Historians Reflect on the War in Iraq: A Roundtable

As with all papers and commentaries presented during its annual meeting, the Organization of American Historians disclaims responsibility for statements, whether of fact or of opinion, made by its panelists, moderators, and participants.

What follows is a transcription of the roundtable which took place Saturday, April 5 2003 at the 2003 OAH Annual Meeting in Memphis. The presentations are copyrighted by the individual presenter.

Marilyn B. Young, New York University

Copyright (©) 2003. Marilyn B. Young. All rights reserved.

William McKinley paced the floor and asked God's advice on whether to annex the Philippines. George W. Bush, who rises before dawn to read a selection from Oswald Chamber's evangelical My Utmost for His Highest, never paced any floors. He only has to ask himself to know what God thinks. Bush can tell good and evil. Once he decided Saddam Hussein was evil, Howard Fineman explained in Newsweek, "everything flowed from that" (1). This reassuringly deductive approach to the world seems to characterize the thinking of Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of the cabal that currently runs the country. For months they have told the public that Iraqis would rise up to greet the Anglo-American invasion force as their liberators. So far as I can tell this conviction was based not on information and analysis but on the cabal's conviction that it should be the case. Therefore it was. You will be liberated, the president instructs the Iraqis. Armed with that imperative and Rumsfeld's desire to demonstrate how feasible, how easy, how inexpensive war can be -- so that we may look forward to one, two many Iraqs -- the invasion was launched.

When things failed to adhere entirely to the plan, senior Pentagon planners and retired officers complained to reporters. They knew it all along. There simply were not enough troops on the ground. This was "war on the cheap," and it wouldn't work (2). The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard B. Myers, angrily denounced the military critics and the press. They were wrong and, more ominously, their criticism was "harmful to our troops." Rumsfeld was his familiar declarative self: "So let's be clear," he instructed a press conference. "Saddam Hussein will be removed from power, the Iraqi people will be liberated, coalition forces will go home as soon as the military mission is complete and return Iraq to the long-repressed Iraqi people" (3).

To be sure, as Bob Buzzanco's work on the Vietnam War has taught us, the Pentagon always wants more troops, especially when things threaten to fall apart and the secretary of defense always wants to save money. And, as H.R. McMasters' book explained with respect to Vietnam, there is no tradition of principled resignation in the military. Actually, one general did quit, not the war, but the war-games which took place last summer. "Millenium Challenge 02" was the largest war game in U.S. military history. Two years in preparation, it cost over $250 million and involved 13,500 participants in a three week exercise intended to test Rumsfeld's strategic concepts. In the game, General Paul Van Riper, commanding the forces of "an unnamed Middle Eastern state," managed to sink much of the U.S. naval fleet through the use of unconventional tactics. At which point, the games were halted, the fleet re-floated and Van Riper walked out. "Instead of a free-play, two-sided game," he complained, "... it simply became a scripted exercise. They had a predetermined end, and they scripted the exercise to that end" (4) So the game began again and the unnamed Middle Eastern adversary duly lost the war. On the March 29, 2003, Lt. General William Wallace discussed the "bizarre" behavior of Iraqi guerrilla forces. The enemy, he observed, is "a bit different from the one we war-gamed against" (5). As Brig. General John F. Kelly ruefully told a reporter: "What we were really hoping was to just go through and everyone would wave flags and stuff."

Meanwhile, in the $250,000 set prepared for the 600 reporters assigned to Central Command (CentCom) in Qatar, Brig. General Vincent Brooks tried to explain the disparity between the insistence of senior commanders that the war was "on track" and what reporters and field commanders in Iraq were experiencing. It is important to know that Vincent Brooks was auditioned for his job as chief communicator by the White House staff. They chose well; Brooks is not only handsome, he looks intelligent and seems to have an earnest desire to answer questions as honestly as he can. He explained the disparity this way: at the tactical level things sometimes go wrong, but "at the operational level, with what we seek to achieve, it remains unchanged." (He may have also been chosen because sometimes his syntax resembles that of his Commander in Chief.) Then he really explained: "And so that's what we're talking about at this level, at the Centcom level. There's a different view down on Planet Earth, if you will, as you described it. The closer you get to the line, the more precise the realities are."

