James Fallows is the National Correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, where he has worked for more than twenty years. He is one of the most important and gifted investigative reporters of our time. During his long and storied career, Mr. Fallows has written extensively on such diverse topics as defense policy, economics, computer technology, politics, and immigration.
Over the past two years, Mr. Fallows has written a series of investigative articles in The Atlantic in which Mr. Fallows argues that the Bush Administration has squandered valuable resources and opportunities as a result of its drive to war against Iraq. In this Atlantic Monthly ($) interview, Mr. Fallows elaborates on his views regarding the mistakes that he believes that the Bush Administration has made in pursuing the Iraqi front in the war on Islamic fascism. It is a valuable and thought provoking piece from a serious reporter and thinker, and the following are several tidbits of the interview to arouse your curiosity.
On why Mr. Fallows contends that 2002 was the Bush Adminitration’s “lost year:”
I was trying to get at what happened in one surprisingly short period, a little over a year. This was the time between America’s immediate reaction to being attacked on 9/11, and its situation barely a year later, when so much of the treasure of the countryÔøΩits military manpower, its government, its international influenceÔøΩwas concentrated on the single goal of removing Saddam Hussein.
At the beginning of 2002, the U.S. had a vast range of resources and opportunities at its disposal. But over the course of that year, we lost or traded away a number of those, including: the ability to conceive of the terrorist threat in the broadest possible terms; the ability to draw upon deep reserves of international support; the ability to rely upon national unity; the ability to field a strong and agile military; and the ability to put government financial resources to effective use. It’s the loss of all those opportunities that amounted to a lost year.
On dissent within the Bush Administration regarding the Iraq policy, and the failure of such dissent to be passed up to the President:
My own personal judgment is that for decades into the future, political scientists and historians will study the decision-making process that led to the Iraq war as a case study in failure. Or at least deliberative disfunction.
You have a president who has made a point of neither inviting challenge on points of detail nor himself seeking out significant facts. John Kennedy was famous for picking up the phone and calling a third-level person in the State Department to ask, “What’s really going on in Laos?” Bush has never shown an inclination to do that kind of thing and, in fact, has prided himself on not being bogged down by the details.
The result of all this is a kind of path of folly where the people who could say, “Wait a minute, is this a good idea?” were systematically excluded from the decisions, and a smaller and smaller group of people reassured each other on the basis of hope rather than evidence. As a procedural matter, it started with the president’s own personality and intellectual traits and radiated out from there.
On the failures relating to the post-war occupation of Iraq:
Historically, a tremendous strength of the United States was that it would start thinking about what would happen after a war while the war was still going on. I mentioned in my previous article that by 1942, when the U.S. had barely gotten into the European war and was still on the losing side of the Pacific war, it set up a school of military government for postwar Japan and Germany. Within the military this same tradition was very much honored in the Iraq war. There were very, very careful efforts to plan for a postwar occupation. Through a combination of arrogance and failure of imagination, none of those plans was put to use until now, when they’re suddenly being looked at. One of many things I still find puzzling is why the people who were most determined that the war succeed and that Iraq become a successful example were so totally uninterested in those efforts to make the occupation work. Of course I’m thinking of people like Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, and President Bush.
On whether America is a safer place as a result of the war in Iraq:
The most impressive thing to me in reporting this article is that there is virtually no dissent among national security professionals on the idea that invading Iraq has made America much less secure. I think that’s an underappreciated point in the general publicÔøΩto put it mildly. Except for those who have an occupational obligation to support the Administration’s policy, everybody in the national security business says, “Of course, this has made the U.S. more vulnerable than it was before.” Our army is more overextended and weaker; our allies are much less on our side; the source of opposition is much, much, much more intense than it was before. And we’ve lost time in dealing with Iran and North Korea.
