Never bet on horses or wars. They never run to form. Yet we do bet, obsessively. We listen to a bloke in a pub or a guy on television. We grab every passing pundit. A day later we are poorer and wiser, but we bet again.
The Iraq war is barely two weeks old and most of the predictions of politicians, generals and scribes are best left wrapping fish. The only satisfied people are those who “told you so”, but they were dismissed as unsound. Instead everyone from the American Defence Secretary to the lowliest laptop bombardier now says he knew all along that this war “might be” long, bloody and hugely expensive.
Funny how I do not remember it. I do not remember it because these people did not say it, on that glad, confident morning when they went to war. They did not say it because, had they done so, the public might have stopped them. And they wanted this war so urgently that they raced forward without enough allies, enough intelligence and even enough troops. They clearly fooled even themselves.
They fooled me. My opposition to this war was political. We had no dog in the fight between George Bush and President Saddam Hussein, as America claimed “no dog” in Britain’s Suez and Falklands conflicts. But I never thought that an attack on Baghdad would not be won quickly. I almost admired Donald Rumsfeld his bravado. There would be a massive aerial bombardment, killing thousands of civilians and making the whole Middle East hate and terrorise the West. But my imagination never “war-gamed” Stalingrad. If battle was joined I merely hoped that it would be “quick and clean”, as the merchants of shock and awe told us it would be.
These merchants are now fleeing for the hills. The American hawk, Richard Perle, is ruing his days-not-weeks and “I don’t believe we will have to defeat Saddam’s army”. The Pentagon’s Ken Adelman and Paul Wolfowitz are “recalibrating” their forecast that “liberating Iraq will be a cakewalk” and “Iraq is ripe for a broad-based rebellion”. Back home my admiration for the military historian John Keegan was so unbounded that I cut out and saluted his March 18 assertion, “it will not be necessary to enter the Iraqi cities in order to bring Saddam down”. He was not alone.
These predictions were hugely comforting to those who preferred not to argue. They encouraged the Americans to travel light and treat allies as expendable. The Pentagon alienated the Turks and claimed it could “walk this one” even without Tony Blair. Where would the war be now without the British round Basra? It is unbelievable that, after Beirut, Somalia and Afghanistan, the Americans did not “war-game” street fighting, suicide bombing and guerrilla harassment. No Iraqi tactic equals the Vietcong for viciousness, including to their own side. What do they learn in war college?
Whenever I hear the drums of war I reach for Barbara Tuchman. The March of Folly by the late American historian charts the distorting impact that war has on leadership mentality. In every case, military miscalculation is based on predictions so sifted as to support a preordained policy, usually the most macho one. This “cognitive dissonance” leads to the biggest handicap on lateral thinking in war, Tuchman’s “protective stupidity”. Leaders stop listening to unsavoury truth because that risks debate. A month ago the coalition cheer-leaders stopped their ears and screamed “Saddam’s friend” and “Hitler’s ally” at any critic of its strategy. This war may yet be won, but not that way.
Tuchman studied wars from the Fall of Troy to Vietnam. She would have scorned those who belittled Iraqi readiness to defend their soil. Was it not an English minister, Lord Sandwich, who in 1775 called America’s Minutemen irregulars “raw, undisciplined cowardly men who, if they do not run away, will starve themselves”? His military adviser, Colonel Grant, had assured him that the Americans “would never fight . . . would never dare face an English army”.
This is the 50th anniversary of John Foster Dulles declaring that “containing” communism was “negative, futile and immoral” and that “America must demonstrate that it wants and expects liberation to occur” across South East Asia. Eisenhower was appalled. Every ounce of intelligence on the ground warned America that it would suffer the same fate in Vietnam as had the French. But once the “illusion of omnipotence” takes hold on those in power, the march to folly seems unstoppable. It took four presidents and 20 years’ bloodshed to re-establish containment in South East Asia. It is communism’s last stronghold.
This week’s fine Channel 4 documentary on Churchill by Max Hastings showed how his generals’ most crucial victories were against his crazier ideas. They stopped him, as Alanbrooke put it, “losing the war”. The war was won by a group leadership able to argue with itself and thus overcome “protective stupidity”. Churchill alone is an appalling model for our present leaders. Yet when the smell of war is in their nostrils, they cannot hold back. They listen to the predictions of hawks, watch cruise-missile videos and beware Hamlet’s “native hue of resolution . . . sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought”.
Why do we feed this appetite for prediction, when it is so dreadfully abused? I can tell you why. We cannot stand uncertainty. In war, as in business and love, people crave to know the future. If an expert cannot be found, then a juju will do. Planets, tea-leaves, goose entrails, anything serves. It is no good banning the pundit from the television studio. The mob will grab him in the street and shake him until he tells them “when this war will end”. He cannot reply, “as long as it takes” or “only time will tell”. Nobody wants a doctor who tells them any disease will end in recovery or death. At moments such as this, we all suffer prediction addiction.
Generals claim that every war is impossible to foretell. The American, Tommy Franks, protested last week that the Iraq war is “unlike any other in history”, requiring a lightning dash, a “collapse of regime” and mopping up afterwards. He was describing the Second World War German blitzkrieg. I gather that British commanders sceptical of American strategy are muttering that any self-respecting Panzer division, safe from air attack, would not now be motoring round the desert taking almost no casualties and pleading for air support. Its tanks would be sitting on top of Saddam’s bunker.
The world was plainly told to get ready for a rerun of the Gulf War or Kosovo or Afghanistan. These templates were carefully preselected. Nobody in my hearing said prepare for Beirut, the West Bank or Stalingrad. Yet history warns strategists (and war ministers) to study defeats not victories. We await the first main-force assault on a defended capital since the Second World War. The intelligence, mostly from unreliable Iraqi exiles, has either been atrocious or ignored. Iraq is already a classic of cognitive dissonance.
All wars may be different, but not so the cast of mind of those leading them. Vietnam was a very different war from Iraq, but it too was an invasion. It too suppressed all intelligence warning that local people might want a change of government, but not one imposed by the West. It too suppressed evidence that aerial bombardment of cities was of little military value, but madness if victory was to depend on popular support. In Vietnam as in Iraq, bombing brutalised cities and made them easier for militias to control. The bombing of Basra’s civilian infrastructure was unbelievably stupid, commanders hypnotised by air power that they must have known would be counter-productive to hearts and minds.
This war will be won, slowly and messily. The American and British forces have too much power in reserve and too much domestic prestige at risk to pull back from the gates of Baghdad. But to kill Saddam they will have to fight their way to his bunker across the bombed streets of a sullen city, or sue with some peace broker for his escape to a safe haven. They will then be trapped far from home and in hostile territory, like the Russians in Chechnya. Every Arab mother will tell her son: “Avenge Baghdad.” Young men from across the Middle East will deploy all the tactics of murder, anarchy and terror against this army until it just goes home.
Of course I could be wrong. I fervently hope so, but each bomb kills hope.
sjenkins@thetimes.co.uk
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