war game that came as close as possible to matching all that the US Government might be doing behind closed doors, using only open sources and overt experts, and here again, well in advance of the war, the conclusion was the same: don't do it!

The author concludes the book with several findings, all of which are completely consistent with the other non-fiction books I have read on Iraq and related blunders:

1) Corporations deciding on how to market a brand of toothpaste are vastly more meticulous and thoughtful that the political leadership in the Executive deciding to go to war on what proved to be whims, lies, and active mis-representation.

2) There was too little friction. The Administration got a "free ride" from the people, Congress, the media. Other than Senator Byrd, who shall long be my personal hero for his 80 speeches against the war (he alone among all the Senators stood fast on the matter of the Senate being equal to the Executive and having the right to question this idiocy--see my review of his book, Losing America), our Congress abdicated its responsibilities and failed the Nation. This was a bi-partisan failure, but the extremist Republican leaders were most to blame.

3) There has been no accountability. I remain shocked by the number of books and DVDs (see my list of Serious DVDs) that document the constant stream of lies and mis-representations from the political leadership and their tame uniformed members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (who should be fired for confusing loyalty with integrity). It is a sad commentary on the Nation that the pedophile charges against Congressman Foley seem to carry more weight with the public than our 65,000 amputees.

I like this book very much. It is important for all Americans to understand that good minds working only with open sources of information easily anticipated the reasons why an elective war on Iraq was not a good idea. It is important for all Americans to know that the good people in State, Defense, and elsewhere got it right, but Dick Cheney shut them down, shut them out, and alone, bears responsibility for leading a young President ignorant of national security matters, on a very irresponsible and costly course of action.

Dick Cheney has a great deal to answer for--none of the others could have achieved their ill without him.

Only one thing puzzles me about James Fallows: why is he not considered among our most important American journalists?

The respected Bob Woodward rightly caused a national sensation with the publication of "State of Denial." Yet, those of us who have been faithfully reading Fallows' reporting in The Atlantic Monthly were made aware of this Administration's predispositions since late 2003 - the year of the Iraqi invasion. It is not news to Fallows' readers that George W. Bush's inner circle chose to overlook facts and cautious warnings from the Government's top professionals - Pentagon war planners and State Department veterans whose responsibility was to provide our elected leaders with the best information possible.

In the January/February 2004 issue of The Atlantic, Fallows wrote: "All the government working groups concluded that occupying Iraq would be far more difficult that defeating it. [Paul] Wolfowitz either didn't notice this evidence or chose to disbelieve it." These statements are among the many damning - but now widely known and accepted - facts that Fallows brought to light in the early going.

Keep your eye on the work of James Fallows. He asks the right questions of the right people long before it becomes the popular thing to do.

This book was painful to read. Not because of any shortcoming of the writing, but because the analysis was so accurate. There's no argument that George W. Bush is an intellectually uncurious person. "Blind into Baghdad" exposes the problems with his character flaw. The president has surrounded himself with yes-men who, like him, were either unwilling or unable to confront tough questions and myriad uncertainties during the time leading to the war in Iraq. Instead, the administration operated with an appalling hubris and made decisions that will likely influence the international community for decades.

Fallows deftly examines how the administration blithely ignored pre-war alerts concerning insufficient troop levels, red flags about possible post-war rioting, and military logistical problems. In addition, the vindictive nature of the administration is also evident as Fallows shows how those people raising hard questions about the war were swiftly scuttled. Finally, the author then gives an excellent analysis of how Bush and company completely fumbled the post-combat operations period when it started to become clear that the administration hadn't done its homework.

This book is not recommended for those with cardiac or circulatory troubles because it will definitely angry the blood.

James Fallows, the Atlantic Monthly's national correspondent, produced a series of articles between 2002 and 2005 on the planning and execution of the war against Iraq. He has now brought these articles together in a fascinating book.

He writes, "the administration will be condemned for what it did with what was known. The problems the United States has encountered are precisely the ones its own expert agencies warned against."

Bush refused to use the State Department's `Future of Iraq' programme. He was told that occupying Iraq would be harder than conquering it, that they should act to prevent looting, and that they should not disband the Iraqi army. But he ignored all this good advice, because planning for postwar meant facing its costs and problems, which would have weakened his fragile case for war.

Fallows writes that the US strategy against Islamic terrorism is `gravely flawed in both design and execution'. He points out that Bush's mantra of "they hate us because we are free" is "dangerous claptrap. Dangerous because it is so lazily self-justifying and self-deluding: the only thing we could possibly be doing wrong is being so excellent."

Fallows also recounts what happened when a team of experienced US government officials war-gamed attacking Iran. They explored three escalating levels of intervention: raids on Revolutionary Guard units (which Brown has apparently signed us up to), a preemptive strike on possible nuclear facilities (an estimated 300 targets, in a five-day assault), and regime change. They concluded, "You have no military solution for the issues of Iran. And you have to make diplomacy work."

Fallows sums up, "The country failed because individuals who led it failed. They made the wrong choices; they did not learn or listen; they were fools."

The war in Iraq is counter-productive: the USA is now worse off than in 2003. It is also unwinnable: as a US lieutenant colonel said, there are now "two options. We can lose in Iraq and destroy our army, or we can just lose." Fallows concludes that the US state should "face the stark fact that it has no orderly way out of Iraq, and prepare accordingly."

