{"product_id":"blind-into-baghdad-isbn-9780307277961","title":"Blind Into Baghdad","description":"In the autumn of 2002, \u003ci\u003eAtlantic Monthly \u003c\/i\u003enational correspondent James Fallows wrote an article predicting many of the problems America would face if it invaded Iraq. After events confirmed many of his predictions, Fallows went on to write some of the most acclaimed, award-winning journalism on the planning and execution of the war, much of which has been assigned as required reading within the U.S. military.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eBlind Into Baghdad\u003c\/i\u003e, Fallows takes us from the planning of the war through the struggles of reconstruction. With unparalleled access and incisive analysis, he shows us how many of the difficulties were anticipated by experts whom the administration ignored.  Fallows examines how the war in Iraq undercut the larger ”war on terror” and why Iraq still had no army two years after the invasion. In a sobering conclusion, he interviews soldiers, spies, and diplomats to imagine how a war in Iran might play out. This is an important and essential book to understand  where and how the war went wrong, and what it means for America.\u003cb\u003eIntroduction \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Fifty-First State? \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBlind into Baghdad \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBush’s Lost Year \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhy Iraq Has No Army \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWill Iran Be Next? \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAfterword \u003c\/b\u003e“No one was more prescient than James Fallows about the war in Iraq and what it would entail.”\u003cbr\u003e –Andrew Sullivan\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The Iraq imbroglio has produced some amazing and, for war supporters, painful essays. . . . \u003ci\u003eBlind Into Baghdad\u003c\/i\u003e  . . . show[s] that most of what happened in postwar Iraq was predicted prewar by government analysts. It's just that their reports were suppressed or ignored by the people making the decisions.” \u003cbr\u003e–David Brooks, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003eJames Fallows is The Atlantic Monthly's National Correspondent, and has worked for the magazine for more than twenty years. His previous books include Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy, Looking at the Sun, More Like Us and National Defense, which won the American Book Award for non-fiction. He and his wife live in Washington DC.THE FIFTY-FIRST STATE?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    NOVEMBER 2002\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Through the summer of 2002 I interviewed several dozen people about   what could be expected in Iraq after the United States dislodged   Saddam Hussein. An assumption behind the question was that sooner or   later the United States would go to war--and would go with at best a   fraction of the support it enjoyed eleven years ago when fighting   Iraq during the Gulf War. Most nations in the region and traditional   U.S. allies would be neutral or hostile unless the Bush   administration could present new evidence of imminent danger from   Iraq.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A further assumption was that even alone, U.S. forces would win this   war. The victory might be slower than in the last war against Iraq,   and it would certainly cost more American lives.* But in the end U.S.   tanks, attack airplanes, precision-guided bombs, special-operations   forces, and other assets would crush the Iraqi military. The combat   phase of the war would be over when the United States destroyed   Saddam Hussein's control over Iraq's government, armed forces, and   stockpile of weapons.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    What then?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The people I asked were spies, Arabists, oil-company officials,   diplomats, scholars, policy experts, and many active-duty and retired   soldiers. They were from the United States, Europe, and the Middle   East. Some firmly supported a preemptive war against Iraq; more were   opposed. As of late summer, before the serious domestic debate had   begun, most of the people I spoke with expected a war to occur.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I began my research sharing the view, prevailing in Washington   through 2002, that forcing \"regime change\" on Iraq was our era's grim   historical necessity: starting a war would be bad, but waiting to   have war brought to us would be worse. This view depended to some   degree on trusting that the U.S. government had information not   available to the public about exactly how close Saddam Hussein was to   having usable nuclear warheads or other weapons of mass destruction.   It also drew much of its power from an analogy every member of the   public could understand--to Nazi Germany. In retrospect, the only sin   in resisting Hitler had been waiting too long. Thus would it be in   dealing with Saddam Hussein today. Richard Perle, a Reagan-era   Defense Department official who is one of the most influential   members outside government of what is frequently called the \"war   party,\" expressed this thought in representative form in an August   column for the London Daily Telegraph: \"A preemptive strike against   Hitler at the time of Munich would have meant an immediate war, as   opposed to the one that came later. Later was much worse.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Nazi and Holocaust analogies have a trumping power in many arguments,   and their effect in Washington was to make doubters seem   weak--Neville Chamberlains versus the Winston Churchills who were   ready to face the truth. The most experienced military figure in the   Bush cabinet, Secretary of State Colin Powell, was cast as the main   \"wet,\" because of his obvious discomfort with an effort that few   allies would support. His instincts fit the general sociology of the   Iraq debate: As a rule, the strongest advocates of preemptive attack,   within the government and in the press, had neither served in the   military nor lived in Arab societies. Military veterans and Arabists   were generally doves. For example: Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy   secretary of defense and the intellectual leader of the war party   inside the government, was in graduate school through the late 1960s.   