Malcolm Redfellow learns something new every day ...

Sunday, 7th March, 2010: military intelligence

It is a well-known truism that the British War Office was always prepared to fight the last war. That needs a whit of modern updating, "... and the next spending review".

There are certainly quite a few retired brass-hats now able to assure the world that the military deficiencies shown up in the Irag campaign were all the fault of the Treasury.

It all goes with perfect 20/20 after-vision.
____________________

Now Malcolm is still recovering from the long effort of striving for the end of James Ellroy's Blood's a Rover. Perhaps labour worthy of a better cause. The effort was a month in the achieving, with delightful intermissions such as

• Jasper fforde's Shades of Grey [get it in hard back for £8.49, rather than wait for the paperback at £7.99 in the late autumn], which owes something to Brave New World, to John Christopher's The Guardians, and to all those other dystopias;
  

and

• Malcolm Pryce's From Aberystwyth With Love, the latest of his Louie Knight stories, in which West Wales becomes a hardboiled parallel universe.

So, what next?

Well, here by the bed is an unread, mint copy (Oxfam books at £4.99, and still over-priced) of The War Within, the fourth of Bob Woodward's investigative-journalist contemporary-histories of the Bush Administration.

That is where Malcolm found his insight for this "something new everyday". Here is Woodward's account of Colin Powell before the blue-ribbon Congressional Iraq Study Group:

Perhaps more than anyone in the administration, Powell had been the "closer" for the president's case for war. A month before the war, he appeared before the United Nations and the world to make the public case, displaying what he said were the "facts" proving that Iraq had threatening stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The 76-minute presentation had proven effective, too effective, with Powell displaying all his powers of persuasion.

Four years later, no WMD had been found, many saw the war as a catastrophe, and Powell's reputation was irretrievably linked to it, forever damaged. So the 10:30 A.M. meeting on this Friday was both a mission of accommodation and penance. He was going to have to confront the war and its aftermath for the rest of his life, and this was but another stop on the road to sort out his anguish.

As he entered the small conference room, Powell was greeted warmly by the members of the group. He gazed around the room. There must have been a jailbreak, he joked. The room erupted in laughter.

There was an obvious camaraderie between Powell and the group members, most of whom had dedicated much of their lives to building up American power and credibility, winning the last phase of the Cold War and shaping a world in which the United States was the only superpower. Now Iraq threatened to undermine all they had built.

[President GHW Bush's Secretary of State, James A.] Baker and [Chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Lee] Hamilton sat together at the head of a table, with Powell directly across from them. The other members lined the sides of the table, and staff sat along the wall.

Did Powell have something to say up front? Baker asked.

"I have no opening statement."

Okay, then why did we go into Iraq with so few troops? Baker asked.

It was an unusual starting point. The study group was supposed to focus on future remedies, not past troubles. But the question of troop levels seemed to be at the heart of the problem, and the relatively small invasion force of some 150,000 troops had contradicted Powell’s philosophy of warfare—namely to send a large, decisive force that would guarantee success. For the 1991 Gulf War—a far simpler military task of ejecting the Iraqi army from its occupation of Kuwait—Powell, then JCS chairman, had insisted on a force of 500,000.

Baker’s question sparked a monologue that went on for nearly 20 minutes.

"Colin just exploded at that point," Perry recalled later.

"He unloaded," [Bill Clinton's Chief of Staff] Leon Panetta added. "He was angry. He was mad as hell."

Powell cited pages 393 to 395 from American Soldier, the memoir of General Tommy Franks, who was in charge of Central Command at the time of the Iraq invasion. Quoting from memory, he noted that Franks had faithfully reported a call that Powell had made on September 5, 2002, six months before the invasion. "I've got problems with force size and support of that force, given the long lines of communications" and supplies, Powell had warned Franks.

"Colin Powell was the free world's leading diplomat. But he no longer wore Army green," Franks had written. "He'd earned his right to an opinion, but had relinquished responsibility for the conduct of military operations when he retired as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1993.

"I picked up the Red Switch and spoke to Don Rumsfeld. 'I appreciate his call,' I said. 'But I wanted to tell him that the military has changed since he left.'"

Franks reported that "Rumsfeld chuckled," but wanted to make sure that Powell's doubts were aired. "I want him to get them on the table in front of the president and the NSC. Otherwise, we'll look like we're steamrolling," Franks quoted Rumsfeld as saying.

