Winning Modern Wars: Iraq, Terrorism, and the American Empire
- Book Review,
by Wesley K. Clark
Amazon.com
Retired General Wesley Clark's follow up to his insightful, detailed memoir of NATO's victorious Kosovo campaign begins as a concise analysis of the 2003 military invasion/occupation of Iraq and wends its way to a troubling yet ultimately hopeful examination of America at an unprecedented domestic, economic, and geopolitical crossroads. Clark's keen intellect (he was a Rhodes Scholar and graduated first in his class at West Point) and refreshing gift for intelligent plain-speaking often call attention to salient observations too often overlooked in the daily jumble of selective news and political spin. Our conflicts with Iraq have not been two distinct wars, but an unceasing, 13-year-long military campaign; the ambitious Pax Americana envisioned by Bush administration neocons is not only unsustainable, but a redundant anachronism, America having long ago created a "virtual empire" by dint of its interlocking international business relationships, cultural lure, and (ideally) moral leadership. His critics may label it the political manifesto of an ambitious presidential contender (a charge he quickly addresses in his introduction with a pre-emptive strike that is, given the subject matter, a bit ironic), but Clark's vision of an engaged, enterprising America leading the world instead of dominating it is rooted in an objective understanding of history, our nation's own longstanding philosophical ideals, and no small amount of refreshing horse sense (are we fighting terrorism by creating terrorists? And how safe is a country that starves its very security apparatus with unsound economic policies?). Ever loyal to the armed forces he served with distinction for 33 years, Clark also never passes up an opportunity to praise our nation's best and bravest, the men and women who are the cutting edge of America's sword, be it yielded with restrained wisdom or reckless abandon. --Jerry McCulley
From Publishers Weekly
While this work's origins do not seem to lie in its author's presidential ambitions, its publication is clearly timed to reinforce General Clark's newly announced candidacy. The effect is a work with a split personality. Its first half is a narrative and analysis of the military campaign that overthrew Saddam Hussein's government in three weeks during the spring of 2003. Clark, a highly visible commentator during the operation, describes the U.S. ability to synchronize firepower and maneuvers as decisive in crushing an Iraqi army whose fighting power had been significantly overestimated. He is appropriately enthusiastic about the competence displayed at all levels, from the senior headquarters down to companies and platoons. He recognizes a level of flexibility and a readiness to take risks that are unusual, if not unique, in U.S. military operations, even though both seem to make him uncomfortable. The plan, Clark argues, took unnecessary risks by skimping on the forces committed. More seriously--and here the work shifts focus and becomes a campaign statement--the Bush administration, he says, was so focused on winning the military war that it made inadequate preparations for occupation and reconstruction. Clark argues that the administration has refused to seek legitimacy from the U.N. and NATO, or to build on the international sympathy manifested immediately after 9/11. The strategic result, Clark says, has been a loss of focus on what he calls the "real war" against terrorism, a neglect of domestic security and a concentration on preemptively challenging purportedly hostile states. The practical consequences, he believes, include a series of wasted opportunities in Afghanistan, a possible quagmire in Iraq and the increasing isolation of a U.S. that uses war as a first option instead of a last resort. Clark concludes by calling for a return to international cooperation combined with greater emphasis on a sound economy.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
This is a tale of two books, each of them slim and each instructive in some fashion as the political new year begins to gather speed for the rush toward an American election day and a popular decision on the Bush administration's conduct of its wars and foreign policies.Written last summer, before he declared his candidacy for President Bush's job, Wesley Clark's Winning Modern Wars presents a sharply focused critical account of our entanglement in Iraq, in the war and in the even more deadly postwar phase of operations there. Without question, it was Gen. Clark and Gen. Barry McCaffrey whom Vice President Dick Cheney referred to when, last April, he laughed at what he called "retired military officers embedded in TV studios." They and certainly every other commentator, including myself, had gotten something or some things wrong as Operation Iraqi Freedom unfolded in fits and starts and lightning strikes into the heartland of Saddam Hussein's beleaguered nation. But it would become amply clear that the retired generals and other commentators had no exclusive patent on being wrong when it came to Iraq.Cheney himself and his good buddy Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were still running victory laps even as a stubborn insurgency neither of them thought possible tied down 130,000 American soldiers. In the balance of the year, the Iraqi malcontents and foreign jihadists killed more American soldiers than were lost in three weeks of actual combat.Clark writes: "Today many are asking fundamental questions about the war against Saddam, such as whether the operation was justified, whether it has succeeded in reducing the terrorist threat we face, what precisely we are going to do in Iraq -- for how long and at what cost -- and how we should win the broader war against terror." The general adds that these questions about the war need to be answered now, "before the costs and problems associated with our actions have grown so great that change will be seen as failure and continuation will be prohibitively costly."Clark's hindsight analysis and his reporting on the events of the three-week war are right on target. The general uses unnamed "others" to point the finger at Rumsfeld for micromanaging the deployment of American ground forces. This penchant of Rumsfeld's, and the penny-pinching that went with it, resulted in deploying too small a ground combat force and taking unnecessary risks in the war plan. A second major criticism is of the administration's endgame, which short-changed postwar planning and overlooked how difficult the transition to civilian rule would be for a nation and people subjugated by Saddam Hussein for decades -- a "profound flaw," in Clark's judgment.In short, the