Off Topic----New and Recommended: The Strongest Tribe And The Peace It Brings To Iraq

The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics, and the Endgame in Iraq, Bing West, Random House Publishing, 448 pp., maps, photographys, notes, bibliography, index, $28.00.

Review From The Washington Post, John A. Nagl, Sunday, August 17, 2008.

'We interpret reality through the clouded prism of our own experience, so it is unsurprising that Bing West sees Iraq through the lens of Vietnam. He served as a Marine officer there, and he thinks politicians and the media caused the American public to turn against a war that could have been won. Now a correspondent for the Atlantic, West has made 15 reporting trips to Iraq over the last six years and is almost as personally invested in the current conflict as he was in Vietnam; this book, his third on Iraq, is his attempt to ensure that the "endgame" in Iraq turns out better than in his last war.

It is increasingly possible to believe that it will. The Strongest Tribe is the first overview of the entire course of the Iraq war to be published since Gen. David Petraeus implemented a change in strategy that is likely to be eternally, if incorrectly, identified as "the surge." West briefly invokes the familiar litany of American errors that nurtured the Sunni insurgency early in the war -- his first chapter is titled "How to Create a Mess" -- and he presents a biting analysis of the muddled strategy that marked the war's second and third years, when the United States rushed to hand over control to an Iraqi military that was not ready to assume such responsibility. He calls it "a hope posing as a plan" that committed too few troops to accomplish the tasks they had been given: a classic ends/means mismatch. When al-Qaeda in Iraq destroyed the sacred Shia shrine in Samarra on Feb. 22, 2006, civil war between the Sunnis and the Shia erupted, and the contradictions and likely failure of U.S. policy eventually became impossible to ignore, even for a Washington that was tragically disconnected from reality on the ground.

Enter Petraeus, co-author of a new field manual on counterinsurgency that focused on the protection of the population as the key to success in this kind of war -- the same mission West had emphasized in Vietnam 40 years earlier. With his deputy (and now successor), Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, Petraeus pushed U.S. soldiers in Baghdad out of the big Forward Operating Bases that had isolated them from the Iraqi people, stationing them in Joint Security Stations with Iraqi soldiers and police. This change in how the troops conceived of their mission was far more important than the relatively small increase in the number of troops that the "surge" label overemphasizes. Petraeus also took full advantage of the opportunity presented when the Sunni tribes of Anbar province attacked al-Qaeda in a turnaround that, as West argues, "was to change the tide of the war over the course of 2007." The military was learning that in counterinsurgency, persuading your enemy to stop fighting against you -- and, if possible, to start fighting alongside you -- can be even better than killing him.

West calls it like he sees it, and there is probably no American not wearing a uniform who has seen more of this war. A large number of senior (mostly Army) generals come in for scathing reviews in The Strongest Tribe, but West reserves his most critical assessments for politicians and journalists. Democratic Congressman and former Marine John Murtha of Pennsylvania was responsible, with the assistance of the media, for "distorting and deliberately exaggerating" the Marine killings of civilians at Haditha. In West's opinion, President Bush failed at his primary responsibility, which was "to persuade the American people to support the war," and also failed to spread the burden of the war equally on all Americans. Instead, the soldiers and Marines who do the fighting and the dying endure repeated tours of duty because we have more war than our too-small Army and Marine Corps can handle. West tells the story of their sacrifices better than anyone else, with an infantryman's keen eye for combat and a father's love for those who engage in it.

During the battle for Fallujah in 2004 (a fight West chronicled in an earlier book, No True Glory), an Iraqi colonel pointed at a Marine patrol and said admiringly, "Americans are the strongest tribe." But the American exit strategy requires that the government of Iraq earn that appellation from its own people, and in this reviewer's opinion the Iraqi government will become the strongest tribe in Iraq only if it enjoys the continued support of a U.S. advisory effort for a number of years. This was the course the United States adopted in Vietnam, but in the wake of Watergate, public support collapsed, advisers were withdrawn, and South Vietnam fell to the North.

That loss had catastrophic consequences for Vietnam, Southeast Asia and the United States. The consequences of defeat in Iraq, West argues, are similarly severe, entirely foreseeable and preventable at an increasingly bearable cost. "Reducing the U.S. force in Iraq can be done prudently, as long as we don't promise a total withdrawal that signals America has given up," he writes. "That makes no sense given the progress that has been made." Looking through the prism of my own experience, I find it hard to disagree. "

CWL: Bing West's No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah (2005) is a gripping battlefront and headquarters account of the 2003 pivital in Iraq. Check CWL's review on Jul 11, 2008. West's tone is neither antiwar nor gungho. His background includes long stays in Iraq and a career in the military as a Marine in Vietnam and as an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration. In writing No True Glory the author observed and interviewed more than 700 Marines, other soldiers and participants in the course of 16 months. His depth of observating first hand the activities he reports and the immense amount of interviews he collected from participants is the background of this book and provoides and immersion experience for the reader.