Most of us live on Planet Earth (though as Aldous Huxley observed, earth may be some other planet's hell). Sergeant Eric Schrumpf, a sharpshooter in the 5th Marine Regiment, for example, is very close to the realities. Riding on top of an armored personnel carrier as it moved north to Baghdad on Highway 1, Schrumpf faced Iraqi soldiers and irregulars, some of whom, he charged, used women and children as shields. Nevertheless, he had had a "great day," he told a reporter. "We killed a lot of people." Once, encountering an Iraqi soldier amidst a crowd of women and children, he had held his fire. But another time, he found a single soldier standing with two or three civilians. He and his men opened fire and watched one of the civilians, a woman, fall to the ground. "I'm sorry," the sergeant said. "But the chick got in the way" (6). A tank attack on the village of Kifl, 75 miles south of Baghdad, was also a precise reality. Units of the 3rd Infantry Division fought three days and nights to take the village, firing rockets, calling in air strikes and blasting it with tank rounds whose concussive force was so great it "sucked everything off the sidewalks. 'even people.'" Later, after the battle, the brigade's chaplain said he had spent hours talking with the troops. "We're in the thousands now that were killed in the last few days," he told Steven Lee Myers. "Nothing prepares you to use a machine gun to cut someone in two. [The soldiers] tell stories amongst themselves. When I come up, they tell different stories. It bothers them to take life, especially that close. They want to talk to me so that they know that I know they are not awful human beings" (7). Soldiers in Korea and Vietnam faced similar issues and solved them in identical ways. In all three countries the US goal was liberation.

If Vietnam was Korea in slow motion, then Operation Iraqi Freedom is Vietnam on crack cocaine. In less then two weeks a 30 year old vocabulary is back: credibility gap, seek and destroy, hard to tell friend from foe, civilian interference in military affairs, the dominance of domestic politics, winning, or more often, losing hearts and minds. "Marines Losing the Battle for Hearts and Minds," read a Guardian headline on March 25, 2003. No one has yet counted the dead. Asked if there were enemy forces were in the village of Kifl, Capt. Darren A. Rapaport replied: "It sort of depends on how you define enemy." In Nassiriya, where cluster bombs were dropped, a surgical assistant in the town's only hospital, told the British reporter he understood the effort to reach Baghdad and drive Saddam Hussein from power. But he was "outraged" at the attack on his city. "There's no room in the Saddam hospital because of the wounded. ... When I saw the dead Americans I cheered in my heart" (8).

Once over the shock of meeting opposition, in Iraq, as in Korea and Vietnam, soldiers on the ground as well as senior commanders, describe the enemy as fanatical and unfair: their soldiers hide amongst the civilian population, forcing the U.S. to kill civilians; they wear ordinary clothes, they are brutal to prisoners of war. In all three conflicts, the tactics of the enemy were said to reveal their utter indifference to the value of human life, which then became the grounds for US indifference to their lives. In all three as well, according to memoirs written by veterans, a growing dislike for the entire population of the country in which (and presumably for whom) they fought sometimes overwhelmed them. "The Iraqis are sick people and we are chemotherapy," a Marine corporal told a British reporter, amidst the wreckage of some 15 civilians cars and the bodies of 12 civilians, including a small child. "I am starting to hate this country. Wait till I get hold of a friggin' Iraqi. No, I won't get hold of one. I'll just kill them." I do not want to misrepresent. There are also soldiers and Marines who not only mourn the dead but for a time will put themselves at risk in an effort to avoid killing unarmed civilians. Inevitably, as the war continues, they will take fewer risks.

This war was supposed to introduce something new and different by way of tactics: "shock and awe." Shock and awe is a "concept" developed by Harlan Ullman, a senior associate with a strategic policy think-tank. Ullman's plan, repeated ad nauseum in the "countdown" to the war, looked forward to "showering" Baghdad with more bombs in the first 48 or at most 72 hours of war than were used for the 39 days of Gulf War I so as to "take the city down." The idea of shock and awe is to gain "rapid dominance," Ullman has written. "This ability to impose massive shock and awe ... will so overload the perception, knowledge and understanding of [the] adversary that there will be no choice except to cease and desist or risk complete and total destruction." You will all remember how disappointed correspondents sounded when, on the first day of the war, they were neither shocked nor awed. Of course, massive bombing is not new. What is somewhat new is the open naming of a terror tactic that in the past would have merited a euphemism or two.

One real innovation, however, first developed during the war in Afghanistan, is the "phrasealtor," a hand-held computer which soldiers can carry around with them. It has a menu of 1000 phrases in Arabic, including "come out with your hands up," or "I need to search your car." The problem with the phrasealator is one that may represent Operation Iraqi Freedom as such: it does not understand the answers.

The embedded press corps is another innovation. In Korea, correspondents requested military censorship rather than risk offense and MacArthur granted their wish; in Vietnam, reporters could hitch rides to the front if they liked, though only one chose to report from Hanoi. Operations Urgent Fury, Just Cause and Desert Storm subjected the press to very strict control. In this war, the embedded journalists have by and large fulfilled their punning name. A recent Boondocks cartoon captures one sort of embedded coverage: "I'm Aaron Brown. This is CNN. We're talking to one of our brave correspondents in Iraq. ... You are so brave to be out there." The correspondent answers: "Thanks, Aaron. I am brave. But our troops are braver." "Yes," the anchor replies, "our troops are brave. But you are very, very brave as well." The correspondent agrees: "Yes, Aaron. There's a lot of bravery here." "There sure is a lot of bravery ... in you, my friend," the anchor replies. "... And that's it from Iraq. Back to you Aaron."

