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Book titles sell books, so it’s understandable that they sometimes hyperbolize their contents with an overwrought word or phrase. Had I read an untitled copy of Thomas E. Ricks’ study of “the American military adventure in Iraq,” I would have suggested Fiasco myself. There really is no better summation of our unnecessary armed escapade overseas, as so thoroughly documented by the Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning senior Pentagon correspondent.
The book begins with the First Persian Gulf War in 1991 and ends with a new postscript written in 2006. Here, the Marines prepare for the 2003 invasion.
In November [2002], Maj. Gen. James Mattis, the commander of the 1st Marine Division, which would spend much of the next two years in Iraq, invited Gen. Zinni to be the speaker at the division’s Marine Corps birthday dinner, the most important day of the year for the Corps. On the afternoon before the dinner, Mattis had Zinni speak to all his senior commanders. “If you guys don’t go through the enemy in six weeks, we’ll disown you,”Zinni said, according to Mattis. “But then the hard work begins. . . . We have lit a fuse, and we don’t know what’s at the other end - a nuke, a hand grenade, or a dud?”
Zinni’s message to the assembled Marine commanders that afternoon was: You are about to get into something that is going to be tougher and more chaotic than you might think. “I was worried that we didn’t understand the importance of maintaining order, that we had to come in with sufficient forces to freeze the situation, to understand that when we’re ripping the guts out of an authoritarian regime, you’ve got responsibility for security, services, everything else. You have to be prepared to handle all that.”
He also warned the Marines that in such situations the U.S. government tends to look to the military for solutions. “The other caution I gave them was don’t count on it when somebody tells you ‘Well, the State Department’s got that,’ or ‘OSD’s planning for that.’ Don’t believe them. You’re going to get stuck with it. So, have a plan. This is the Desert Crossing philosophy: You’re going to end up being the ’stuckee’ on this.” [p. 71]
Paraphrasing French army Capt. Pierre-Henri Simon, speaking decades earlier of his nation’s Algerian War, Ricks writes, “When a policeman abuses or tortures a suspect, it inevitably diminishes the officer’s humanity…But when a soldier uses [such tactics], the honor of the nation becomes engaged.” Torture and America have been frequently mentioned in the same sentence in the last few years, and in Fiasco, Ricks provides new perspectives on the issue.
Capt. [William] Ponce stated that Col. Steve Boltz, the second highest ranking military intelligence officer in Iraq, “has made it clear that we want these individuals broken” - intelligence jargon for getting someone to abandon his cover and relate the truth as he knows it. Ponce then went on to wave the bloody shirt, a move that would raise eyebrows among some of his e-mail’s recipients. “Casualties are mounting and we need to start gathering info to help protect our fellow soldiers from any further attacks,” he wrote. So, Ponce ordered them, “Provide interrogation techniques ‘wish list’ by 17 AUG 03.”
Some of the responses to his solicitation were enthusiastic. “I spent several months in Afghanistan interrogating the Taliban and al Qaeda,” a soldier attached to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, operating in western Iraq, responded just fourteen hours later, according to the time stamp on his e-mail. “I firmly agree that the gloves need to come off.” With clinical precision, he recommended permitting “open-handed facial slaps from a distance of no more than about two feet and back-handed blows to the midsection from a distance of about 18 inches. . . . I also believe that this should be a minimum baseline.” He also reported that “fear of dogs and snakes appear to work nicely.”
The 4th Infantry Division’s intelligence operation responded three days later with suggestions that captives be hit with closed fists and also subjected to “low voltage electrocution.”
But not everyone was so sanguine as those two units’ operations. “We need to take a deep breath and remember who we are,” cautioned a major with the 501st Military Intelligence Battalion, which supported the operations of the 1st Armored Division in Iraq. (The officer’s name was deleted in official documents released by the Army, as were those of other writers in this e-mail exchange.) “It comes down to standards of right and wrong - something we cannot just put aside when we find it inconvenient, any more than we can declare that we will ‘take no prisoners’ and therefore shoot those who surrender to us simply because we find prisoners inconvenient.” This officer also took issue with the reference to rising U.S. casualties. “We have taken casualties in every war we have ever fought - that is part of the very nature of war. . . . That in no way justifies letting go of our standards. . . . Casualties are part of war - if you cannot take casualties then you cannot engage in war. Period.” The “BOTTOM LINE,” he wrote emphatically in conclusion, was,”We are American soldiers, heirs of a long tradition of staying on the high ground. We need to stay there.” His signature block ended with a reference to “Psalm 24: 3-8,” which begins with the admonition, “Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart.” But this lucid and passionate response was a voice in the wilderness. The major was arguing against embarking on a course that the Army had already chosen to take. [pp. 197-198]
Those of us who only know this conflict through media coverage will never truly appreciate what life in the Iraq War is like, but every first-person account provides a powerful illustration of a reality we will hopefully never get to know.
A document that captured the fierceness of Second Fallujah was a lessons learned summary written by a group of scouts/snipers in the 3rd Battalion of the 5th Marines. Among their findings about house-to-house combat in the close confines of the city were that the interior walls of most houses were sufficiently thick to permit the use of fragmentation grenades without hurting Marines waiting on the other side of each wall. “Each room can be fragged individually,” they reported. They also had learned that it is better if possible to attack from the ground floor up rather than move onto a roof from an adjacent house and attack downward. That’s because it is nearly impossible to haul up stairs a limp, wounded Marine in body armor, helmet, and other battle gear. Also, it is more difficult to maintain control of a downward attack, because “top down is always in high gear.”
They came to believe in shooting first. “There is no reason to place Marines into the building until it is thoroughly prepped” with heavy fire, preferably from 120 millimeter cannon rounds from a tank. Likewise, if forced by enemy contact to withdraw from a house, they recommended blowing it up or burning it down - preferably the latter, because, they noted, humans fear death by flames more than death by explosion, and other members of the enemy force will see what happens. The best way to bring down a house, they had found, was with a device the Marines in Fallujah came to call house guest - two propane tanks filled with gas and ignited by a block of C-4 plastic explosive. “Creates a fuel air esplosive,” the snipers reported, that not only sucks the oxygen out of the house and suffocates its occupants, but also destroys the house. [p. 403]
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