TPM can chatter about the Rumsfeld debacle. But it looks like Sy Hersh has the goods and then some. Here's the sneak preview. I'd say this is going to be the big article.
Here are just a few examples from an article just sent out by Reuters ...
"He thought he knew better. He was the decision-maker at every turn," the article quoted an unidentified senior Pentagon planner as saying. "This is the mess Rummy put himself in because he didn't want a heavy footprint on the ground."It also said Rumsfeld had overruled advice from war commander Gen. Tommy Franks to delay the invasion until troops denied access through Turkey could be brought in by another route and miscalculated the level of Iraqi resistance.
"They've got no resources. He was so focused on proving his point -- that the Iraqis were going to fall apart," the article, by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, cited an unnamed former high-level intelligence official as saying.
...
Hersh, however, quoted the former intelligence official as saying the war was now a stalemate.
Much of the supply of Tomahawk cruise missiles has been expended, aircraft carriers were going to run out of precision guided bombs and there were serious maintenance problems with tanks, armored vehicles and other equipment, the article said.
"The only hope is that they can hold out until reinforcements arrive," the former official said.
The article quoted the senior planner as saying Rumsfeld had wanted to "do the war on the cheap" and believed that precision bombing would bring victory.
We've got a great military, great commanders and great troops. They can do this. But we owe them far better civilian leaders.
--Josh Marshall
Humanitarian relief? This report is good news, bad news. Luckily 
more of the former than the latter, at least in the medium to long term. According to this AFP report, refugees streaming south to avoid fighting gave food to US Marines. That's a good sign of goodwill from Iraqi civilians -- possibly a sign of underlying support, kept in check for the moment by fear of Saddam's reprisals. But it does rather beg the question of why our troops are having to get food from Iraqi refugees. Isn't it supposed to be going the other way? Numerous news organizations are reporting that Marines at the tip of the spear have had to ration their food, limiting themselves to one MRE (meal) a day, because of supply-line disruptions farther south.
--Josh Marshall
I'm trying to keep posts to a minimum today. But just a quick update. I've been getting hints from a number of directions that some of the president's political allies are privately distancing themselves from his policies. I've mentioned the "I told you so" interviews with retired generals. But this is more pols who didn't have a lot of sense one way or 
another about the military and diplomatic issues and took it on faith that the plan was a good one. I pass this news on without comment.
The unfortunate reality is that however many long-predicted mistakes Rumsfeld and company made, we still have to come up with a strategy to protect our troops and complete the mission. I think what we should keep in mind is that our immediate military situation is really not as bad as it looks. But our short, medium and long-term political position may be worse than we even yet realize. As per Clausewitz, war is "a continuation of political activity by other means."
TPM continues to get whining messages from Bush supporters saying that this site is somehow either supporting or giving aid to the nation's enemies by pointing out the administration's mistakes. Not true. TPM is obviously no military man. But, to the extent that I had any angle on this issue, it was from interviewing current and retired career officers over the last year. Frankly, if these Bush partisans have a beef with me, they have a beef with them.
The people who have spent a year trying to make sure we didn't send our troops into battle unprepared are not the ones who are endangering our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines.
The key priority now is moving ahead in way that secures a successful military and political outcome while safeguarding our troops. But it ill-behooves the president's partisans to use the sheer magnitude of their screw-ups as an excuse not to discuss them.
Meanwhile, I think we really do need that no-fly-zone set up for the now-discredited cakewalk Iraq-hawks -- you know, modeled on the humanitarian operation, Operation Provide Comfort, we set up to protect the Kurds. Again, just for humanitarian reasons, even if they brought it all on themselves. But what would its name be? The best I've been able to come up with so far is Operation Chicken Hawk Down ...
--Josh Marshall
"The enemy that we're fighting is different from the one we'd war gamed," U.S. Army Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace told the Washington Post a couple days ago. "We knew they were there-the paramilitaries-but we didn't know they'd fight like this."
In addition to chagrin, for those of us who follow military affairs and national security issues, I think this comment couldn't help but recall 
the "Millennium Challenge" war games and the leaked remarks of General Paul Van Riper, who headed up the "red" or enemy team in that mock war. Basically, Van Riper complained that the folks running the war game stopped him when he tried to think outside the box with the sorts of low-tech, asymmetric tactics an outnumbered and outgunned enemy might use. In the most notorious instance, when Van Riper knocked out several US navy vessels in the Persian Gulf with suicide speed boat attacks, the war-gamers stopped the exercise and "re-floated" the ships.
Anyway, I'm not going to say more about this particular point because Fred Kaplan has an excellent piece on this issue in Slate which covers it admirably. (Just a side note: Kaplan's reporting on the war has been invaluable. If you haven't checked him out, you should.)
As I've noted, I think Don Rumsfeld has a great deal to answer for in all this. But the war-game mini-scandal clearly goes beyond just Rumsfeld. This was also the sort of group-think, bureaucracy and lack of accountability which is endemic to all vast bureaucratic organizations -- not least of which the military. In retrospect, the conduct of that war game looks very, very bad.
Here's another point. Many people on the web have been buzzing about this Russian website, which has reports on the war said to be based on information from Russian military intelligence, the GRU. The site is similar to Debka, out of Israel. In any case, it's impossible to know precisely where they're getting their info and the tone of the reportage is unmistakably hostile to the US position (the headline of the site is "Aggression Against Iraq.") But there is one piece of strategic analysis on their site, which a reader sent me, which I am sure is quite valid.
The first myth is about the precision-guided weapons as the determining factor in modern warfare, weapons that allow to achieve strategic superiority without direct contact with the enemy. On the one hand we have the fact that during the past 13 years the wars were won by the United States with minimum losses and, in essence, primarily through the use of aviation. At the same time, however, the US military command was stubborn in ignoring that the decisive factor in all these wars was not the military defeat of the resisting armies but political isolation coupled with strong diplomatic pressure on the enemy's political leadership. It was the creation of international coalitions against Iraq in 1991, against Yugoslavia in 1999 and against Afghanistan in 2001 that ensured the military success.
It's hard to see those who wish the US ill having such a perceptive analysis of our folly. But this is about as perceptive as it gets. And it recalls a exchange retired General Wesley Clark had with a senior Pentagon appointee just after the turnover of administration's in 2001.