The other night Charlie Rose conducted a telephone interview with Frederik Balfour, a Business Week correspondent who is embedded in or with (hard to know which prepositions to use) the 3rd Infantry. Rose asked what it was like and Balfour said his mother had asked him to same question. He said he was cursing more and his grammar had deteriorated and then he apologized for his "elitism." Balfour told Rose that he had opposed the war before it began, but that now, protected as he was by these soldiers, fond of them as he had clearly become, it was impossible not to join their "cause," to want them to win. Rose next asked Colin Soloway, Newsweek correspondent with the 101st Airborne Division if he'd been able to go along on any Apache helicopter missions. No, Soloway sadly explained, Apache helicopters, only have seats for the two pilots. Still, he got to review the video tape when the helicopters returned to base and the pilots were glad to "walk him through" whatever engagement they had conducted. The TV audience did not get to see the tapes -- any more than they had in Gulf War I when, a pilot told an LA Times reporter, Apaches had shot up Iraqi troops "like sheep." "Embeds" on TV, such as the normally skeptical Ted Koppel, have little distance from the story they are supposed to cover. However, the "unilaterals" (someone in the Pentagon has a sense of humor) as the independent print and TV journalists are officially called, have done some extraordinary reporting from inside Baghdad and from villages and towns south of the capital which cannot help but raise doubts about the US as a force for the liberation rather than destruction of the country.

[I have not had time to check this out, but it occurs it to me that the idea for embedding reporters may have had its roots in a plan for a 13 part TV series worked out by Jerry Bruckheimer (director of Pearl Harbor, among other megamovies), the ABC entertainment division and the Pentagon in February 2002. According to a report in the NYTimes, the Pentagon planned to "promote its war effort [then it was the war in Afghanistan of course] through television's genre of the moment, the reality series." The ABC news division, whose reporters, like others covering the Afghan war, had been subjected to tight restrictions, protested. But while Rear Adm. Craig R. Quigley agreed that the nightly news was the "principal means" of giving information to the public there were "a lot of other ways" and "if there is an opportunity to tell about the courage and professionalism of our men and women in uniform on prime time television for 13 straight weeks, we're going to do it. That's an opportunity not to be missed" (9). ] Anthony Swofford, whose memoir of the first Gulf War, Jarhead, recorded how soldiers were instructed by their officers to lie to the press, expressed his doubts about the new system in a recent short essay for the NY Times Magazine section. "Embeds serve up burly-chested kids full of charisma and grit," he wrote. "Television reports soften war and allow it to penetrate even deeper into the living rooms and minds of America. War can't be that bad if they let us watch it" (10).

Nor can it be that bad if kids can play it. The differences between the war and play, between war toys and weapons have been considerably narrowed. For example, a Marine corps laboratory is developing a small remote controlled mobile weapon called the "Dragon Runner." It is guided by a keypad modeled after the Sony PlayStation 2 video game. The designers believe that "soldiers would be familiar with [the keypad] and by default, partially trained to use it." Just as the Pentagon looks to toy designers and video games for new military ideas, the toy industry is quick to make toys out of new weapons and wars. One toy manufacturer introduced a new line of model soldiers as soon as the the networks began their "showdown" to war (11).

Something else is new in this war -- or rather, something is missing. There is no Iraqi Sygmann Rhee or Ngo Dinh Diem -- or even Chiang Kai-shek. Nor does the administration seem particularly interested in developing a local anti-Saddam Hussein nationalist leadership. Instead, the US plan for post-war Iraq appears to be for retired Lt. General Jay Garner, to run the country. A close friend of the secretary of defense and former president of SY Technology, a defense contractor which helped develop the Israeli missile defense system, Garner is now head of the Pentagon Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. Post-war, according to one report, Garner will oversee 23 ministries, all of them to be directed by Americans with the assistance of US appointed Iraqi advisers. Already a split has developed between the State Department and the Pentagon over precisely which Americans will get to direct these ministries. Disgruntled but anonymous State Department officials suspect the "more ideological" Pentagon officials, like Douglas Feith, are determined to control "what a new Iraq should look like." The Onion must have a direct line to the Pentagon. A recent headline read: "U.S. Draws Up Plan for Post-War Transitional Dictatorship in Iraq" (12).

