The Iraq War

A Military History

Williamson Murray, Robert H. Scales Jr., Robert H Scales

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780674019683, 9780674012806
• eBook ISBN: 9780674504127
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

In this unprecedented account of the intensive air and ground operations in Iraq, two of America's most distinguished military historians bring clarity and depth to the first major war of the new millennium. Reaching beyond the blaring headlines, embedded videophone reports, and daily Centcom briefings, Williamson Murray and Robert Scales analyze events in light of past military experiences, present battleground realities, and future expectations.

The Iraq War puts the recent conflict into context. Drawing on their extensive military expertise, the authors assess the opposing aims of the Coalition forces and the Iraqi regime and explain the day-to-day tactical and logistical decisions of infantry and air command, as British and American troops moved into Basra and Baghdad. They simultaneously step back to examine long-running debates within the U.S. Defense Department about the proper uses of military power and probe the strategic implications of those debates for America's buildup to this war. Surveying the immense changes that have occurred in America's armed forces between the Gulf conflicts of 1991 and 2003—changes in doctrine as well as weapons—this volume reveals critical meanings and lessons about the new "American way of war" as it has unfolded in Iraq.

1

The Origins of War

Of audacious character and untiring physique, secretive about himself and ever ready to incriminate others, a blend of arrogance and servility, he concealed behind a carefully modest exterior an unbounded lust for power. Sometimes this impelled him to lavish excesses, but more often to incessant work. And that is as damaging as excess when the throne is the aim.

TACITUS, The Annals of Imperial Rome,
describing the Praetorian prefect Sejanus, first century BC

On July 18, 1979, just five days into his new presidency, Saddam Hussein called a meeting of over three hundred Baath Party senior leaders. Wearing his military uniform and calmly smoking a Cuban cigar, Saddam listened as one of his henchmen announced the discovery of “a painful and atrocious plot” to overthrow the regime and its new leader.¹ The president then stepped to the rostrum to reveal the details and to invite the plot’s instigator, Muhyi Abd al-Hussein Mashhadi, who had just returned from a grim visit to one of the Baathist torture chambers, to reveal the details. Promised his life, Mashhadi confirmed all.

In a cloud of cigar smoke, Saddam returned to the podium, this time with a list of the plotters. As an assistant read each name, guards escorted the unfortunate party member out of the hall. Fear spread throughout the audience; some started to weep. All wondered whether their name too was on the list. When the show was over, Saddam’s thugs had taken away sixty-six senior party members. Then, in a final gesture to indicate the new regime’s direction, Saddam asked the surviving delegates to volunteer to serve on the firing squads. Barely two weeks later, many of these functionaries would participate in the executions of their fellow Baathists. Mashhadi himself would be shot as an Israeli spy. As with those who “plotted” against Stalin in the late 1930s, there would be no mercy.

In a society steeped in blood feuds, Saddam’s move to involve a substantial number of senior leaders in the executions of their comrades was a stroke of genius. The message was clear: no one would be trusted in the new regime; no one could feel secure. All, no matter how high or low their position, knew that arrest and torture could be their fate at any moment. After Saddam’s premier performance, no one dared to question openly the ideas of the nation’s president. Even within the confines of their own families, Iraqis feared that Saddam’s agents might be listening; they seemed to be everywhere and nowhere. Dissent and initiative within the government quickly disappeared. As enormous monuments, statues, and portraits went up in public squares, portraying Saddam as the Great Uncle of Iraq’s people, the main political attribute of the Republic of Iraq became mind-numbing fear.

In five thousand years of hosting empires, the fertile valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers has endured many tyrannical regimes. Sumerians, Chaldeans, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes, Persians, Macedonian Greeks, Seleucid Greeks, Romans, Parthians, Arabs, Mongols, Ottoman Turks, and the British have all passed through and left their mark, for good or ill. Some, like the Assyrians, have come “like a wolf on the fold”; others have stayed long enough to build more than they destroyed.