The official mocked the conduct of the Kosovo war, telling Clark, "We read your book ... And no one is going to tell us where we can or can't bomb." (I know, but am not in a position to say, who the official is. But let's just say he's really senior.)
Let me quote at length from an article Clark wrote a few months ago in the Washington Monthly ...
That day at the Pentagon, the senior official and I never had the opportunity to complete the discussion. But it was clear that he had totally misread the lessons of the Kosovo campaign. NATO wasn't an obstacle to victory in Kosovo; it was the reason for our victory. For 78 days in the spring of 1999, the alliance battled to halt the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo's Albanians being carried out by the predominantly Serb troops and government of then-President Slobodan Milosevic. It was the first actual war NATO had fought in its 50-year history. Like the U.S. war in Afghanistan, it was predominantly an air campaign (though the threat of a ground attack, I believe, proved decisive). America provided the leadership, the target nominations, and almost all of the precision strikes. Still, it was very much a NATO war. Allied countries flew some 60 percent of the sorties. Because it was a NATO campaign, each bomb dropped represented a target that had been approved, at least in theory, by each of the alliance's 19 governments. Much of my time as allied commander was spent with various European defense officials, walking them through proposed targets and the reasoning behind them. Sometimes there were disagreements and occasionally we had to modify those lists to take into account the different countries' political concerns and military judgements. For all of us involved--the president, secretaries of state and defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and me--it was a time-consuming and sometimes frustrating process. But in the end, this was the decisive process for success, because whatever we lost in theoretical military effectiveness we gained manyfold in actual strategic impact by having every NATO nation on board.NATO itself acted as a consensus engine for its members. Because it acts on the basis of such broad agreement, every decision is an opportunity for members to dissent--therefore, every decision generates pressure to agree. Greece, for example, never opposed a NATO action, though its electorate strongly opposed the war and the Greek government tried in other ways to maintain an acceptable "distance" from NATO military actions. This process evokes leadership from the stronger states and pulls the others along.
Of course, this wasn't a pleasant experience for any of the participants. For U.S. leaders during the war, it meant continuing dialogue, frictions, and occasional hard exchanges with some allies to get them on board. For some European leaders, the experience must have been the reverse: a continuing pressure from the United States to approve actions--to strike targets--that would generate domestic criticism at home. There was no escaping the fact that this was every government's war, that they were intrinsically part of the operation, and each was, ultimately, liable to be held accountable by its voters for the outcome.
In the darkest days before the NATO 50th anniversary summit in late April in Washington, British Prime Minister Tony Blair came to our headquarters in Belgium on very short notice. To be honest, it wasn't altogether clear why he was coming. But as he and I sat alone in my office, it quickly became apparent. "Are we going to win?" he asked me. "Will we win with an air campaign alone? Will you get ground troops if you need them?" Blair made it very clear that the future of every government in Western Europe, including his own, depended on a successful outcome of the war. Therefore, he was going to do everything it took to succeed. No stopping halfway. No halfheartedness.
That was the real lesson of the Kosovo campaign at the highest level: NATO worked. It held political leaders accountable to their electorates. It made an American-dominated effort essentially their effort. It made an American-led success their success. And, because an American-led failure would have been their failure, these leaders became determined to prevail. NATO not only generated consensus, it also generated an incredible capacity to alter public perceptions, enabling countries with even minimal capacities to participate collectively in the war. As one minister of defense told me afterwards, "Before Kosovo, you couldn't use the word 'war' in my country. War meant defeat, destruction, death, and occupation. Now it is different. We have won one!"
The victory in Kosovo was complicated and messy. But it worked. One doesn't have to agree with that approach or think it couldn't be improved upon. The issue with Rumsfeld and his deputies is less their difference of opinion than their arrogance. They repaid advice with ridicule, assuming that they knew everything. Now we're seeing some of the results.
--Josh Marshall
Now we hear from Mark Tedrow, from the Old Dominion ...
From: "Mark Tedrow"
To: talk@talkingpointsmemo.com
Subject: Let me add...
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 23:35:12 -0500
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1106
my own 'last paragraph' to the remarks of Michael Thomas, of Kentucky.
MY son is fighting today, risking HIS life...and some are dying...for your right to assist our enemies. That must make you very proud.
To think for a second that you have served this country in combat is laughable. You're too busy munching a croissant and pretending to have some clue about what makes this country 'America'. Easy for you to sit and flap your fingers or look pretty in front of a camera while 'someone else' puts his/her life on the line for your privelege; typical elitist. You spend hours denegrating our current president, who didn't create the mess in Baghdad or North Korea, and exactly zero time questioning the ones who did; typical elitist.
My son is currently in Iraq...somewhere. Air Force Special Ops., Sgt. We haven't heard from him in a while...and we pray. We pray for his safety...and we pray for our country. We also pray that critics such as you will someday grow a brain and become a productive piece of this incredible country; instead of spending all your time in the red...throwing rocks at those who make your life possible.
Mark Tedrow
Virginia
More soon ...
--Josh Marshall
Just do it? Here's an article by the aforementioned Joseph Galloway. And it paints a pretty uncomfortable picture. Basically the civilians at the Pentagon are pushing Tommy Franks to attack Baghdad before the arrival of the 4th Infantry Division. Here's one of the key passages ...
So it apparently falls to one heavy Army division, one light Army division and a division-plus force of Marine infantry to destroy at least two and possibly more Republican Guard tank divisions dug in and blocking the approaches to Baghdad.In other words, roughly 100,000 U.S. servicemen could face about 30,000 Iraqi troops, not enough for the 4 or 5 to 1 ratio that conventional military doctrine calls for when attacking an entrenched enemy.
The Americans are far better trained and equipped than the Iraqis, and they have a huge technological edge, especially when fighting at night. But military analysts say there may not be enough of them to do the job.
On CNN last night, Wes Clark made an interesting and ominous observation, which he said he based on recent conversations with various region experts. The gist of it was that we have a four or five week window to finish this up. And if we don't do it before then, a bad chain of events kicks off. Saddam starts to look strong, like he's making a stand against America, and so forth. Then Arab or non-Arab Muslim volunteers start streaming into the country to take up the fight. Basically, instead of just being angry and marching in their own countries because they think we're clobbering Iraq, they decide that Saddam's actually making a fight of it and go to get in on the action.