Again citing Franks's memoir, Powell noted that he had raised his concerns at an NSC meeting held at Camp David with the president two days later. According to Franks's account, "Soft-spoken and polite, ever the diplomat, he questioned the friendly-to-enemy force ratios, and made the point rather forcefully that the Coalition would have 'extremely long' supply lines."

Powell did not mention that two pages later, Franks wrote that he had outlined his war plan without objection. "Colin Powell didn't debate the brief I gave, and he didn't ask any more operational questions," Franks wrote, suggesting that Powell did not persist.

Powell acknowledged to the study group that he couldn't have predicted the insurgency or the chaos of post-invasion Iraq. But he did know that such a mission required plenty of troops. It was the Powell Doctrine: Go-in big. Go in to win.

Seven months before the war, Powell had asked for a private meeting with President Bush to layout what he felt were the consequences of an invasion of Iraq that the president and his team had failed to examine. Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, summed it up this way: "If you break it, you own it."

At the study group meeting, Panetta later recalled, Powell said he had warned the president. "I did make clear that once this happens, you're the one who is going to have to pick up the pieces and put it back together again. And it's not going to be easy to do." Or as he put it later: "We not only did not have enough troops to stabilize the country and act like an occupying force, we didn't want to act like an occupying force. But we were the occupying force. We were the government."

In the classic sense, Powell told the group, there had never been a "front" to this war. The insurgency had begun from behind.

After his recapitulation on force levels, Powell moved without pause to the lack of postwar planning. He said he was stunned that Rumsfeld, when asked publicly about rampant looting in Iraq, had said, "Stuff happens." At a Pentagon press conference three weeks after the invasion, Rumsfeld had said that freedom was "untidy" and the extensive looting was the result of "pent-up feelings" from decades of Saddam Hussein's oppression. Powell quoted the defense secretary's "stuff happens" with utter disdain, suggesting it was an absurd evaluation and an abdication of responsibility.

Throughout that spring of 2003, Powell said, he'd kept thinking to himself, "When are we going to get this together?" All the Pentagon would say was, "Chalabi is coming, Chalabi is coming," a reference to Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile with a checkered past who had long opposed Saddam Hussein. Chalabi had been the poster boy for a new democracy in Iraq, but Powell was dismissive.

"It was just Chalabi and 600 thugs," Powell said, noting that Chalabi failed to live up to the promise he'd made to the Pentagon to show up in Iraq with 10,000 men.

As secretary of state at the time of the invasion in 2003, Powell said he wasn't told about the decision to dissolve the Iraqi army until it happened. It was a monumental decision that disbanded the entire Iraqi army with the stroke of a pen, and its enactment was contrary to previous briefings that had been given to the president and to Powell. Nor was Powell told in advance about the sweeping de-Baathification order banning members of Saddam's Baath Party from many levels of government. It had effectively pulled the rug out from under the bureaucracy that made the country run, as many Iraqis had needed to be Baathists simply to get a job within Saddam's government.

Powell expressed astonishment that officials who lacked proper credentials had been sent to Iraq. He specifically mentioned Bernard Kerik, the troubled former New York City police commissioner, whom Bush had named to head the Iraqi national police and intelligence agency. "Bernie Kerik is in charge of police?" Powell asked, with a mixture of mock surprise and disgust. "Where did Bernie Kerik come from?"

Though he had been out of government for a year and a half, Powell's anger seemed fresh and raw. And now it had risen to the surface for them to see as he channeled years of accumulated resentments into his testimony.

Now, Malcolm reckons that teaches us a great deal:

• Powell's Go-in big. Go in to win is conventional orthodoxy. It has been shown to be the most dependable strategy for most of military history and was Eisenhower's in North Africa and Normandy. One can assume it is the most basic rule taught at West Point. Yet, for the Iraq campaign and its lamentable aftermath, up to Bush's last-throw "surge", it was discounted.
• If the supply lines were "extremely long" for the US logistical potential, they must be even more difficult for British forces, operating well out of their usual theatres. Did any UK military figure point this out to his political masters?
• Not all the responsibility can be dumped on the Bush cronies. As Woodward comments (in connection with General George Casey being appointed to take over the Iraq command in May 2004):

The general attitude in the US military was "We can do this. Get out of our way. We'll take care of it. You guys stand over there."