Mr. Fallows is lengendary in media circles for the Pentagon sources that he developed during the weapons system battles of the early 1980’s that challenged many of the Pentagon’s conventional theories of how the American military should fight wars, and he continues to cull similar networks regarding his research on the Iraq war:
Two of the long pieces I’ve done in the last two years (“The Fifty-first State” and “Blind Into Baghdad”) and one short one (“The Hollow Army”) have brought a lot of people out of the woodwork. A lot of people have written to me after those articles appeared, saying, “Oh, you don’t know the half of it.” Email really is wonderful! There has also been a nucleus of people I’ve known for a long time as they’ve risen through various ranks of the military and the national security community. There has been a kind of ongoing conversation among these people about the way America responds to different foreign policy threats. The fact that these people proved to be right early on about Iraq has made their view increasingly interesting to me, so I’ve kept in close touch with them. There are networks of people who, as they gain confidence, know they can talk to you without having their views distorted or, in certain cases, their cover blown. You’re able to have more sustained talks with them.
Mr. Fallows comments on criticism of Donald Rumsfeld’s “light and fast” military, a theory that Mr. Fallows has reported on extensively for much of his reporting career:
What is behind Rumsfeld’s “light and fast” military ethos? It seems like there’s a lot of evidence that it doesn’t seem to be able to stabilize a country in the long term. I’m just wondering, why are we still seeing troop reassignments in that same model?
The “light and fast” approach in general is a good one, and I think that part of Rumsfeld’s reform doctrine has been a valuable part of the fight he’s been trying to lead. The difficulty is that he has apparently cared more about winning that symbolic battle than thinking carefully about this particular war in this particular countryÔøΩIraq. It’s certainly the case that these light, fast units are wonderful for destabilizing regimes or for lighting strikes. But the job in Iraq, as it was conceived by the administration, was a different one. It wasn’t just about getting rid of Saddam Hussein and then leaving. It was about transforming the country altogether. That’s a very different undertaking. Rumsfeld apparently has a longstanding disagreement with the Army establishment. He thought they were too slow in changing their ways. He let that spill over into ignoring, disregarding, and overruling their very prescient warnings about what it would take to actually run Iraq. In his past life, he would have ridiculed pointy-headed theorists, but his regime within the Pentagon has meant the triumph of the pointy-headed theorist over the people who actually have to occupy territory and pacify neighborhoods.
Mr. Fallows comments on the festering problem of Iran:
Iran is in a very, very unstable area. It’s a major power in that area, and it’s acquiring weapons while it’s surrounded by also very well-armed powers. So there are a number of dangers: will Israel feel it needs to take preemptive action against Iran? Will the Saudis feel they need to get nuclear weapons if Iran has them? It’s just an inherently unstable area compared even to Asia.
And on allegations that Mr. Fallows’ series of articles on Iraq have been a partisan attack against the Bush Administration?:
What I’ve been doing over the last two years is looking at America’s military and diplomatic response to the pressures it’s come under since September 11. This article is a logical continuation of the other work I’ve been doing about how Iraq happened, how things could have gone better, how they could have gotten worse. Part of The Atlantic’s historic role has been to explain, as best we can understand, the big issues of our time. During the Vietnam War, The Atlantic was not a partisan magazine, but it published an increasing number of articles saying, “How could this war have happened? How could it have unfolded in just this way? How is it likely to end?” The magazine’s coverage of that war was not partisan, even if the governments then in powerÔøΩfirst Democrats, then RepublicansÔøΩwere unhappy about some of its implications.
As I said a while ago, I think the road to Iraq will be studied as a specimen of a failure of decision-making. And while that is a hostile judgment about the nature of the current administration, I’m not intending it as a partisan judgment. If Democrats had done the same thing I would be just as critical. What I’m saying is that in carrying out the public trust and committing the nation to war, the current Administration did not perform well. They ignored crucial information, they fooled themselves on certain important points, and they did not, based on the available evidence, consider the broadest possible view of America’s strengths and weaknesses and how to defend them.
Read the entire interview. Regardless of your position on the Bush Administration’s handling of the war against the Islamic fascists (and mine is more sympathetic than Mr. Fallows’), Mr. Fallows’ views are well-reasoned and worthy of serious consideration. Interestingly, the flawed decision-making process that Mr. Fallows contends took place in regard to the Iraq war is similar to the lack of policy analysis in developing and finalizing domestic policy that former Bush Administration Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill described in his earlier book, “The Price of Loyalty.”
By the way, my dream debate on the war against Islamic fascism: James Fallows and Victor Davis Hanson.