No end of a lesson

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‘We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.’ Kipling’s re- proof, in ‘The Lesson’, on the conduct of the Boer war would serve well as the subtitle of this impressive review of the mess that is the Iraq intervention. The authors are the chief military correspondent of the New York Times and a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general and sometime military correspondent for the same newspaper. Their access to officials and classified documents is remarkable. They are certainly no apologists, unsurprisingly, coming from the NYT. Their intention is ‘to provide a comprehensive account and rationale of the foreign policy strategy, generalship and fighting … in all its complexity’. They are by no means unsympathetic, however: they do not impute corrupt motives, although their criticism of Donald Rumsfeld echoes that of retired US generals recently. What the account reveals above all is the sheer complexity of, in Churchill’s phrase, ‘the correct application of overwhelming force’. The war and subsequent occupation are ‘a story of hubris and heroism, of high- technology wizardry and cultural ignorance’. The authors’ conclusion, even though its premise is controversial, is utterly damning for its implicit and explicit charges of incompetence: ‘The bitter insurgency American and British forces confront today was not preordained. There were lost opportunities, military and political, along the way.’

But why Iraq, and why then? It was not mere pride, Bush family ‘unfinished business’, say the authors, nor oil, nor any of the other trite claims. Iraq did not figure high on the President’s agenda until after 9/11, after which the threat of a ‘nexus of terrorism and WMD’ changed the degree of strategic risk, where the consequences of inaction may have been unpredictable but certainly identifiable. But even then the President was not convinced that removing Saddam forcefully was the priority: it was Rumsfeld who argued for a response beyond just Afghanistan, a signal that the US was engaging in a global war on terrorists and the renegade states that helped them, ‘a powerful demonstration of American power and an object lesson — for Iran, Syria, and other would-be foes — of the potential consequences of supporting terrorist groups and pursuing nuclear, biological and chemical arms’.