This did not sell itself to Donald Rumsfeld. With such disconnection between the Pentagon and the Washington politicians, then, again, the British were further back in the queue.

• If Powell, Secretary of State, was regularly by-passed on major decisions, we can reasonably assume that the British were equally kept out-of-the-loop. The whole of Woodward's book makes this clear by omission: Tony Blair achieves a single mention (pages 224-5): even Lawrence of Arabia gets two.

Throughout the book Woodward keeps coming back to what Powell says there, which is later defined as "the Pottery Barn rule": you break it, you own it. Deficiencies in US strategy, implementation and planning smashed the shop in Iraq (and, arguably, continue to do so in Aghanistan). Yet the opposition parties in Britain, and some political brass hats, seek to place the ownership of the breakages entirely on Blair and, now, Brown.

Surely something wrong?

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Coming to terms: six years on
(and seventeen months of Bush still to go)

Malcolm freely admits he is still trying to get a perspective on the madness of these last six years.

The event

He arrived home mid-late afternoon, that Tuesday. Before he was into the house, his wife called out that his daughter was safe. Why? What?

All television channels were rolling the news feed: the smoke and horror of Manhattan, three thousand miles away and five hours time difference.

His daughter should have been going into work in one of the buildings which subsequently collapsed. She should have arrived at the World Trade Center by the PATH link from Hoboken. (Until now, Malcolm had thought that meant "Passage under the Hudson". He now sees it means "Port Authority Trans-Hudson" Corporation.)

What saved the daughter was the baby, just a few months old, and needing to be delivered to the day-care facility. He had filled his nappy, twice, so she had missed two trains. As a result, and somewhat flustered, she pulled in very late at Hoboken to be told that the PATH was not operating, and that everyone should go home. Hoboken station is right on the waterside, and the plume of black smoke just across the river was only too obvious.

Cell-phones were not working, partly because of the consumer overload, partly because of deliberate official intervention, and partly because the aerials on top of the WTC had been taken out. Her husband was in Dallas, Texas, at a conference. She could not contact him. By some strange dispensation she was able to phone London. So a strange bouncing of messages took place. She phoned London. London phoned the husband's sister in Los Angeles. She phoned Dallas. And vice versa. And for some time.

The husband, and three New York colleagues, rented a car (the only transportation available, remember) and drove, non-stop, from Dallas to New York: thirty hours, 1550 miles. They were not the only ones.

The daughter assumed that the rest of her team, for whom she felt responsible, could be under the rubble: in fact all were safe, but she would not know that for two days. Other members of her company, with whom she had worked, were on American Airlines flight 77.

That evening, the 9th September, she eventually arrived back at her hometown, and collected the baby from day-care. Later she discovered that the nursery helpers, way past their usual hours, were still caring for two uncollected children. Learning that, she says, was the moment it all closed in on her.

The consequences

Perhaps those subjective recollections were what clouded Malcolm's objective judgments. Or perhaps he merely went with the flow.

The deposing of a fascist dictator is a good thing, yes? And Saddam Hussein and his Baathist régime were a blood-bespattered lot, who had consciously moulded their structures and methods on the Nazi example.

There was, and is, clear and incontrovertible evidence that Saddam's Iraq was a military threat, that it had invaded its neighbours, and deliberately and earnestly sought weapons of mass destruction. Nay-sayers should refer to the Supergun Affair, and recognise that Saddam did initiate both nuclear weapons and biological weapons programmes. What the US and UK did not know (because the Iraqi totalitarianism was so opaque) was that these had not been sustainable.

So far, so ...

Malcolm is still not sure whether he would not repeat his acceptance of the military option.

Organising the aftermath

When the American and British forces crossed the Rhine in 1945, and brought about the collapse of the Third Reich, what happened next (at least in the Western Zones of Occupation) was well rehearsed.

The US Army had some practical experience: they had administered Mexico in 1847-8, the former Confederacy after 1865, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Cuba after the Spanish-American War, and the Rhineland after World War I. From this experience, a committee in the War College in 1939-40 had actually produced a manual on administering occupied territory.

Nor were the British, having run an empire, any further behind.

As early as the beginning of 1941 the Intelligence Training Centre of the War Office began courses at St John's College, Cambridge, "to train officers in postwar reconstruction and other missions incident to military operations in foreign countries".

