Gordon Michael R. - Cobra ii: the inside story of the invasion and occupation of iraq

COBRA II

THE INSIDE STORY OF THE
INVASION AND OCCUPATION OF IRAQ

Michael R. Gordon and
General Bernard E. Trainor

PANTHEON BOOKS NEW YORK 2006

Contents

To the courageous men and women of the armed forces

Wars must vary with the nature of their motives and of the situation which gives rise to them. The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and the commander have to make is to establish by that test the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something alien to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.

On War, Carl von Clausewitz

Foreword

We wrote this book to provide an inside look at how a military campaign that was so successful in toppling Saddam Husseins regime set the conditions for the insurgency that followed. The Iraq War was a war of choice, not necessity. It was also one of the most covered but least understood episodes in recent history. The development of the U.S. military plan was shrouded in secrecy. The debates among the generals were conducted behind closed doors. Saddams deliberations with his war council were unknown. Many of the key battles are only dimly understood.

For three years, we have done exhaustive research on all these fronts. Our mission was not to offer up a slice of the war, to cover the action of a single unit, or to concentrate exclusively on the decision-making in Washington. Instead, we sought to prepare a contemporary history of the entire conflict with all of its complexity, to relate the planning behind closed doors, the bloodletting on the battlefield, and the parallels among disparate battles, and to provide a comprehensive account and rationale of the foreign policy strategy, generalship, and fighting.

We assembled the history from the ground up. We were able to learn about the development of the American plan by reviewing the contemporaneous and unpublished notes of participants and through repeated interviews with senior officials, generals, and their staffs. The research took us to Iraq, the White House, the Defense Department, the Central Command, the State Department, and military headquarters from the Persian Gulf to Texas, North Carolina, Kansas, Georgia, Nevada, and California.

We were able to reconstruct the key battles by interviewing hundreds of participants of all ranks, amassing previously undisclosed and, in some cases, still classified accounts of the clashes, canvassing military archives for written and oral histories, and visiting most of the major battlefields in Iraq, including Kifl, Samawah, Objective Floyd, Tallil, Objective Rams, Hindiyah, the Euphrates River crossing at Peach, Baghdad, Mosul, and Fallujah. The process of embedding provided Michael Gordon extraordinary access over a period of almost five months to a variety of military commands and units. From the allied land war command, the V Corps headquarters, the 3rd Infantry Division, and the 101st Airborne Division, we had access when many of the key decisions about the war were made and postwar policies set. In addition to the conventional fights, we were able to document in detail the engagements of the Delta Force.

We reconstructed decisions by Saddam and his war council through access to a still classified report, Iraqi Perspectives, by the U.S. Joint Forces Command. The extensive briefing, which had been given to the president, is the product of years of research and is based on Iraqi documents and interrogations with senior regime officials and military commanders. The secret study outlines how the Iraqi war strategy was devised, Saddams perception of the American plan as it unfolded, the Iraqi leaders thinking on weapons of mass destruction, his meetings with his high command, his whereabouts during U.S. bombing strikes, and even the actual escape routes he and his sons took from Baghdad.

Accessing the internal records of each side has enabled us to chronicle the misperceptions that each adversary had of the other and how they interacted to produce an outcome that neither side intended. Our research has yielded a new and more comprehensive record of how the war was actually planned and fought. Guided by Donald Rumsfeld and executed by Tommy Franks, the American-led campaign was a fulfillment of the defense secretarys vision of military transformation, calling for the use of precision weapons and the latest reconnaissance and command and control systems to rapidly defeat the foe. By and large, the strategy workedonly to leave American forces facing a new and more dangerous phase of the conflict. There were indications from the first days of the invasion of the insurgency and guerrilla tactics to come, but they were ignored at the highest levels in Washington and at the Central Command.