How U.S. officials mismanaged the war

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By Martin Sieff SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Peter Mansoor's memoir of his year as a brigade-level commander in Iraq during the year it all began to go sour mid-2003 to mid-2004 - has already received a wall-to-wall carpet of praise, and it is justified. This is a moving, clear, lucid and extremely valuable account of midlevel operations in Iraq in the early, crucial stages of the insurgency, with many valuable lessons.

"Baghdad at Sunrise" stands out from the memoirs of previous Bush administration senior civilian officials and senior Army officers in rising above any obsession for the author to cast himself as all-wise and all-prescient. Because he was not, in fact, responsible for any of the egregious bungles and misjudgments that characterized U.S. policymaking, both military and civilian, in this period, it is, of course easier for him to do so. Still, compared with many other memoirs of the period that have been published already, this one reads like a welcome breath of fresh air.

The immediacy and honest tone of Col. Mansoor's reporting comes with his very first sentence. "I was ready for the heat. But not for the smell." As anyone who has covered any kind of serious conflict around the world knows, reliable plumbing and garbage collection are the first things to go. If any significant level of killing is going on or recently ended, the stench of death will be everywhere as well. Armchair theorists dispensing wisdom from their laptops in Starbucks [-] including the latte drinkers in Baghdad's notorious Green Zone - never grasp that. ...

Col. Mansoor's outspokenness is remarkable, particularly coming as it does after the nearly six-year reign of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, when independent thought and any outspoken criticism of Pentagon-ordered policies was literal career suicide for any serving ground-forces officer. As an insider, Col. Mansoor frankly acknowledges the appalling incompetence and ineptitude that was imposed on the superbly professional armed forces of the United States from the very top by Mr. Rumsfeld and his crew. ...

"Very little of what happened in the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad in April 2003 was foreseen by the vast majority of civilian and military planners in the months leading up to the war," he writes. " ... The destruction of the reviled Ba'athist security apparatus, coupled with the lack of preparedness of the coalition to restore law and order in a timely fashion created a power vacuum in which anything left unguarded was pillaged and looted. [EnLeader]"

He concludes, "By 2006, corruption and lack of governing capacity had made the central Iraqi government all but irrelevant to the lives of the average Iraqi citizen ... A culture of violence and the absence of the rule of law had made Baghdad all but ungovernable" This is a devastating indictment.

As a memoir, Col. Mansoor's book is honest, moving and exceptionally readable. It is worth purchasing for its "Reflections" chapter at the end alone, which is filled with eminent good sense about how to really fight counterinsurgency campaigns, as he did effectively in his second tour of duty in Iraq, serving as executive officer to Gen. David H. Petraeus in 2007-08.

Col. Mansoor warns against the Rumsfeld Pentagon orthodoxies that high-tech weapons can be of much use in a counterinsurgency campaign or that such conflicts can be fought and won quickly, painlessly or "without large numbers of troops or extended occupations."

He also recommends that "to secure a population, forces must live among the people." As I noted in my own recent book, "The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East," Sir Herbert Dowbiggin in his classic 1930 report on the Arab pogroms against Jewish settlers in Palestine (then a League of Nations Mandate run by the British Empire) conclusively established that this condition is the first essential requirement for erecting any kind of stable, lasting civic order in any military-occupation situation.

Col. Mansoor has produced a first-class memoir and analysis that richly deserves the high praise it already has received.

• Martin Sieff is defense industry editor for United Press International and has received three Pulitzer Prize nominations for international reporting. He is most recently the author of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East," 2008.