Between the seventh and thirteenth centuries, at a time when few in Europe could read, much less write, Baghdad was at the center of a cosmopolitan culture renowned for learning and the arts. But in 1258 the Mongols stormed the city from the east and killed the caliph by rolling him in a carpet and then trampling him under the hooves of their horses. Across the region, they pillaged, raped, and slaughtered with a ruthlessness rarely seen in history. The society of the time was not capable of totaling its losses, but somewhere near three quarters of a million died in the year of the first Mongol invasion. Many of the complex irrigation canals on which agriculture had depended since the dawn of civilization lay in ruins.

A century later, under Tamerlane, the Mongols returned. Unlike most other conquerors, including even the fearsome Assyrians, the Mongols left no monuments or temples to their gods, only memories of horrifying brutality. At Tikrit on the upper Tigris they constructed a pyramid of skulls to mark their passing. Few escaped their fury. What little was left of the irrigation system soon collapsed, and the region degenerated into a backwater, its people ravaged by disease, malnutrition, and outright starvation, its productive base barely at subsistence level for its meager inhabitants.

The Ottoman Turks fell heir to this now-blighted terrain, and for the most part ignored it. As Europeans expanded their empires in the sixteenth century, the ancient Mesopotamian Valley held little interest for the conquerors, pirates, and trading companies that dominated the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. North and South America, India, the East Indies, and the Caribbean all offered a better return for risking one’s life.

The twentieth century finally brought change, not all of it welcome. In the early years, a war with Italy over Libya, followed by conflict in the Balkans, placed the Ottoman Empire under direct assault. Humiliating defeats thrust new leaders to the fore, but the “young Turks” proved no more competent than their predecessors in forestalling the empire’s decay. In 1914 the Turks sided with Germany in the war that broke out among the great powers. They immediately came under attack from the British, whose initial missteps thoroughly disproved the idea that muddling through is an effective way to wage war.

In 1915 the British launched an assault on the Dardanelles to open up a route to Russia. The naval attack failed first; then a badly planned landing on the Gallipoli Peninsula left thousands of British, Australian, and New Zealand soldiers dead. In the east, as Britain’s Indian Army invaded the Ottoman Empire through Basra, one of the planners thought it reasonable to take a crane along to unload the army’s supplies. However, the crane was loaded on board ship first, with the supplies piled on top. The ensuing campaign reflected this kind of ineptitude throughout. In 1915 the British advanced on Baghdad and suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of Ottoman troops near Ctesiphon, the ancient capital of Parthia, taken briefly early in the second century AD by Roman legions under the emperor Trajan.

In 1916 a more coherent and effective assault on Ottoman forces in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley led the British to victory. By spring 1917 Baghdad had fallen. From Egypt, British troops under General Edmund Allenby invaded what was then called Palestine—present-day Israel and Jordan. Slowly the Ottoman armies crumbled. By 1918 Jerusalem and Damascus had fallen to British and Anzac troops after sustained fighting. In October, no longer able to bear the strain of war, the Turks conceded defeat.

What to do with the spoils of the Ottoman Empire was only one of a number of intractable problems confronting the victorious powers at the end of that most dismal conflict. While the actual fighting was going on, two minor functionaries in the British and French governments had negotiated the Sykes-Picot Agreement to divide the empire between their nations. But the respective governments and various other representatives had also promised portions of the region to the Zionists for a homeland and to the locals if they would revolt. Some Arabs, under that magnificent mythmaker Lawrence of Arabia, finally did rebel, though their contribution was relatively small in comparison with the pretensions of their later claims.

In the end, British and French diplomats divided up the areas falling to Allied armies in much the same higgledy-piggledy fashion they had divided Africa during the nineteenth century. The French received the territory that today forms Lebanon and Syria. The British received Palestine as well as the three Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul, which they merged into modern-day Iraq.

Other than rich farmland in the valley, Iraq had few natural resources—except oil. And it had oil in abundance: the greatest reserves of any nation after Saudi Arabia, and the easiest and cheapest petroleum deposits to extract anywhere in the world. Initially, Britain’s acquisition of Iraq had little to do with oil. At the time, the British aimed at acquiring territory that could extend the raj’s security. But they also acted from simple greed: if they had failed to take control of the area, the French would undoubtedly have seized it.