Off Topic---War In Iraq: The Battle of Fallujah

No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah, Bing West, Bantam Books, 380 pp., photographs, maps, appendix, index, order of battle, notes, bibliography, $25.00 hardcover, $15.00 paperback.

Fought in April 2003, the Battle of Fallujah is representative of nearly every experience of the American military in Iraq. Fearlessness by the fighting men and battleline commanders, double mindedness and 'deer in the headlights' paralysis by political operatives in Baghdad and Washington are illustrated through the book. The military's will to succeed in Iraq and the U.S. government's lack of planning and funds are the hallmarks of West reporting. Treacherous relationships between tribal sheiks, imams, foreign insurgents, the citizens of Fallujah and the American frontline military are chronicled by West, coauthor of The March Up: Taking Baghdad with the United States Marines (2003).

West covers adequately those policy decisions made by the White House that affect the soldiers in Fallujah. The majority of the book focuses on the battlefront in a town that even under Saddam's regime had a reputation for being on the wild side. The author offers eyewitness accounts of negotiations in Baghdad as the soldiers sleep houses at the outskirts of Fallujah. In the building to building fighting, West offers details from eyewitnesses to the point that at times his work appears to be oral history. His coverage of the activities of Marine snipers during the negotiated calm before the final storm is graphic. How snipers' targets fall when hit is described. No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah, is vivid.

West's tone is neither antiwar nor gungho. His background includes long stays in Iraq and a career in the military as a Marine in Vietnam and as an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration. In writing No True Glory the author observed and interviewed more than 700 Marines, other soldiers and participants in the course of 16 months. His depth of observating first hand the activities he reports and the immense amount of interviews he collected from participants is the background of this book and provoides and immersion experience for the reader.

Off Topic---Combat Soldiers Today, Iraq

We Were One: Shoulder to Shoulder With the Marines Who Took Fallujah by Patrick K. O'Donnell, Da Capo Press, chronology, maps, notes, index, 244 pages, 2006, hardcover $25.00, 2007, paperback $15.95.

CWL---In its audio compact disk version, this book is an immersion experience. Leadership in combat is a strong element in We Were One and in this book the leaders get shot up. From boot camp, to training camp, to Kuwait, to Fallujah, Lima Company brings together a diverse and articulate group of young men, who are in many ways representative Americans.

I travelled to Gettysburg, PA and back from the Pittsburgh, PA metropolitan region, and for the nine hours it took, I was saturated with the story of this Marine company and its platoons. The strategy, tactics, and the boots on the ground received equal time from the author. Patrick K. O'Donnell had the distinct advantage of not representing any news gathering organization. He represented only and himself, and in that sense he represented you and me. Shelby Foote once stated that all war stories are anti-war. O'Donnell listens and reports; there are very few interjections of his own personality and agenda in this book. All war stories are anti-war in the sense that if they bring the reader into the conflict and allow the soldier to speak. There may be good wars but all deaths are a loss to each of us.

Below is the Publishers' Weekly review of this book. The reviewer misses the mark by stating that O'Donnell falls in love with the soldiers, who perform fantasy heroics. The reviewer believes that only a heroic enemy makes other's actions heroic. Surprisingly, the reviewer doesn't dispute O'Donnell's reports of the Jihadist's drug induced frenzied violence. But for the PW reviewer, the Marines are not heroes for facing down suicide assaults, ambushes, and booby traps conceived and perpetrated by crack-heads. Does the reviewer think that heroes are only made by taking action against rationale human beings?

From Publishers Weekly
Military historian O'Donnell (Into the Rising Sun) embedded himself in the 1st Platoon of Lima Company, 1st Marine Regiment. His book describes its training and deployment to Iraq in 2004, where the platoon patrolled, fended off guerrilla attacks and finally "fought bravely and died in the Iraq War's fiercest battle" in Fallujah. Most of the book is a detailed, blow-by-blow description of the brutal street fighting, during which nearly the entire unit became casualties. As the author portrays them, these Marines were heroes and warriors with only macho flaws, such as heavy drinking or practical joking, while their enemies are simply terrorists. Maintaining that our troops fight because they love America and their buddies, but their opponents fight because they are drug-addled, suicidal maniacs, the author forgets what every military buff knows: one cannot be a great warrior without a worthy opponent. Like many embedded reporters, O'Donnell appears to have fallen in love with his subjects, adding to the growing genre of worshipful, jingoistic battle narratives about Iraq. Though these Marines fought with great courage and the details of their battle make gripping reading, the author's uncritical cheerleading reduces their accomplishment to fantasy heroics.