Richard Armitage, his skeptical counterpart at the State Department   and Powell's ally in pleading for restraint, is a Naval Academy   graduate who served three tours in Vietnam.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I ended up thinking that the Nazi analogy paralyzes the debate about   Iraq rather than clarifying it. Like any other episode in history,   today's situation is both familiar and new. In the ruthlessness of   the adversary it resembles dealing with Adolf Hitler. But Iraq,   unlike Germany, has no industrial base and few military allies   nearby. It is split by regional, religious, and ethnic differences   that are much more complicated than Nazi Germany's simple   mobilization of \"Aryans\" against Jews. Hitler's Germany constantly   expanded, but Iraq has been bottled up, by international sanctions,   for more than ten years. As in the early Cold War, America faces an   international ideology bent on our destruction and a country trying   to develop weapons to use against us. But then we were dealing with   another superpower, capable of obliterating us. Now there is a huge   imbalance between the two sides in scale and power.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    If we had to choose a single analogy to govern our thinking about   Iraq, my candidate would be World War I. The reason is not simply the   one the historian David Fromkin advanced in his book A Peace to End   All Peace: that the division of former Ottoman Empire territories   after that war created many of the enduring problems of modern Iraq   and the Middle East as a whole. The Great War is also relevant as a   powerful example of the limits of human imagination: specifically,   imagination about the long-term consequences of war.*\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The importance of imagination was stressed to me by Merrill McPeak, a   retired Air Force general with misgivings about a preemptive attack.   When America entered the Vietnam War, in which McPeak flew combat   missions over the jungle, the public couldn't imagine how badly   combat against a \"weak\" foe might turn out for the United States.   Since that time, and because of the Vietnam experience, we have   generally overdrawn the risks of combat itself. America's small wars   of the past generation, in Grenada, Haiti, and Panama, have turned   out far better--tactically, at least--than many experts dared to   predict. The larger ones, in the Balkans, the Persian Gulf, and   Afghanistan, have as well. The \"Black Hawk Down\" episode in Somalia   is the main exception, and it illustrates a different rule: when   fighting not organized armies but stateless foes, we have   underestimated our vulnerabilities.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    There is an even larger realm of imagination, McPeak suggested to me.   It involves the chain of events a war can set off. Wars change   history in ways no one can foresee. The Egyptians who planned to   attack Israel in 1967 could not imagine how profoundly what became   the Six Day War would change the map and politics of the Middle East.   After its lightning victory Israel seized neighboring territory,   especially on the West Bank of the Jordan River, that is still at the   heart of disputes with the Palestinians. Fifty years before, no one   who had accurately foreseen what World War I would bring could have   rationally decided to let combat begin. The war meant the collapse of   three empires, the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian, and the Russian;   the cresting of another, the British; the eventual rise of Hitler in   Germany and Mussolini in Italy; and the drawing of strange new   borders from the eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, which now   define the battlegrounds of the Middle East. Probably not even the   United States would have found the war an attractive bargain, even   though the U.S. rise to dominance began with the wounds Britain   suffered in those years.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In 1990, as the United States prepared to push Iraqi troops out of   Kuwait, McPeak was the Air Force chief of staff. He thought that war   was necessary and advocated heavy bombing in Iraq. Now he opposes an   invasion, largely because of how hard it is to imagine the full   consequences of America's first purely preemptive war--and our first   large war since the Spanish-American War in which we would have few   or no allies.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    We must use imagination on both sides of the debate: about the risks   of what Saddam Hussein might do if left in place, and also about what   such a war might unleash. Some members of the war party initially   urged a quick in-and-out attack. Their model was the three-part   formula of the \"Powell doctrine\": First, line up clear support--from   America's political leadership, if not internationally. Then assemble   enough force to leave no doubt about the outcome. Then, before the   war starts, agree on how it will end and when to leave.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The in-and-out model has obviously become unrealistic. If Saddam   Hussein could be destroyed by a death ray or captured by a ninja   squad that sneaked into Baghdad and spirited him away, the United   States might plausibly call the job done. It would still have to   wonder what Iraq's next leader might do with the weapons   laboratories, but the immediate problem would be solved.