The land occupied by the British looked good on a map; it was geographically cohesive. To the west and south lay one of the world’s great deserts—a flat, featureless expanse inhospitable to human life except for a few Bedouins. Scorching heat in summer, sudden deluges and terrible sandstorms in winter, and virtually no standing water at any time made for a desolate and empty landscape. Northeastern Iraq, with peaks rising above 10,000 feet and rainfall more plentiful, was inhabited largely by Kurds, whose tenuous connection to Arab culture was Islam. In the south, the rivers converged in a region of swamps and irrigation canals, home to a people known as Marsh Arabs whose cultural roots reached back millennia. Between these extremes of desert, mountains, and swamps lay the fertile Mesopotamian Valley. Like the Nile delta, it owed its richness and productivity to alluvial floods, which replenished the land with new soil from the Anatolian plateau. The majority of Iraq’s townspeople and farmers lived within this relatively confined area, as they had for thousands of years.

Political and religious cohesion was another matter. The cross-currents of invasion had left a population as disparate as that of the Balkans in terms of ethnicity, religion, and tribal loyalty. The Arabs around Basra in the southeast practiced the Shii form of Islam, while the Arabs centered around Baghdad were largely Sunni. Most of the Bedouin tribes were also Sunni but were regarded as ignorant robbers by the more sedentary peasants and urban-dwellers. In the north, the Kurds were Sunni, too, but they were not Arabs, and their culture was quite different from that of their neighbors to the south. Throughout the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, especially in the north, survivors of other ethnic groups as well as the remnants of fallen empires were scattered about. Within the Kurdish and Arab areas, in communal groupings, lived Assyrian Christians, Chaldean Christians, Persians (Iranians), Turcoman Muslims, and Jews—the last consisting mostly of descendants of survivors of the Babylonian captivity.

Out of this conglomeration of conflicting interests, the British attempted to unify their mandate from the League of Nations. The local population immediately rebelled, not so much because they believed the occupiers had broken a promise to give the Arabs freedom but because their new rulers were Christians. The outcome was never in doubt, but the British suffered 2,269 casualties in persuading various groups that they would not tolerate rebellion. In the decade during which the British controlled Iraq directly, they brought only a modicum of order to a deeply divided region. At times Royal Air Force fighter aircraft were sufficient to intimidate marauding tribes galloping out of the deserts to the south. For most of the time, an uneasy peace held.

To knit Iraq’s three disparate provinces together, the British placed on Iraq’s new throne a Hashemite desert chieftain who had followed T. E. Lawrence in his guerrilla war against the Ottomans. Third son of the sharif of Mecca, Faisal had hoped the rebellion would lead to a pan-Arab state. Now king, he supported his fellow Sunni Arabs in dominating the new territorial entity called Iraq.

The basic political problem of the infant state lay in the fact that the Sunni represented a minority of Iraq’s people, and, like Faisal, they were deeply suspicious of the large Shiite population in the south. A major reason why the British had included the Kurds in Iraq’s territory—a move with which Faisal was in full accord—was to increase the proportion of Sunnis in the country. Faisal’s regime proceeded to expel many of the Iranian clerics who exercised influence over the Shia and in effect to disenfranchise Iraq’s most populous ethnic group.

In 1932 the League of Nations ratified Iraq’s independence, although the British kept control of several air bases and determined the nation’s foreign policy. With a veneer of democratic institutions overlaid on a thoroughly tribal society, the state maintained a tenuous balance between the deeply antagonistic but leaderless Shia in the south, the rebellious Kurds in the north, and the British-anointed Sunnis in the center.

BAATH IDEOLOGY AND THE TYRANNY OF SADDAM HUSSEIN

The measure of a regime of terror is the victims of its peace, not the casualties of its wars.

SAMIR AL-KHALIL (Kanan Makiya), Republic of Fear, 1989

During the Hashemite monarchy, the history of Iraq began to merge with wider currents in the Arab world. Two young Syrian intellectuals, Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar, who met while students in Paris in 1929, would critically influence the course of events. Both were from Damascus, the former Greek Orthodox in his faith, the latter a Sunni Muslim, and both were fanatical believers in a future Arab nation. What Aflaq and al-Bitar took back to Damascus in 1941 was an amalgamation of idiosyncratic but exceedingly dangerous ideas about how to reform the Arab world—ideas that would give birth to the Baathist Party in Syria and later in Iraq.

