Analyze This: Civilian officials reached a point of sufficiency only because they were pushed to it

National Review, May 5, 2003 by Mark Helprin

In a recent film version of, believe it or not, the Battle of Trenton, Washington at the head of half his army approaches a Hessian guard post that must be silenced, and dispatches two men to overcome an enemy of indeterminate strength. Clattering up to the farmhouse, they nonetheless manage to surprise three times their number inside, and kill them after a desperate fight, though without suppressing the warning shot they were sent to prevent. Given that the Battle of Trenton was brilliant in all respects, with not one American casualty, why in this version did Washington send only two men to do a ragged job while more than a thousand stood by? The answer is that the director and the screenwriters who commanded Washington and his troops didn't really know what they were doing.

In this war, the White House and the civilian Pentagon often didn't really know what they were doing either, and still don't. The war went as well as it did despite them, and much of what they themselves did or would have done was like passing on a blind curve: Though it can work, it offers little guidance for the future. Nor do they react well to criticism, as is a human right, although their charge that criticism endangered the troops may seem a bit rich when one recalls that never have war plans been discussed so openly by so many than in the glacial prologue that preceded the invasion of Iraq.

And, further, they attack not merely those who -- in the mistaken belief that action was unjustified, success impossible, or both -- would have stayed the hand of the United States, but those who for the sake of the infantryman and the infantryman not yet born would draw attention to imperfections in the prosecution of the war. In defense of a fantasy of infallibility, much obfuscation has been pouring forth from officials and apologists unfamiliar with operational art, but within these thickets of bureaucratic self-protection and contrary to unreflective judgment, the facts and truth remain.

Clearly, the 18-month delay from September 11th to American columns moving across Iraq was disastrous. Reversing the sensible order of policymaking, the Bush administration suppressed debate and emerged with a persistently divided position. Too clever by an order of magnitude, the president's inner circle attempted to float above the Powell-Rumsfeld dialectic, hoping perhaps to preserve its freedom of action. But, slow to choose and promiscuous in compromise, it produced an unconscionable delay of a year and a half, in which the connections between cause and response appeared broken; the diplomatic balance of power was rearranged; France, Germany, Russia, and China were given the opportunity to forge an anti-American coalition of opportunity; the international Left was allowed the time needed to mobilize and coordinate with political Islamism; the Arab world was, to the detriment of our flexibility, grievously alienated; Saddam Hussein was fully apprised of our war plans and granted a holiday to lay in a defense, which he did not, and to distribute to people of dubious motivation his weapons of mass destruction, which perhaps he did; the United Nations was needlessly courted only to be scorned; the United States was seen fruitlessly polishing its own apple by claiming the endorsement of Bulgaria; and Kim Jong Il was awarded a kind of Guggenheim Fellowship, paid in the currency of American paralysis, for the accelerated development of nuclear weapons.

Part of the delay was attributable to the president's failure to keep his promise to restore the military after the Clinton-era depradations of readiness and procurement, so that after Afghanistan we simply did not have the materiel to turn immediately to Iraq. Part may have been attributable to the bizarre effort to enfold in a grand coalition against terrorism the very countries that support terrorism (the ridiculous expression "coalition of the willing" probably seems perfectly reasonable to those who labored prodigiously to produce a coalition of the unwilling). Part may have been due to indecision and intellectual confusion. Part may have been due to a failed attempt to bluff: As the president was publicizing his determination in the last three months of 2002, eight ships were activated for the purpose of military transport to the Gulf; in January of 2003, when things apparently got real, 42.

Whatever its origins, the 18-month phony war produced the kind of damage and dislocation that in parliamentary democracies would mean certain dismissal of the ministers responsible. Because our system is not as quickly self-correcting, we must be more attentive to criticism rather than less so.

The politico-diplomatic debacle distorted the war plan, depriving the Anglo-American forces of unconstricted, advantageously located basing in Saudi Arabia and Turkey, and thus northern and western fronts, easily accessible large reserves, and, in the event, the 4th Armored Division, which in less propitious circumstances might have been missed more sorely even than it was. In ascending levels of incompetence -- even after the long delay, after the Turkish refusal, and after efforts to reverse the Turkish refusal -- we kept the 4th Armored's equipment spinning around the Eastern Mediterranean like foam circling above a drain.