administration (with the exception of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell) gave little or no thought to what happens when the destruction of war ends and the serious task of securing the peace and rebuilding a shattered nation begins. Rumsfeld and his neoconservative aides, including Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, didn't believe there would be a real problem, didn't believe in nation-building and thus did not plan for it.As for all that noise about Rumsfeld's revolutionary transformation of the military, radical rewriting of Clausewitzian principles and birthing of a new way of war, Clark says this "is largely a reality . . . inherited when [Bush officials] took office in 2001."There are changes needed, and changes afoot, in the Army. But Rumsfeld owes the simple existence of an Army still barely large enough to handle unending commitments old and new -- in Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Korea, the Sinai and elsewhere -- to then-Army Chief of Staff Eric K. Shinseki's successfully fending off a Rumsfeld attempt in 2001 to cut the active-duty Army from 10 divisions to eight, and the Army National Guard from eight divisions to four. In the first part of 2001, the office of the secretary of defense firmly believed that the United States was beginning a 20-year strategic pause, a welcome breathing space that could be used to transform (read: downsize) the Army and gain billions in savings on personnel that then would be spent building a strategic missile defense.The events of Sept. 11, 2001, made it clear there would be no pause, and made it just as clear that the Army needed every soldier it had, active and reserve and National Guard, to deal with what was coming. Far from excoriating Shinseki, Rumsfeld should have been grateful that the general saved him from himself.As Iraq ate up our deployable military might and consumed an estimated $100 billion per year of our national budget, what of the global war on terror? Clark says, "the analysis suggests that defeating terrorism is more difficult and far-reaching than we have assumed. Not only does the struggle continue; our success is far from assured."Yet that hasn't tempered the ambitions of the Bush White House. Clark asserts: "Overnight [after Sept. 11], U.S. foreign policy became not only unilateralist but moralistic, intensely patriotic, and assertive, planning military action against Iraq and perhaps other states in the Middle East, and intimating the New American Empire." He clearly believes we have gone in the wrong direction and has been stumping the country saying so.And here we consider, briefly as deserved, Midge Decter's hagiography of her friend of two decades' standing, Donald Rumsfeld. The best that can be said of Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait is that it is mercifully short.Decter has been described as the doyenne of the neoconservative movement: wife of one of its founders, Norman Podhoretz; mother of a key adherent, John Podhoretz; and an in-law of the White House's Middle East expert Elliott Abrams. Like other neoconservatives, she has made a long leap from left to right, landing lightly at the end just as dogmatically certain of rectitude as before. The neocons, by virtue of that background, are obviously more witty and literate than the plain old cons.Not that Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait displays much in the way of wit or erudition. Consider page one of the prelude: "It was a warm autumn evening in 2001, and we were dining alfresco on a terrace overlooking New York's Central Park. A woman I had known for many years -- a handsome, elegant and well-connected member of the city's cultural and artistic community -- was seated across from me. 'Oh, Rumsfeld,' she practically cooed, 'I just love the man! To tell you the truth, I have his picture hanging in my dressing room.' "Or this, on page two, same prelude: "I had been very pleased then, as one would be in the case of someone one knows and respects, when after more than a quarter of a century [Rumsfeld] had been returned to a high position in the United States government. But for him to be the object of so very feminine a kind of admiration was something altogether different. This was the stuff -- no other word would do -- of glamour."Or this, at the end of the book: "And then there is his stardom, which has carried with it, and to some extent furthered, some kind of change in American attitudes. The popular 'discovery' of Donald H. Rumsfeld spells the return of the ideal of the Middle American family man, with all that such an ideal entails in the way of vitality, determination, humor, seriousness, and abiding self-confidence, along with protectiveness toward loved ones, neighbors, and country."That is a debatable point, to put it mildly, given the harsh reception accorded those Rumsfeldian American ideals in Iraq and among our traditional allies in Western Europe (especially those Rumsfeld has humorously dismissed as "Old Europe"). Rumsfeld would do well to buy up every copy of this book he can locate to prevent any wider circulation. Reviewed by Joseph L. GallowayCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
From Booklist
The title will hardly rouse readers, and the book will be read with the assumption that Clark knew he was running for president as he penned it. (In fact, it's a follow-up of sorts to Clark's earlier tome, Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Future of Combat, 2002). Whatever his motives this time, Clark delivers a straightforward account of the war in Iraq and then offers his opinions on the mistakes that were made in its aftermath. The first half of the book will appeal most to military buffs as Clark goes over the events leading up to Operation Iraqi Freedom (Clark, a four-star general, oversaw the no-fly zone in Iraq for a period), including the Gulf War, and details the battlefield strategies that brought the U.S. an easy victory. During this discussion, Clark seems to have on his CNN commentator's cap, writing in a neutral tone that has a "you-are-there" appeal. It is later, when Clark discusses the postwar period, that he sounds, if not passionate, then at least more involved, as he details the weaknesses of the U.S. case against Iraq and explains how the military operation undermined the overall war on terrorism. Most of what Clark writes about the aftermath of the war has already been noted by various critics; this has particular interest because of who is saying it. Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Walter Isaacson
"A fascinating analysis of the tactics of war and the values that underlay America's mission in the world."
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