What About the Fedayeen?

There’s nothing really surprising about the infighting among senior officers depicted in the second part of Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor’s piece about the intial stages of the Iraq War. Those sorts of disagreements and threats happen in any kind of military operation, especially one that moves forward at the pace of American operations in 2003. The account probably does tell us something about the collision of cognitive limitations and the revolution in military affairs, however. No matter how much intelligence is available, and no matter how fast communications move, there will always be disagreements about interpretation and relevance, and these disagreements will always work to slow the tempo of military operations and sometimes divert their course.

The disagreements between civilian and military officers over the conduct of the war and particularly its pacing are a bit more interesting. I don’t think it’s a stretch to argue that the primary method that the military has used to explain its failure in Vietnam is some kind of nebulous “civilian interference”, and that much of the military’s political effort since Vietnam has been about insulating the military from those civilians. This has never worked, really, and shouldn’t work. Nevertheless, it’s interesting, in the context of this narrative, to watch Pentagon civilians interfere in every aspect of the operation up to the attack on Baghdad.

The whole Ahmed Chalabi episode is a bizarre sideshow. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad.

In the end, I think it’s fair to say that Wallace and McKiernan come off much better than Franks and Rumsfeld. The US should have spent more time destroying the paramilitary fedayeen units before seizing Baghdad. Iraqi resistance wasn’t getting any stronger, and there was plenty of time to conduct the necessary operations. Undertaking this (and deploying the First Cavalry) probably wouldn’t have prevented the insurgency, but it couldn’t have hurt, either.