I can't say whether this is an accurate prediction or not. But it has the ring of truth to it -- in my ears at least. And, regardless, it's probably one of the issues that's being considered. Unfortunately, says the Galloway article, the 4th ID won't be ready for at least three weeks.
That math doesn't add up too nicely, does it? Maybe we do have to hit Baghdad now to prevent some broader regional deterioration.
The one thing that seems really clear is this: We should not be in this position of having to decide whether to go in under-gunned or wait longer than we can really afford to. This is what's so nice about having the world's most powerful military, several times over: you shouldn't have to wing it. We should have had all the necessary troops and hardware in position when we pulled the trigger on this war, rather than having what turns out to be a critical component on the ground in Texas.
Why was that allowed to happen?
--Josh Marshall
I have a simple request: Is it possible for the Bush administration to go one day without fulfilling its critics' direst predictions about its war aims and operational abilities? Yesterday, The Washington Monthly released my new article on the Bush administration's grand plan for reforming the entire Middle East. One assertion many found difficult to believe was my claim that the administration would soon seek to provoke wars with Syria and Iran. Today, Don Rumsfeld threatened both countries with just that. Admittedly, this creates some extra buzz for the article and this website as well. But frankly, Don, TPM is doing okay and, buddy, you're starting to get a kinda scary.
The language Rumsfeld used was key. He basically accused the Syrians of committing acts of war against the United States. The key wording was: "We have information that shipments of military supplies have been crossing the border from Syria into Iraq, including night-vision goggles. These deliveries pose a direct threat to the lives of coalition forces. We consider such trafficking as hostile acts and will hold the Syrian government accountable for such shipments."
Now, what makes this really weird is that background briefings at the Pentagon suggest that we're not reacting to anything new. Rather, this is a long-standing issue we've had with the Syrians -- presumably a subset of our larger issue with their sanctions-busting.
This invites a pretty obvious question: was this the best day to bring it up? I'm no expert on the military art. But I have the impression we've got our hands full at the moment.
Here's another question ...
Let's assume Bill Clinton had launched the country on a major war on the other side of the globe. Clinton's top military advisors had told him and his Sec Def that he was sending them to war gravely under-gunned, without all they needed to get the job done and protect the lives of American troops. Then let's assume that Clinton and his Sec Def ignored their advice. He and the Sec Def told the generals they didn't understand how modern wars were fought and sent them out anyway. And then let's assume that the generals and admirals warnings were rapidly confirmed on the battlefield with a bogged down offensive and an escalating number of American casualties. Do you think Clinton and his Sec Def might be in some hot water? Yeah, me too.
Joseph Galloway, a storied old war reporter, was on Lou Dobbs show this evening and walked through the whole sorry story. In its outlines it was basically what I've been telling you on this site for several days. But obviously Galloway knows a lot more about war-fighting doctrines than I do and also much better sources. So he laid out the story with gripping, sorrowful detail. Basically, the Rumsfeldians thought a new day had dawned in the annals of war. The old doctrines were out the window. And the fuddy-duddies with the uniforms and medals just didn't understand. Now it seems like they knew something after all.
Finally, is it time -- strictly for humanitarian reasons -- to set up a journalistic no-fly-zone to give some sanctuary for the hawks who've been telling us for months that a few good SWAT Teams could take down Saddam's regime.
I mean, think about Ken Adelman, who a year ago said that Iraq would be a cakewalk. (Okay, what did he really say? Ummm, well "I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk." I think that counts as calling it a cakewalk.) Now he's been driven to the hills by reportorial fedayeen. He's run ragged, exposed to the elements, and short on food. Or what about Richard Perle, who said Saddam's regime was "a house of cards [which would] collapse at the first whiff of gunpowder." Sure, AEI would like to send out a relief mission. But most of their troops have run off to the hills with those makeshift tarp-and-cardboard tents like Adelman and Perle. And well -- how to put this? -- let's just say they're just not in much of a position to beg relief from the UNHCR. Can't we at least protect these war-hawk worthies from fixed-wing aircraft, if nothing else? Toss 'em some MREs from the spare C-130? I mean, just for humanitarian purposes.
--Josh Marshall
Before we get down to business today let's hear some sage words from the estimable Michael Thomas of Kentucky ...
From: "Michael Thomas"
To: talk@talkingpointsmemo.com
Subject: Objectives
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 10:21:15 -0500
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1106
I browsed your memo... (very 'creative' title btw)... it doesn't take long to see that your objective is to demoralize our troops and our citizens, de-ligitimize the efforts (any efforts) of the Bush (or any Republican) Administration, further the "liberal cause" (although there really is no such thing - gaining power is not a cause in itself, you know), and attempt to help us lose this war - and any war - as long as a Republican is in the White House.
Your motives are clearly political and self-serving. I am sure they have made you quite popular with your friends in academia and Hollywood.
This may be the most critical time in the history of the modern world much less of our country; and it is my fervent hope that the American People will remember and appropriately reward those, like you, who have chosen to use this opportunity to forward a political cause, and not incidentally their own careers, by attempting to sabotage an honorable effort to make the world a safer, better place.
Our sons are fighting today, risking their lives... and some are dying... for your right to assist our enemies. That must make you very proud.
Sincerely,
Michael Thomas
Kentucky
More soon ...
--Josh Marshall
I've become associated over the last several months with the proposition that the Bush foreign policy team is simply incompetent. I have to tell you though that in recent days I have been repeatedly shocked by just how true this seems to be. If you still need to be convinced how disastrously the situation with Turkey was handled, take a look at this article in Friday's Post. It's almost beyond belief. A bull in a china shop doesn't do it justice. The other analogies I came up with were just unmentionable...
--Josh Marshall
I was finishing up an interview early this evening when I flipped open my laptop to find that Richard Perle had resigned his post as Chairman of the Defense Policy Board. All I can say is, it's about time. At TPM, we've been on Perle's trail for the DPB shenanigans since early October 2001. But clearly our efforts were just -- as the folks in uniform might say -- reportorial triple-A compared to the transformational, big munitions Sy Hersh and others brought to bear in recent weeks.