In November, 1950, Eric Larrabee reflected on the progress of the Korean War. The aim of the Soviet Union, as he saw it, was to force the U.S. "to become the Mechanical Monster who -- in the eyes of the ill-armed majority of mankind -- burns and tortures at a distance, and never fights fair." " ... if this war ever becomes one of Machines vs. People, with the United States on the side of the Machines," he concluded, "we shall most surely lose it." Korea, Vietnam, Iraq are different countries, with different histories. It is the US that remains the same -- only more so: a mechanical monster. There is no real victory possible in Gulf War II. To have gone to war on the side of the Machines is already to have lost.

The war in Iraq is an illegal war fought in defiance of international public opinion and the UN. As William Pfaff argues in a thoughtful essay published the day after the war began, the French catalyzed "constructive resistance" to US power in the course of the Security Council debate. "The result," he writes, "has been a basic shift in international relations, which will affect the future configuration and policies of the EU, no matter what happens in Iraq." Closer union and a common defence are no longer luxuries. "A similar development," Pfaff observes, "is taking place in the Far East, caused by US policy toward North Korea ... ." Pfaff concludes even if the US should prove successful in establishing its authority in the Middle East, the aftermath "will automatically generate new forces of resistance and hostility. ... The American superpower has been the centre of a solar system. Centrifugal political forces now have been set loose." Already the war in Iraq has become enmeshed in Islamic fundamentalism -- possibly ending Iraq's long secular history. To be sure, history does not repeat itself, certainly not as farce. But the world has never been a more dangerous place. Bush's fundamentalist Christianity keeps him calm in the face of what is to come. But the rest of us had better be agitated. What is to come is likely to be terrible. Biblically terrible.

Is this war and the openly imperial vision of the administration which pursues it a new development in US history or just the latest articulation of American hegemony. I have gone back and forth on this -- sometimes arguing for a nearly seamless history of American imperialism; at other times struck by the speed with which what Paul Krugman calls a new, oligarchic ruling class has seized the state and begun to transform it. I don't really have an answer. If pressed to respond -- and the question is, after all, a particularly historical one -- I think I'd insist that it's both. The tactics through which various post-1945 administrations have attempted to order the world so as to sustain the dominant power of the U.S. have been shaped by the individual predilections of the president and his men, domestic opposition, the state of the economy and the actions of other nations. And tactics have consequences, certainly to those on the receiving end. There is a difference between the interim bombing of Iraq, however brutal and futile, and Operation Iraqi Freedom; between, that is to say the veiled, cautious, unilateralism of the Clinton administration, and the brutal, naked, crusading version with which we live today (13).

Endnotes

1.Howard Fineman, "Bush and God," Newsweek, March 10, 2003 (accessed 4/01/03: http://www.www.msnbc.com/news/. There is also a Presidential Prayer Team (http://www.presidentialprayerteam.org) constantly working on the president's behalf.

2. As quoted in Seymour M. Hersh, "Offense and Defense," the New Yorker, April 7, 2003, p.43. The entire article repays close reading, pp.43-45.

3. Thom Shanker and John Tierney, "Top-ranked officer denounces critics of Iraq campaign," New York Times 4/2/03, p1. At least one retired general, Barry McCaffrey, spiritedly defended his criticisms. See Jim Rutenberg, "Ex-Generals defend their blunt comments," New York Times, B1.

4. Quoted in Sean D. Naylor, "War Games Rigged?" Army Times, August 16, 2002; see also Julian Borger, Guardian, August 21, 2002.

5. New York Times, March 29, 2003, p.1

6. Dexter Filkins, "Either Take a Shot or Take a Chance," New York Times, 3/29/03,p.1

7. See two powerful reports by Steven Lee Myers, New York Times, March 28 ("A Village is Bloodied in a stubborn battle," p.1, and "Haunting Thoughts after a fierce battle," March 29, p.1.

8. James Meek, "Marines Losing the Battle for Hearts and Minds," Guardian March 25, 2003, online.

9. Felicity Barringer, "'Reality' TV about GIs on War Duty," New York Times, 2/21/02.

10. Sunday New York Times Magazine section, March 30, 2002, p.17.

11. Sunday Style section, New York Times, March 20, p.1

12. Brian Whitaker and Luke Harding, "US draws up secret plan to impose regime on Iraq," Guardian, 4/1/03, online; David Sanger, "Plans for Postwar Iraq are re-evaluated as fast military exist looks less likely," New York Times, 4/2/03, B11; The Onion, 27 March-2 April 2003, p.1

13. In Indonesia, the Clinton administration cut off all military aid after the attacks against East Timor. This past December, a $17.9 million "Regional Counter-Terrorism Defense Fellowship Program" was approved under which Indonesian military personnel will be brought to the US for training. See Center for Defense Information, April 8, 2002. Note too, that the task of training foreign militaries has created a boom industry in private military firms to which much of the work is contracted out. See Esther Schrader, "US Companies Hired to Train Foreign Armies," Los Angeles Times, April 14, 2002.