In the early 1930s, as the Great Depression corroded sureties that had undergirded the West for nearly a century, radicalism in Europe’s universities and among the continent’s intellectuals spread widely. The writings of Marx and Nietzsche were influential, as were Lenin’s vitriolic attacks on European imperialism. The ongoing experiment in the Soviet Union suggested that an ideologically driven totalitarian regime could accomplish great things in reforming a less advanced society. Germany’s recovery from the Depression and the Third Reich’s diplomatic and military triumphs provided yet another example of how easily a motivated authoritarian nation might overturn the existing international order.

Unlike nationalists such as Ho Chi Minh, Vo Nguyen Giap, and Pol Pot, also educated in the French system, Aflaq and al-Bitar explicitly rejected the Marxist component so attractive to French intellectuals. Aflaq’s turning away from Marxism was part of his attempt to reject everything about the Western intellectual tradition: “The philosophies and teachings that come from the West invade the Arab mind and steal his loyalty before they rob him of his land and skies. We want a unified nationalist programme of education that derives its roots from the peculiarities of the Arab nation, the spirit of its past, and the needs of its future. It should preserve loyalty to the Arab homeland and the Arab cause without sharing in this venture any other homeland or cause.”² Yet in the end, influences from the West would permeate the Baathist message, despite Aflaq’s disclaimers.

Among these influences were Fascism and its insidious, even more dangerous derivative, Nazism. Baath ideology was deeply antisemitic well before the state of Israel became a reality in 1948. The idea of the “leader” held a place of importance in Aflaq’s writings that Adolf Hitler would have found congenial. But neither Aflaq nor al-Bitar possessed the political skill of a Hitler or Mussolini. What they provided instead was an ideological framework that allowed Arab intellectuals and members of the middle classes to respond to challenges posed by the West’s irruption on the Middle Eastern scene.

After the Second World War ended, Baathist ideology proved more attractive than Marxism in both Syria and Iraq because it was not tainted by connections to the Soviet Union—an outsider to the region and, to many Arabs, as Western as the colonial powers. On the other hand, Baathism did not retreat into a religious fundamentalism that rejected what the West had to offer in science and technology. Islam played surprisingly little role in Baath ideology. Like the Communists, the Baathists could appeal to modern interests but at the same time also claim to represent a return to a glorious Arab past. Thus, they could reject the corrupt colonial regimes ruling the Middle East into the early 1950s without throwing into the dustbin of history the awakening dreams of Arab nationalism. In effect, Baathism set about to create a new myth on which a pan-Arab nation, which had never existed, could rest.³

At the root of Baath ideology was a ruthlessness modeled on Nazi and Communist totalitarianism. The greater one’s love for the nation and its principles, the more necessary it was to be cruel to the nation’s people when the occasion arose. A good Baathist must “engender fierce hatred until death towards those persons who represent a contrary idea. It is worthless for members of the movement to content themselves with combating opponent ideas by saying: why bother with persons . . . The antagonistic idea does not exist by itself; it is embodied in persons who must perish, so that it too may perish.”⁴

Unlike earlier Arab nationalists, the Baathists were careful observers of the political structure of the Communist Party. They were also exceptional organizers. Party discipline, a conspiratorial atmosphere, and dreams of an Arab nation proved an intoxicating brew for activists bewildered by the challenge of Western influence and power. Drawing on the secretiveness and suspiciousness of its native clans, the Baath Party built political organizations in both Syria and Iraq that survived the inevitable purges, persecutions, and upheavals of the postwar years. In the end, they proved more resilient, popular, and adaptable than their Communist opponents.

In 1958 a group of officers led by General Abd al-Karim Qassem overthrew the Hashemite monarchy and proclaimed the Republic of Iraq. The coup participants and their supporters slaughtered the young king (Faisal’s grandson), his family, and most of his ministers in an orgy of violence. The next five years were a period of turmoil. The main political support for the new regime came from the Communists, while much of the opposition came from the Baathists. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue: The Gulf War, 1991
• 1. The Origins of War
• 2. The Opposing Sides
• 3. The Ground Campaign in Southern Iraq
• 4. The British War in the South
• 5. The Air War
• 6. The End of the Campaign
• 7. Military and Political Implications
• Weapons of War
• Notes
• Acknowledgments and Sources
• Index