As I said, it's about time.
Another point. The conventional wisdom right now isn't really 'things are going badly.' It's more aptly characterized as 'things sure look like they're going badly but it's too soon to know.' Let's unpack this for a moment. The specter of Afghanistan is hanging over the reaction to, and reportage of, this war. Back in Afghanistan things looked like we were in for a long, tough, bloody battle. And then suddenly everything broke free. Pundits who had deployed the Q-word (i.e., "quagmire") too soon felt awfully exposed when the Taliban simply collapsed. No one wants that to happen to them again. So everyone's keeping their powder dry.
But the Afghanistan experience hangs over this moment in a deeper way too. Back in Afghanistan, the folks at the Joint Staff really wanted to go slower. They wanted to bring up more men, more equipment, the whole bit. But Rumsfeld and his people said 'no.' They wanted to move much more quickly, relying on a mix of high-tech weaponry, quick-moving Special Forces operations, indigenous proxy armies, and agile, on-the-fly decision-making.
And something happened: it worked.
When people write the history of these years, I think they'll place great emphasis on this fact. Rumsfeld and his deputies didn't need a lot of convincing that they understood military affairs as well as or better than anyone. But this experience greatly emboldened them.
But it did more than embolden them. This part is harder to get at or know. But I think it subtly shook the confidence of some of the folks on the Joint Staff. Rumsfeld went for the Hail Mary pass and, amazingly, Paul Wolfowitz came down with the ball in the end zone.
Of course, this is an over-simplification. But it catches the outlines of what happened. And I think it played a key role on a variety of levels in allowing the Office of the Secretary of Defense to get the Joint Chiefs to go along with an Iraq war plan they were never comfortable with.
We'll be saying more about this ...
Meanwhile, self-parody seems to be the answer to our recent reverses in Mesopotamia.
When I was doing course-work in graduate school I studied a little 19th and early 20th century German history. What always struck me was that "crude Marxism" looked a lot less crude when you looked at it through the prism 
of late 19th century German history. You had the cartoonish reactionary leaders, the alliance of ancien regime with plutocratic capital. And a foreign military adventure was pretty much always the solution of choice when things looked iffy at home or the Socialists looked set to win a majority in the parliament.
In any case, you can see all sorts of examples now -- cropping up everywhere it seems -- that we're heading toward some similar Gotterdammerung of ridiculousness.
I was watching a British military briefing this morning when a reporter asked one of the British generals what he thought of the fact that the running of the port of Umm Qasr has apparently already been raffled off to some American company. The look on his face was priceless. Sort of the Blair tragedy writ small.
Now, we hear that California Congressman Darrell Issa, a major recipient of money from hometown cell phone goliath Qualcomm is lobbying the Pentagon to rewire (rewireless?) Iraq with Qualcomm's CDMA standard rather than the one now used in the country, GSM, which is preferred by European manufacturers. "Hundreds of thousands of American jobs depend on the success of U.S.-developed wireless technologies like CDMA," says Issa.
And to think that for a moment I thought we were about to turn Iraq into a parodic banana-republic where favored US campaign contributors got to line up for Iraq-pork!
And speaking of the rather shariah-offending concept of Iraq-pork, at least we're not going to try to evangelize Iraq by turning over aid distribution to evangelical faith-based organizations from the Bible Belt, right?
Well ...
Here's another charmer from the always invaluable Beliefnet. Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, said yesterday that his organization, Samaritan's Purse, has an army of relief workers "poised and ready" to roll into Iraq to serve the physical and spiritual needs of the Iraqi people. He's in constant contact with the US government agencies in Amman to help coordinate efforts.
Graham says that he knows he can't just whip out the good book and start preaching the gospel in an Arab country. But "I believe as we work," said Graham, "God will always give us opportunities to tell others about his Son... We are there to reach out to love them and to save them, and as a Christian I do this in the name of Jesus Christ."
That should go over well.
I mean, it's not like the Muslim Arabs have a chip on their shoulder or anything about the Christian West launching a new crusade against them to reclaim Arabia for the cross. So it shouldn't be any problem.
In all seriousness, obviously the US can't bar anybody with a Christian affiliation from doing relief work in Iraq. But optics seems to be the issue here. The American president is a deeply-believing born-again Christian. He's closely associated with Franklin Graham. Graham has repeatedly called Islam a "wicked" religion. And now Graham's missionaries are coming in behind US tanks invading Iraq.
If the Arab world had electronic media that tended toward sensationalism and inflammatory coverage this could really be a problem ...
--Josh Marshall
"We do not all love Saddam, but we do not love the United States either." That's one line from a very sobering article at ABCNews.com. Until Saddam Hussein's regime is totally displaced we'll never quite know what people really think as opposed to what they say.
--Josh Marshall
Hope is not a plan, as the Army planners say. And they say it for a reason ...
Here is our text for the day. It comes from an interview last evening on PBS's Newshour, when Gwen Ifill asked retired Colonel Samuel Gardiner whether the momentum of the campaign could be sustained. Gardiner said ...
No. I just want to add a political military dimension. Yesterday a very important thing happened. Two retired four-star generals: Wes Clark and Barry McCaffrey, who was a division commander in the first Gulf War, said we don't have enough force. Whether they are right or not, the leadership of the United States has a problem. And that is if we go to Baghdad with two divisions and there are losses, that's regime change kind of stuff. And I don't mean Baghdad regime change. But you don't send American men and women into battle without all it takes to do that. I mean, that's a very serious thing.
Now, a few points. I know Gardiner was only talking about changes of government at the ballot box but I'm still always a bit uncomfortable when even retired military men talk publicly about US governments being turned out because of poor military decisions. I didn't like it under Clinton; and I don't like it now. Retired military officers have as much right to speak out as the rest of us. But given the importance of civilian supremacy over the military, there's a penumbra of prudence that stretches over the public comments of even retired career officers. (Late Update: My criticism, if there is any, is not directed at McCaffrey and Clark. I think it's not only right but incumbent on them to speak out. My only point is that, in the case of Gardiner, it may be the better part of wisdom for retired career officers to speak out against bad defense policy but leave spelling out the political consequences to others. Again, a mild, tentative criticism, but one that I think worth voicing.)
