ISBN: 0375422625
List Price: $27.95
Amazon Price: $17.61
Usually ships in 24 hours
Buy this book
from amazon.com
or from
amazon.co.uk
|
Avg Cusomer Rating: 4
Reviews:
Summary: The Iraqi War - A Forty Day Party?
While reading Cobra II - when I wasn't simmering - I got the impression that the strongest military in the world was being controlled and misused by a modern day version of the Keystone Kops. Not that I'm surprised. I and two thirds of the country (God help the other third) knew something was amiss, but many of the things I suspected were laid out in glaring fashion in this interesting text.
It's like President "What me worry?" was having his arm twisted by Vice President "Darth Vader" undersecretary Darth Maul (Wolfowitz) to throw a forty day party in Baghdad. That's right the war that has outlasted both World War I and the Korean War and is fast approaching World War II was expected to be a thirty to fifty day party and then we all go home with smiles on our faces. Perhaps it would have, except for two things.
First, our Defense Secretary, decided he knew more than all his generals combined. He threw out ten years of military planning for the invasion of Iraq, and proceeded to badger his generals to keep reducing planned invasion troop levels to a number he liked. I guess the secretary is into numerology. The number the generals started with was 380,000. The number the S.O.D. accepted was 140,000 - just enough to get us into Baghdad but not enough to get home.
The second thing, which some knowledgeable people foresaw, but not the myopic administration, was that the party might get crashed by some unwanted guests. Who you ask? Why, a bunch of young hot heads driving Toyotas, some wearing towels over the faces, some carrying funny objects on their shoulders or weapons in their arms and all looking for trouble. The first fatality of the war was caused, not by an Iraqi soldier but, a group of these hot heads in a Toyota Pick-up.
Commanders on the ground noticed this effective, unforeseen adversary, utilizing hit and run guerilla tactics and wanted to confront them, but the bigwigs in Cent Com ordered them to bypass these future insurgents and head straight to Baghdad, do not pass Go. Apparently they felt that once Baghdad fell everything. would fall into place. What they got when they took Baghdad was widespread looting. The authors Michael Gordon and General Bernard Trainor go on to speculate that the fediyeen, which the army was ordered to ignore and bypass on the way to Baghdad, became the backbone for the strong insurgency we now face.
Conclusion
Liberal, Conservative, independent - Right wing, Left wing, it doesn't matter, reading this book will upset you. The book is not a liberal rag. It does not have a political bias, unless you consider a bias toward incompetence political. It just lays out the facts, often in minute detail. That, in fact is one of the books weaknesses. Cobra II reads like a play by play description of the war to date from the rationale though the planning to the prosecution of the war, with it's attendant mis-steps. The prosecution portion of the war takes up at least two thirds of the book and unless you are a war junkie and despite some interesting parts begins, after awhile, to all sound the same.
The parts of the book I found most interesting were the initial planning stages and those portions dealing with the dissension that developed between Rumsfeld and Franks and later the turmoil between Franks and the generals in the field. The authors also point out how many of the problems that developed in the initial occupation of Baghdad and the aftermath were anticipated by various sources with suggestions, but were discounted or ignore by the administration. In short, the administration didn't want to hear anything that didn't might disrupt their vision of a forty day party.
Unfortunately the book only takes us through the war itself and the stirrings of the nascent insurgency. Three years later we are seeing what almost everyone agrees is a low grade civil war, verging on civil war.
Summary: The Whole Story on the Iraq Invasion
Anyone who reads this book will be quickly appalled by the lack of attention paid by the civilian/political masters of the US military. The IED's, foreign fighters, and guerrilla tactics of the opposition in Iraq were there on day one. The feared Republican Guard and WMD's were a PR ploy of Saddam.
Summary: Very thorough overview of the planning and execution of the war
Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor have done an outstanding job of researching and reporting how the US planned the invasion of Iraq and the military carried out that invasion. I cannot imagine how it would even be possible for any other author to top them on those two subjects.
However, the title of the book promises the inside story of not just the invasion of Iraq, but also its occupation. Here, the book falls short. I was really quite surprised by how little attention was paid to this extremely important topic, which does not even begin until chapter 23. And there are only 24 chapters, so that gives you an idea how quickly the authors dispense with that topic.
What has become clear to me in retrospect is that the authors' strong point is military history from a tactical and operational standpoint. If anything, the detail presented on those two topics goes a bit overboard at times, with incredibly meticulous descriptions of even the most mundane elements of the combat operations described in the book. Let it not be said that the authors did not research those subjects thoroughly. But once the shooting stopped, so seemingly did the authors' attention span. A decent effort is made in the Epilogue to tie things together and discuss the deficiencies in planning, but the problems that arose during the occupation really should have been given a lot more attention. Still, this book has enough strengths to deserve a four-star rating in my opinion.
I also recommend "The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq" by George Packer, which covers the war and the occupation (in fact, mostly the occupation) from the standpoint of ordinary Iraqis. It is an absolutely superb book on that topic, and also the complex and politically charged subject of how the perfect storm of people and events made the Iraq war possible in the first place. You really won't know the whole story unless you read both these books.
Summary:
|
,
amazon.co.uk
,
google.com