Blind into Baghdad is all the more impressive for the fact that nearly all of the content was researched, written, and published as events were unfolding. The book loses nothing for being an anthology of previously published articles, and it gains much force from that circumstance. The writing is clear and readable. Occasional footnotes update specific points.

For those who do not have the time or energy to read the whole array of books on the Iraq war, Blind into Baghdad may be the one best book to select from that array.

In Blind into Baghdad, Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, cobbles together a series of articles he wrote between 2002 and 2004 to explore the road to war and occupation in Iraq. He adds an introduction and a brief afterward to frame his articles and annotates throughout to show how his predictions played out.

Fallows makes no secret of his opposition to the Iraq war. "If [the United States] did not have to attack, then it should not go ahead, not simply because of the complications within Iraq itself but because the way a war would inevitably suck time, money, and attention from every other aspect of a `war on terrorism.'" This assumption underscores the antagonism of many elite journalists to the Iraq war, but it is not necessarily correct. Fallows ignores the hundreds of foreign fighters killed at Salman Pak, the plant U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell identified correctly as a terror training camp, as well as Saddam Hussein's subsidization of suicide bombers.

Fallows also does not address the complexity of U.S. concerns about weapons proliferation. In a chapter penned before the war, he observes that "Iraq's SCUD and Al-Hussein missiles cannot reach Europe or North America." True, but he misunderstands White House thinking: Bush administration concern centered on Iraq after the events of 9-11 had demonstrated that rogue regimes need not rely on traditional delivery systems.

While his essays are a useful reminder of the many prewar policy debates, Fallows annotations display shallow analysis. He calls de-Baathification "a major apparent failure." But data on the insurgency shows a correlation between re-Baathification and violence. The policy of ridding Iraqi politics of top-level Baathists has been the major factor preventing a Shi'ite uprising. Hindsight shows the analysis of many experts quoted by Fallows to be wrong-headed. For example, Charles William Maynes of the Eurasia Foundation argued that placing U.S. troops on Iran's border could transform Iran into a permanent enemy. But the fallacy of such apprehension is now apparent: U.S. failure to guard the Iranian border enabled wholesale infiltration of militias, money, and weapons to enemy forces in Iraq--and still Tehran remains an enemy.

His criticism of disbandment of the Iraqi army is anachronistic, given that the army had already dissolved on its own. Fallows finds sources to argue the contrary, but these were pundits not present in Iraq and reflect the tendency of agenda-driven journalists to cherry-pick quotes. With broader research, Fallows may have examined the question of who hampered prewar training for free Iraqi forces and why. Had he done so, and had he treated his sources with far more skepticism, he might not have allowed himself to become a pawn in a political blame game.

Blind into Baghdad is well written but ultimately it pales in comparison to accounts written by experienced journalists such as Michael Gordon and former general Bernard E. Trainor, authors who relied less on assumption and more on research in their account of the same period.

Michael Rubin
Middle East Quarterly
Summer 2007

In Blind into Baghdad, Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, cobbles together a series of articles he wrote between 2002 and 2004 to explore the road to war and occupation in Iraq. He adds an introduction and a brief afterward to frame his articles and annotates throughout to show how his predictions played out.

Fallows makes no secret of his opposition to the Iraq war. "If [the United States] did not have to attack, then it should not go ahead, not simply because of the complications within Iraq itself but because the way a war would inevitably suck time, money, and attention from every other aspect of a `war on terrorism.'" This assumption underscores the antagonism of many elite journalists to the Iraq war, but it is not necessarily correct. Fallows ignores the hundreds of foreign fighters killed at Salman Pak, the plant U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell identified correctly as a terror training camp, as well as Saddam Hussein's subsidization of suicide bombers.

Fallows also does not address the complexity of U.S. concerns about weapons proliferation. In a chapter penned before the war, he observes that "Iraq's SCUD and Al-Hussein missiles cannot reach Europe or North America." True, but he misunderstands White House thinking: Bush administration concern centered on Iraq after the events of 9-11 demonstrated that rogue regimes need not rely on traditional delivery systems.

While his essays are a useful reminder of the many prewar policy debates, Fallows' annotations display shallow analysis. He calls de-Baathification "a major apparent failure." But data on the insurgency shows a correlation between re-Baathification and violence. The policy of ridding Iraqi politics of top-level Baathists has been the major factor preventing a Shi`i uprising. Hindsight shows the analysis of many experts quoted by Fallows to be wrong-headed. For example, Charles William Maynes of the Eurasia Foundation argued that placing U.S. troops on Iran's border could transform Iran into a permanent enemy. But the fallacy of such apprehension is now apparent: U.S. failure to guard the Iranian border enabled wholesale infiltration of militias, money, and weapons to enemy forces in Iraq--and still Tehran remains an enemy.

His criticism of disbandment of the Iraqi army is anachronistic, given that the army had already dissolved on its own. Fallows finds sources to argue the contrary, but these were pundits not present in Iraq and reflect the tendency of agenda-driven journalists to cherry-pick quotes. With broader research, Fallows may have examined the question of who hampered prewar training for free Iraqi forces and why. Had he done so, and had he treated his sources with far more skepticism, he might not have allowed himself to become a pawn in a political blame game.

Blind into Baghdad is well written, but ultimately it pales in comparison to accounts written by experienced journalists such as Michael Gordon and former general Bernard E. Trainor, authors who relied less on assumption and more on research in their account of the same period.