Having said that, his comments get at a very big issue and one that may have profound political implications. War is, by definition, unpredictable. But what we're seeing right now was predicted. The predictions were just ignored.
Relations between the Pentagon's civilian political leadership and the uniformed services has been more vexed and acrimonious in the last two years than it has been for decades. (I discussed this at greater length in this article I wrote last August in Salon -- you can also see it here -- and touched on part of the debate in this earlier post.) The disagreements range over a number of issues including war-planning, 'transformation,' force structure and military-diplomatic relations with various countries across the world. At heart, however, the civilians believed the folks in uniform were overly conservative, risk-averse and failed to understand how technology had transformed modern warfare.
Don Rumsfeld (and Rumsfeld, in this case, stands for Rumsfeld and his various civilian deputies) thought Saddam Hussein could be taken down with a relatively small number of ground forces in conjunction with fast-moving and agile high-tech air power and special forces. (Keep in mind that the Pentagon's civilian leadership originally wanted to mount this war with as few as a quarter of the troops we now have in the theater.) The Sec Def's military advisors told him he was sending them into Iraq under-gunned. They argued about it for months. Rumsfeld thought he knew better than they did, however, and sent them in that way regardless of their objections.
We'll be saying more about this. And I think it's still to soon to fully evaluate Rumsfeld's plan. Perhaps Saddam's regime will collapse spectacularly in the coming days. But at the moment the results of Rumsfeld's gamble are not looking very good.
P.S. Special thanks to valued TPM reader BZ for sending the Newshour link ...
--Josh Marshall
The uncomfortable reality is that presidents have often deceived the American public to pull the country into wars or extensive military engagements. FDR said he was trying to keep us out of World War II, even as he courted a conflict with the Axis powers, which he believed both necessary and unavoidable. History has judged him well. LBJ manufactured an incident to get us into Vietnam. Eventually it destroyed him. When President Clinton put American troops into Bosnia he claimed they'd only be there for a year, even though everyone knew they'd be there much longer. The verdict there has been generally positive, though more time needs to pass for a definitive verdict. There are many other examples both before and since.
Yet what the Bush administration has done and is doing is, I believe, qualitatively different from these and other examples both before and since. In each of these other cases the public had some sense of what war was being debated. Do we get into another world war based in Europe? Do we get into Vietnam the way we got into Korea? Do we sign on for a murky and perhaps unpredictable period of military oversight in the Balkans? Presidents may have lied about the costs of war or the pretexts. But there was at least some sense of what sort of war we were talking about.
That's not the case here.
This war isn't really about Iraq or deposing Saddam or even eliminating his WMD, though each of those are important benefits along the way. Nor is it something so mundane as a 'war for oil.' The leading architects of this war in and out of the administration see this war, and have pursued it, as an opening blow in a far broader war against political Islam. They see it as the first in a series of wars and near-wars which will lead eventually to the overthrow of most of the current governments in the Middle East, the establishment of western-oriented democracies throughout the Arab world, and the destruction of nothing less than the political world of Islamic fundamentalism.
That, as you might say, is a rather tall order. And it would have been very hard for the administration to sell the American people on such a struggle. So it didn't try. It pushed rather to get us into Iraq, knowing that if it went about the process in the right way it would make a further series of wars against Iran, Syria and perhaps lower-level hostilities against Saudi Arabia and Egypt all but inevitable.
As Jeffrey Bell put it last week in The Weekly Standard, this is nothing less than a "world war between the United States and a political wing of Islamic fundamentalism ... a war of such reach and magnitude [that] the invasion of Iraq, or the capture of top al Qaeda commanders, should be seen as tactical events in a series of moves and countermoves stretching well into the future."
In any case, I've tried to sketch this out and put together the various ideas and aims involved, in the cover piece of the soon-to-be-released new issue of the Washington Monthly. The piece was finished on, I think, the first day of the war. But events have been moving so quickly that we've decided to preview release it on the Monthly's website. You can read "Practice to Deceive" here.
--Josh Marshall
Over-estimating the extent of one's own power is the best sign that someone or something is heading for a fall.
This is something the Bush administration has been doing for months now. We're extremely powerful. But we're not all-powerful. Almost, but not quite.
An example of such over-reach is our current decision to threaten almost every country on the planet with payback for not following our lead on Iraq. Such threats aren't just ill-advised. Worse than that, they lack credibility since we're just not in a position to stick it to every country at once. Here at TPM we've been focusing on Turkey. But Dan Drezner has an excellent post on another country we're now threatening with payback: Canada ... (Drezner's post plays off this article in The Globe and Mail.)
On a similar note, there is an article today by Michael Ledeen in the New York Sun, which blames the French for the failure of our diplomacy with the Turks. (The article isn't available online.) As I noted in my column in The Hill, the argument that Turkish Islamism is at fault is belied by the fact that the secularist, Kemalist deputies in the Turkish parliament voted against us by a far greater proportion than the 'Islamic' deputies. Ledeen says this happened because the French and the Germans threatened the Turks (i.e., the pro-Western secularists) with exclusion from the European Union if they went along with us. Ledeen lards the piece with several throwaway lines which are as meaningless as they are foolish. He says for instance that we'll eventually find out "that French actions constitute the diplomatic equivalent of chemical and biological warfare."
(What does this mean? If one wants a little shock value, shouldn't the insults at least make some logical sense?)
Now, I have a few responses to this. First, Ledeen doesn't proffer a lot of evidence for this claim, merely unnamed sources. But, frankly, I don't doubt that they did make such threats. Perhaps they did; perhaps they didn't. Yet, Occam's Razor would suggest that it may not have played that decisive a role. No one in Turkey supported our war in Iraq. No one. Given that the secularists are out of government and not particularly inclined to help the Erdogan government, I don't think they needed a lot of encouragement to vote this way. On the contrary, it makes perfect sense.
There's a second problem with Ledeen's argument. The Erdogan government has shown that it is also extremely eager for EU admittance. Why didn't the threat work better with them?
The long and the short of it is that one doesn't have to look too far past the Turkish borders to explain what happened.
