The War in Iraq: A Military Historian's View

The Wall Street Journal is not a liberal rag, to put it mildly. And the English military historian John Keegan has been widely respected in neo-con circles. The Iraq War, his account of the invasion of Iraq, was a paean to the American military. Consequently it will be difficult for conservatives and members of the Bush admin to shrug off his comments in the WSJ this morning as traitorous whining from a faint hearted liberal playing partisan politics (he can't even vote in this country).

He opens his piece with this:

The mystery of the Iraq War is to explain how a brilliantly executed invasion turned into a messy counterinsurgency struggle. Part of the explanation, at least, is a lack of troops, a fault for which the Defense Department has been responsible.

He then goes on to recount the devastating criticism of the admin's conduct of the war found in Thomas Rick's Fiasco. In fact the book is so critical that at least one conservative journalist, Hugh Hewitt, simply refuses to believe conversations Ricks reports he had with senior military commanders.

Keegan's opinion of this deserves to be in italics:

Few would disagree with the analysis in "Fiasco."

Keegan final paragraph about the war:

All that can be hoped is that the U.S. Army will prevail in its counterinsurgency and, as Mr. Ricks's gripping accounts of the troops in action suggest, it may still. His description of Marines "attacking into an ambush" leaves one in no doubt that American soldiers know combat secrets that their enemies do not and cannot match. Whether pure military skills will win the war, however, cannot be predicted.