Some fifty months later the investment paid off. And three years after that, a new, dynamic and democratic Federal Republic of Germany was up-and-running. And after that came the Wirtschaftswunder.

Anyone who wants to get into this period, in Malcolm's view, should start with the fiction and romance, and then work back to the history. Leon Uris creamed the popular market with the near-weepie Armageddon, published in 1963, but covering the period from the mid-1940s to the Berlin Airlift. Still available (if only on the second-hand market), still as good as any other historical thriller. For a less emotive, more satisfying read, then it's John le Carré, including his impression of Bonn as A Small Town in Germany. In passing, for Malcolm, Len Deighton (especially the historical reconstructions Bomber and Fighter, and the marvellous Bernard Samson series) trumps le Carré every time. Philip Kerr's revived Bernie Gunther (of whom, doubtless, more anon) also catches the mood.

Au suivant!

And then ...

A briefing paper prepared for British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers eight months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq concluded that the U.S. military was not preparing adequately for what the British memo predicted would be a "protracted and costly" postwar occupation of that country.

... the memo "Iraq: Conditions for Military Action" notes that U.S. "military planning for action against Iraq is proceeding apace," but adds that "little thought" has been given to, among other things, "the aftermath and how to shape it."

Who is thereby seen to be derelict of their duty? Who should be held responsible?

Clearly the American authorities bulldozed their way through (and apparently without) any contingency planning. That implies we can no longer trust the Pentagon's forward planning (including that of General Petraeus, just this last week) until they prove themselves and their judgments to the contrary.

Equally, the UK systems, under the new Prime Minister, need to be more wary, more transparent, more credible and less credulous in their actions and interpretation of American initiatives.

And now...

A wholesale stream of "I told you so" confessions and self-exculpations are being loosed on the public. As token of that, by courtesy of the New York Times Book Update, Malcolm receives notice of The Terror Presidency (a nice, ambiguous title, that) by Jack Goldsmith. Malcolm regards the New York Times Sunday edition (which arrives in umpteen sections over two days), of which the book section is just one part, one of the journalistic delights of the world. It makes our domestic Sunday Times seem small beer.

Goldsmith was for just nine months, from the autumn of 2003, head of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in the US Justice Department. As such he was, effectively, the main scrutineer of legal opinion on the actions of the Presidency.

Goldsmith was a conservative republican loyalist, and got his job on that basis. Even so he found the White House's shenanigans unacceptable. Here's he lays out his stall:

I was briefed on some of the most sensitive counterterrorism operations in the government. Each of these operations was supported by OLC opinions written by my predecessors. As I absorbed the opinions, I concluded that some were deeply flawed: sloppily written, overbroad, and incautious in asserting extraordinary constitutional authorities on behalf of the President. I was astonished, and immensely worried, to discover that some of our most important counterterrorism policies rested on severely damaged legal foundations.

Goldsmith puts that, and himself, in a very specific, significant and physical context: sitting under the framed photograph of a predecessor, Elliot Richardson. Richardson had been ordered by Nixon to sack the Special Prosecutor, Archibald Cox (and so frustrate further investigation into Watergate): Richardson had refused, and honourably resigned.

The New York Times reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, says:

The portrait of the Bush administration that Mr. Goldsmith — who resigned from the Office of Legal Counsel in June 2004, only nine months after assuming the post — draws in this book is a devastating one. It is a portrait of a highly insular White House obsessively focused on expanding presidential power and loathe to consult with Congress, a White House that frequently made up its mind about a course of action before consulting with experts, a White House that sidelined Congress in its policymaking and willfully pursued a “go-it-alone approach” based on “minimal deliberation, unilateral action, and legalistic defense.”

Malcolm sees a sad truth in that; it tells us nothing new. It reinforces all that we felt, and feared about the Bush/Cheney Administration.

For Malcolm, that leaves three areas of questions:

• How many more of these "revelations" are to come from other White House defectors and discards? Can this Prsidency be besmirched any further? Will this one emerge as the most discredited Presidency of modern times? Or of all time?
  
• How can the next Presidency clean the Augean stables, rebuild a relationship with the people (not just the American people, but those of the entire US sphere of influence) and live, like every previous President had to, eventually, within and under the Law? And when will the Supreme Court scent the wind, assert itself, and regain its pre-eminent position in the tripartite system?
  
• Can we wait that long?

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