But let's assume for a moment that the French and Germans did level this threat. And that it had some effect. Far from being exculpatory of Bush administration diplomacy, it's actually quite damning.
Here's why.
The centerpiece of the Bush administration's strategic doctrine has been that alliances and international institutions hinder our ability to secure our vital interests far more than they advance it. Thus, they argue, we should chart our own course and invite the 'willing' to follow us or get out of the way. The subtext of that strategy is that if this or that country doesn't like it, that's their problem, not ours.
Their opponents said, no. Our alliances help us shape international debates and catalyze our power rather than diminish it. What's more, even with all our power, our isolation is our problem too. If true, France's threat to the Turks is a textbook example of this fact.
France has never made peace with American dominance in Europe. What they've heretofore lacked was a constituency among the countries of Europe to work against that dominance. Now they have it. And France is a big player in ... well, what else to call it, an alliance, the EU, which Turkey would really like to become a part of. If no more than French perfidy were involved here, France's threat would carry little weight. France doesn't run the EU. On the contrary, if the Turks think that the French are now speaking for most of the populations of Europe, the threat could be quite real. As we noted here, opportunists will always arise to exploit an exploitable situation. But we created a situation ripe for exploitation.
It's sad and undignified for conservatives to trumpet the evidence of the administration's shortsightedness and incompetence as evidence of its insight. They're lost in a tangle of their own enthusiasm and self-deception. Unfortunately, we're all along for the ride.
--Josh Marshall
Thank god for small favors. At least there's some good news on the Turkish front this morning. Gen. Hilmi Ozkok, head of the Turkish General Staff and de facto arbiter of Turkish civilian governments, said today that -- barring a massive deterioration of the situation in Northern Iraq -- he will not send troops into Iraqi Kurdistan. That staves off one truly nightmarish scenario.
Yet look a bit further down in the article and you see a deeply revealing comment from Gen. Ozkok.
I have difficulty understanding those who claim there is a threat to them across the ocean. And when Turkey says the same threat exists on the other side of its border, this is found to be unbelievable.
What answer can we make to this?
It's difficult to fully grasp the deeper import of this remark without some sense of how deeply pro-Western and, 
more specifically, pro-American an institution the Turkish General Staff is. These are notes of resentment being sounded by our most loyal friends -- in the region, or anywhere for that matter.
My column in The Hill this week is on the Turks and the rise on the American right of a foolish, dangerous and utterly self-serving argument which holds that our problems with Turkey are due not to our own high-handed incompetence but rather to rising Turkish Islamic fundamentalism. The people who make this argument are either liars, utterly ignorant, or folks who are so unwilling to confront the reality of what's happened in Turko-American relations over the last three months that they've just willingly spun themselves. As I write toward the end of my new piece in The Hill ...
The Bush administration acted toward Turkey like the stereotypical rogue from a 1950s B-Movie. First we told Turkey what we wanted. When she balked, we got a little rough. When even that didn’t do the trick, we pulled out our wallet, saying in essence, “Fine, how much do you want?” When even cash failed, we told her to get out of the car and walk home.
This just gets uglier and uglier. And the costs keep rising.
--Josh Marshall
Neil MacFarquhar has a fascinating and disturbing article in Wednesday's New York Times. The upshot of the piece is that almost everybody in the Arab world hates Saddam. But many are also energized and inspired by seeing Saddam's troops make problems for the US-UK invasion force. "They want Saddam Hussein to go and they expect him to go eventually, but they want him to hold on a little longer because they want to teach the Americans a lesson," says a Saudi newspaper editor.
What echoes through this piece and others in the papers this morning is the simple possibility -- never really appreciated by the more zealous Iraq hawks -- that people could hate Saddam and yet also fail to happily greet our invasion. (Saddam is a tyrant ergo we must be right and we must be welcome.) Equally so, few of them ever seemed to grasp that the Bush administration's long litany of indifference to world opinion on almost every issue imaginable might have some impact.
Don't get me wrong: it's not that an alternative approach would necessarily have made the Iraqis act differently. It's just that the administration seems to have premised its entire geopolitical and military strategy on the notion that they would.
--Josh Marshall
This is the quote from Michael Ledeen, from this morning's event
at AEI, which I noted in the previous post.
The quote came in response to a question from the floor, asking how many casualties the American public would be willing to endure and still support the war in Iraq. This was the heart of his response ...
I think it all depends how the war goes. And I think the level of causalities is secondary. It may sound like an odd thing to say. But all the great scholars who have studied American character have come to the conclusion that we are a warlike people. And that we love war. And one of my favorite comments on American character, which is Patton's speech at the beginning of the movie, where he says "Americans love war. We love fighting. We've always fought. We enjoy it. We're good at it. And so forth." What we hate is not casualties but losing. And if the war goes well, and if the American public has the conviction that we're being well-led, and that our people are fighting well, and that we're winning, I don't think causalities are gonna be the issue.If the American public gets the idea that we're doing poorly, that we're badly led, that the war plan is inferior, that we're being outmaneuvered, outwitted and our guys are dying on behalf of a losing cause, then the American people will turn against it. And that's the usual rule.
Interestingly, in the neo-conservative circles in which he runs, Ledeen is known not so much as an Iraq-hawk, but rather as an Iran-hawk.
--Josh Marshall
I'll put together a verbatim transcript later this afternoon. But two points struck me from Michael Ledeen's comments from this morning at AEI. The first was his argument that Americans are a "warlike people" who have a high tolerance for casualties so long as they're well-led and fighting in a just cause. He referenced the speech from the beginning of the movie Patton -- you know, the one where Patton's standing in front of the big American flag.
The other point was on the definition of terrorism. Ledeen argued that the record of the war thus far has confirmed Saddam's practice of terrorism. His point was a reference to the Iraqis' practice of having soldiers try to blend in with civilians by taking off their uniforms and putting on civilian clothes, false surrenders, ambushes, and stuff like this.
Now, I don't defend this stuff for a minute. These are clear violations of the rules of war. But this isn't 'terrorism.' It's called guerrilla warfare. And guerrilla fighters, almost by definition, seldom follow the rules of war. This is something that's almost always practiced -- for better or worse -- by forces that are vastly outnumbered by their opponents.
