Winning Modern Wars: Iraq, Terrorism, and the American Empire [Hardcover]

The author had four sections to the book, a review of the Iraqi war, a discussion on what the Bush team did to sell the war, a brief history of American and it's foreign policy in relation to warfare, and lastly a section on everything that the Bush team is doing to ruin the country. Any one of these areas could have easy been a full book, two in one book would be tough to get more then a review. Having all four topics in your book meant that magazine articles have more depth. To be fair, the first half of the book is the review of the war and I got the feeling after reading the book that is what the author originally meant to cover. The campaign process must have started about half way through the writing of the book and he needed to get his book out the door with something to differentiate him from Bush Jr. What ends up happening is that no one area is covered with enough depth and it makes the full book come across to me as either a rush job to cash in or a view into a very shallow man.

I do not want to sound all-negative because there were sections of the book I enjoyed. The review of the war was a nice, quick overview. The discussion of the lead up to the war and the selective truth telling played out by the Bush administration was interesting if not light. The book was written in an easy to read manner. It was just as a whole the book was very lacking, I wanted more on every topic. A constant theme could be said about the book - time. The author did not spend enough time on any one topic, the author did not have the time to dig deep into the topics of the book, and the reader does not need a lot of time to finish the book. I don't even think the book is remotely good at introducing the man as a candidate. Overall the book was disappointing to me, the required detail was not used to make the book useful and important. If you are looking for newspaper headline type reviews of the subjects then you will enjoy the book.

Clark finished this book sometime early in the fall of 2003 before the full extent of the Bush administration's failure in postwar Iraq became clear. Nonetheless Clark anticipated the failures, and his critique is devastating. When one adds it to some of the other criticisms that have come from distinguished military experts--the latest of which was General Anthony Zinni's appearance on Sixty Minutes (May 23, 2004) in which he said that had he made the mistakes in planning that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had made, he would be compelled to resign--one is forced to recognize not only failure but premeditated and deliberate ignorance and incompetence.

While the old saw that "war is too important to be left to the generals" is still viable, it is equally true that to ignore or to go against the advice of those most experienced in such matters is foolhardy. Imagine yourself as President of the United States being told by your most experienced and senior generals such as Wesley K. Clark and Colin Powell--just to mention the two most prominent--that an invasion of Iraq would be unwise, counterproductive, and very expensive both in terms of monies spent and lives lost. What would you do?

What Bush did was to ignore the experts and to go with the neoconservative ideologues in and around the White House and people like Rumsfeld, and to do it without thinking the consequences completely through. As Gen. Clark so calmly and convincingly points out, the invasion of Iraq was a military success and a reconstruction failure of the most obvious and predictable sort. He writes, "Destruction of enemy forces on the battlefield creates a necessary--but not sufficient--condition for victory." (p. 88) More specifically, the planners failed to anticipate "various contingencies...including the possibility of postwar Iraqi resistance." (pp. 86-87) It is amazing to realize that the Bush White House apparently thought that the scattered Baathist elements and the Shia faithful would turn into flower children and hand out daises to the occupying soldiers.

Perhaps the simplest and most telling criticism is that "decisive operations (how to defeat Iraqi forces) had taken priority over the postwar plan (how to achieve the real objectives in Iraq)." (p. 89) However Clark's most important criticism is this: "the Administration raised the costs and risks of the mission by preventing our use of the full array of tools available to win modern war" by being "unwilling to exploit the international legitimacy and support from international institutions like the United Nations and NATO." (p. 92)

Now in May 2004 as I write this, Bush is practically begging the UN and anybody else who will listen to help us extract ourselves from the quagmire.

As to Bush's motive for invading Iraq, Clark asks, "if a primary but unspoken purpose of the campaign was to demonstrate the skills and courage of the American armed forces, then surely... [the military invasion] was a success." (p. 101) What he is suggesting (in a larger and less sanitized sense) is that we showed the world not only the awesome power of our weapons but our willingness to use them. I think that this was the real purpose of the invasion of Iraq. An easy victory against an overmatched (and evil) opponent in which the "shock and awe" of our military might could be displayed for all the world to see was what Bush had in mind. One cannot help but observe that such a scenario (successfully constructed) would work toward his becoming a two-term president and would fit well the mind set of a mediocre man whose personal advantages had allowed him many easy victories in his personal life.

Another "unspoken" reason for invading Iraq was to draw attention away from the fact that we had not caught Osama bin Laden and that the Bush administration really did not (and does not) know how to go about doing that. Let me make a suggestion: use the $200-billion plus that we have squandered in Iraq to persuade the tribesmen and warlords of Afghanistan and the government of Pakistan to help us find bin Laden. What Bush has accomplished in Iraq amounts to a giant recruiting poster for terrorists. Indeed the boots on the ground in Iraq serve as training targets for a mushrooming terrorist population.

Clark also addresses the larger theoretical issues, that of preemptive wars (he's in favor of them but only as self-defense on a multilateral basis) and the delusion of an American Empire. He points out that the word "empire" no longer has any real military or economic meaning. The US in fact, through globalization, has in effect created an economic empire, the maintenance of which requires a lot more than military might. Clark calls this the "virtual" American empire, and I think that is insightfully apt terminology.

There's a lot more to this book than I can discuss here, but let me add one more thing. Clark makes the astute observation that one of the tactics of terrorism is entice governments into instituting "repressive security measures...and so lose the support of its citizens" (p. 106) We can see the beginnings of such measures in the United States with the Patriot Act. One hopes that we do not fall into this trap, the ancient one of allowing the ends to justify the means on our way to becoming our enemy.