It's amazing that anyone would not have expected that, and disingenuous to class it as terrorism.
--Josh Marshall
Nothing seems as important right now as the possibility of a civilian uprising in Basra. If it plays like the hawks have long predicted it would, it would prove a major victory for the whole military endeavor.
Here's the key, as I see it, to the current situation. Nothing that has happened is really that troubling from a purely military point of view. The US-UK forces have advanced to the edge of Baghdad in just a few days. This isn't really good or bad, really. As we've noted before, the story will be told when we fight for Baghdad itself.
The problem isn't with the military strategy. It's rather that what we've seen so far on the military side of the equation has thrown into some doubt our political strategy.
We can subdue Iraq militarily. That's really not a question. But if we have to subdue it in that sense our political strategy will be in a shambles. The strategy which the administration is following amounts to a grand politico-diplomatic carom shot. We can ignore the protests from around the world, they argue, because we assume that when we've finished with our plan the results will prove our diplomatic opponents wrong.
In other words, if we get into Iraq and we find tons of WMD and the Iraqis are praising us to the stars for liberating them, then France and Germany and Russia will have egg on their face. It really won't matter how much they griped on the way in because we'll be retrospectively justified. And with a pro-American Iraqi civilian population we'll go about setting up a democratic polity which will be the envy of the Arab world.
On the other hand, if we have something more like an angry and restive civilian population, then, from a political standpoint, we're really up the creek. We won't have happy Iraqis making our case for us to the world community. And it will be very hard for us to set up a democratic government while we're ruling the place with our fists.
The real outcome will almost certainly fall between these two extremes. But the Bush administration's approach to changing the regime in Baghdad banked almost everything on a picture perfect response from the Iraqi people.
This reminds of a phrase they repeat over and over again in the Army: "Hope is not a plan."
--Josh Marshall
I just got back from a briefing from what we might call -- with a nod to the Civil War lexicon -- the Army of the Potomac. That is, the key regime-change boosters from the DC foreign policy establishment. This morning at the American Enterprise Institute, Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen and James Woolsey gave a briefing on the progress of the war. I'm going to write more about this later this evening. But I thought I'd write a little now from my filing station here at Starbucks just to give my first impressions.
There was a definitely a sense that things weren't going as well as had been expected. But the general tenor of the presentations was 'Let's wait and see; we never said it would be easy, etc.'
To the extent there was any second-guessing it was from Ledeen, who said it was a bad idea to have "made the battle for Iraq almost entirely a military battle when there were so many political elements operating in our favor..." This is something we may be hearing a lot more of -- basically, the neos saying we should have taken the US military-cum-'Iraqi opposition' approach.
There was some discussion of the much broader conflict or war of which Iraq is supposed to be only the first battle. But of that, more later.
--Josh Marshall
Speaking in strictly military terms, it's far too soon to say how this war is going or how good a strategy the US is pursuing. But there is one man in particular who comes to mind whose professional reputation very much rides on the outcome. His name is Eliot Cohen and he's the author of a much-discussed book called Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime.
The thesis of Eliot's book is that the best wartime leaders are those who heavily involve themselves in military planning. They don't just leave it to the generals. They question and prod and, when needed -- and that's fairly often -- overrule them. A key premise of Cohen's argument is that generals and admirals are often overly risk-averse, trapped in the thinking of the last war, and sometimes overly devoted to the institutional agendas of their particular service.
Any quick description of a book will to some degree be an over-simplification. But this captures the main outlines of Cohen's argument.
The book made a big splash in Washington policy circles. And what made the book so important was that it provided grist for a debate which was going on in Washington last year between the Pentagon's civilian political appointees and those in uniform.
Was Rumsfeld and Co. right to tell the Joint Chiefs how to do their business? Were the staff officers on the Joint Staff just too unimaginative or maybe just too afraid of taking casualties? Did the uniforms really grasp the impact of new technology on the conduct of war? Or did the folks in uniform maybe know something that Rumsfeld and Co. didn't?
For those who supported Rumsfeld and Co., Cohen's book provided much-needed ammunition. If you didn't want to fight a war in Iraq the way the military wanted to fight it, Cohen provided a reading of history which justified ignoring a lot of the career officers' advice.
That debate is now coming back with a vengeance as a lot of retired Army commanders are coming forward with a big "I told you so." (For a number of reasons, this debate centered most heavily on the Army.) This second-guessing from retired generals isn't coming from nowhere. They've been saying this for 18 months. And the degree of tension and acrimony in that debate became quite intense. (I discussed some of this in an article about civilian-military relations at the Pentagon last year in Salon.)
The Pentagon's political appointees were buoyed by the progress of the war in Afghanistan. Rumsfeld and Co. pressed the uniformed services to adopt a much more rapid and aggressive approach than they wanted to take. And it worked. By the early spring of last year, in part because of the success in Afghanistan and the discussion generated by Cohen's book, it had become conventional wisdom in certain circles in Washington that the career officers at the Pentagon were really just a bunch of fuddy-duddies who needed to be told what to do.
That's the backdrop to retired Army General Barry McCaffrey's remarks yesterday to Reuters. McCaffrey, who commanded the 24th Infantry Division in the first Gulf War, was asked whether he thought Don Rumsfeld had misjudged the nature of this war, particularly by sending in the Americans without enough force on the ground ...
Yes, sure. I think everybody told him that ... I think he thought these were U.S. generals with their feet planted in World War II that didn't understand the new way of warfare.
There's a lot more to tell here. (One part of the story is Rumsfeld's practice of appointing military leaders who are not known for standing up to, or giving bad news to, their civilian superiors.) But if it does turn out that we don't have enough men and materiel on the ground in Iraq, that's the direction this debate is going to go.
--Josh Marshall
This run-down of the events of the last three days in Ha'aretz strikes me as a pretty apt summary of the current military situation.
--Josh Marshall
Here's another post for the foreign policy 
incompetence file. As we've noted here several times before, the administration thought muscling the Turks would pay off for the United States -- a strategy that backfired terribly. I don't even think I imagined, however, they'd be this clumsy. Buried in the last graf of this article in Saturday's Washington Post comes this ...
But one senior U.S. official acknowledged that U.S. pressure in recent months has backfired, saying that at one point Pentagon officials insinuated to Turkish politicians that they could get the Turkish military to back the request for U.S. troop deployments in Turkey. "It was stupid stuff. These are proud people," he said. "Speaking loudly and carrying a big stick wins you tactical victories from time to time, but not a strategic victory."
The backdrop here is that the military pushed out an Islamist government only a few years back. Going over the civilians' heads to the Turkish General Staff would inevitably raise the spectre of a repeat of those events.
It's the sort of tough guy tactics that's worked for the Bushies at home but failed miserably abroad.
What I wouldn't give to know who at the Pentagon tried this? Could someone with the initials HR possibly be involved? And who's the "senior U.S. official" who said this to the Post? What I wouldn't give ...
Special thanks to TPM Reader JW for bringing this article to my attention.
--Josh Marshall
Looking over the day's news, my strongest impression is a curious sort of deja vu. Military planners have been thinking this through for years. And when I spoke to a number of them last year to write an article about a war against Iraq, I tried to draw them out on precisely this issue. What will be easy? Which parts will be hard? Which parts of doing this worry you the most?
Most everyone agreed that we'd roll up the south pretty quickly. (Despite all the rough news of the last couple days, that's pretty much been borne out.) And then we'd come up to Baghdad with a massive coalition army. And then the big question would be answered. Would the regime fold? Or would Saddam have enough loyal Republican Guards to pull us into a really ugly fight for Baghdad?
That's always been the question and it looks like we're about to learn the answer.
This was always the question that worried military planners. I also did my best to put this question to the more zealous hawks.
Jim Woolsey was pretty straightforward. He thought we might possibly avoid a pitched battle for Baghdad, but thought the possibility was very real and that such a confrontation would be very bloody. This from my interview with Woolsey last April ...
It could well end up that Baghdad will be a big battle ... This could be a bloody and very bad thing ... It may be that the uprising will spread even among the Republican Guards and he'll lose out very quickly. But I think we would have to count on having to fight for Baghdad ...And that could be a bloody undertaking. But it was a bloody undertaking to fight the Battle of the Bulge and for the Russians to take Berlin in 1945 and I don't really see any alternative.
Richard Perle was a good deal more cagey. I had a very hard time pinning him down on what would happen if Saddam's government didn't collapse before we got to Baghdad, or for that matter really any of the serious downside possibilities. He never seemed to accept the premise. This from my interview with him, also from last April ...
I don't think you have to go to Baghdad. At least it's not certain that you have to. I think if you've initiated activities, or at least his opponents have in the north and the south, he either accepts the loss of that territory -- which I think he is loathe to do -- or he sends that same Republican Guard out to try to reverse the situation. And when he does it is exceedingly vulnerable to American air power.[At this point, I asked Perle why Saddam would ignore textbook military doctrine which would counsel him to fight on ground on which he was least vulnerable, i.e., in Baghdad. I also pressed him on the necessity of having some plan in place if Saddam didn't fold or send his Republican Guards out to meet us on the barren desert.]
Well, first of all, his revenues would shrivel, which is to say he would have none. His ports in the south would be gone. What does he do? Just hold up in a palace near Baghdad? Try to assert authority over the country as a whole or does he accept that he now rules the Baghdad area but that's all? I think we can put him in a situation where he's got to try to assert authority over his own territory. And when he does he's highly vulnerable, his forces are highly vulnerable. There are other ways of doing this. It's certainly not up to me to decide what strategy we pursue. But I think there are strategies that do not entail an inevitable result on Baghdad.
Soon enough, this will cease to be a matter of conjecture.
--Josh Marshall
Over the weekend, I've only been able to keep up on press reports sporadically. But what caught my eye over the last two days was the failure to take the southern city of Basra. It made me think that things weren't going quite as well as the initial reports implied.
Now, in this case, it's very important to give some context to words like 'failure' or things going better or worse than expected. Over the last year I've spoken to many US military planners. And what's happened so far seems well within the range of what they considered expected outcomes. It's only that the best case scenario does not so far seem to be materializing.
Let's take Basra first. Part of the lightning approach the US is following here is to set everything aside in pursuit of getting to Baghdad and decapitating the regime. On that thinking, it's fine just to seal off Basra -- and its military capabilities -- and move on to Baghdad. One needs to be sure that it's sufficiently secured so as not to allow Iraqi units to circle back and attack the relatively vulnerable US supply lines on the way to Baghdad. But that's probably not too big a worry. The Iraqi Army's real bite, if it has one, is going to be in defensive actions, particularly in urban settings. The issue is not that Basra's resistance is a problem in itself. It's what it may portend for Baghdad, Tikrit and other Iraqi cities.
Basra is in heavily Shi'a southern Iraq. And it's garrisoned by the regime's least reliable troops. So if the regime's military were going to fold quickly or be overwhelmed by restive civilians, you'd expect it to be there. The fact that it hasn't makes it much less likely that that sort of happy outcome will happen in Sunni central Iraq, among the Special Republican Guards, Saddam's Tikriti tribesmen, and others closely associated with the regime. In short, Saddam seems to have a good number of troops who are willing to fight and die for what appears to be a doomed regime.
Here's a key passage from an article in today's Washington Post ...
The Iraqis holding out in Basra are members of the Iraqi army's 51st Division, not the elite Republican Guard who have been moved to defend Baghdad and were expected to put up the stiffest resistance the U.S.-led invasion. That regular soldiers have stood so long and fought has surprised some who were predicting that Basra could be taken on the first day of fighting, to provide the American-led coalition a quick victory and deliver an early psychological blow to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Now, the failure of a rapid capitulation in Basra doesn't necessarily mean the Basrans want to fight the US soldiers. It may mean there is a sprinkling of Republican Guards and still-fearsome security forces in the city who have been able to keep a reign of terror in place which has prevented any slide toward capitulation. In a sense, though, the fact is more important than the 'why.'
This is why the uniformed military wanted to do this operation with a massive number of US troops (as we do have there now) rather than pursuing the so-called 'Afghan model.' It was always possible that the regime would just fold. But if it didn't, they wanted to have on hand overwhelming force to crush such resistance very quickly.
--Josh Marshall