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Absent ninjas, getting Saddam out will mean bringing in men,   machinery, and devastation. If the United States launched a big   tank-borne campaign, as suggested by some of the battle plans leaked   to the press, tens of thousands of soldiers, with their ponderous   logistics trail, would be in the middle of a foreign country when the   fighting ended. If the U.S. military relied on an air campaign   against Baghdad, as other leaked plans have implied, it would   inevitably kill many Iraqi civilians before it killed Saddam. One way   or another, America would leave a large footprint on Iraq, which   would take time to remove.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And logistics wouldn't be the only impediment to quick withdrawal.   Having taken dramatic action, we would no doubt be seen--by the world   and ourselves, by al-Jazeera and CNN--as responsible for the   consequences. The United States could have stopped the Khmer Rouge   slaughter in Cambodia in the 1970s, but it was not going to, having   spent the previous decade in a doomed struggle in Vietnam. It could   have prevented some of the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s, and   didn't, but at least it did not trigger the slaughter by its own   actions. \"It is quite possible that if we went in, took out Saddam   Hussein, and then left quickly, the result would be an extremely   bloody civil war,\" says William Galston, the director of the   Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of   Maryland, who was a Marine during the Vietnam War. \"That blood would   be directly on our hands.\" Most people I spoke with, whether in favor   of war or not, recognized that military action is a barbed hook: once   it goes in, there is no quick release.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The tone of the political debate reflects a dawning awareness of this   reality. Early this year, during the strange \"phony war\" stage of   Iraq discussions, most people in Washington assumed that war was   coming, but there was little open discussion of exactly why it was   necessary and what consequences it would bring. The pro-war group   avoided questions about what would happen after a victory, because to   consider postwar complications was to weaken the case for a   preemptive strike. Some war advocates even said, if pressed, that the   details of postwar life didn't matter. With the threat and the tyrant   eliminated, the United States could assume that whatever regime   emerged would be less dangerous than the one it replaced.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    As the swirl of leaks, rumors, and official statements made an attack   seem alternately more and less imminent, the increasing chaos in   Afghanistan underscored a growing consensus about the in-and-out   scenario for Iraq: it didn't make sense. The war itself might be   quick, perhaps even quicker than the rout of the Taliban. But the end   of the fighting would hardly mean the end of America's commitment. In   August, as warlords reasserted their power in Afghanistan, General   Tommy Franks, the U.S. commander, said that American troops might   need to stay in Afghanistan for many years.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    If anything, America's involvement in Afghanistan should have been   cleaner and more containable than what would happen in Iraq. In   Afghanistan the United States was responding to an attack, rather   than initiating regime change. It had broad international support; it   had the Northern Alliance to do much of the work. Because the Taliban   and al-Qaeda finally chose to melt away rather than stand and fight,   U.S. forces took control of the major cities while doing relatively   little unintended damage. And still, getting out will take much   longer than getting in.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Some proponents of war viewed the likelihood of long involvement in   Iraq as a plus. If the United States went in planning to stay, it   could, they contended, really make a difference there. Richard Perle   addressed a major antiwar argument--that Arab states would flare up   in resentment--by attempting to turn it around. \"It seems at least as   likely,\" he wrote in his Daily Telegraph column, \"that Saddam's   replacement by a decent Iraqi regime would open the way to a far more   stable and peaceful region. A democratic Iraq would be a powerful   refutation of the patronizing view that Arabs are incapable of   democracy.\"*\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Some regional experts made the opposite point: that a strong,   prosperous, confident, stable Iraq was the last thing its neighbors,   who prefer it in its bottled-up condition, wanted to see. Others   pooh-poohed the notion that any Western power, however hard it tried   or long it stayed, could bring about any significant change in Iraq's   political culture.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Regardless of these differences, the day after a war ended, Iraq   would become America's problem, for practical and political reasons.   Because we would have destroyed the political order and done physical   damage in the process, the claims on American resources and attention   would be comparable to those of any U.S. state. Conquered Iraqis   would turn to the U.S. government for emergency relief, civil order,   economic reconstruction, and protection of their borders. They   wouldn't be able to vote in U.S. elections, of course--although they   might after they emigrated. (Every American war has created a   refugee-and-immigrant stream.) But they would be part of us.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    During the debate about whether to go to war, each side selectively   used various postwar possibilities to bolster its case. Through the   course of my interviews I found it useful to consider the   possibilities as one comprehensive group. What follows is a triage   list for American occupiers: the biggest problems they would face on   the first day after the war, in the first week, and so on, until,   perhaps decades from now, they could come to grips with the long-term   connections between Iraq and the United States.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    THE FIRST DAY\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Last-minute mayhem The biggest concern on the first day of peace   would arise from what happened in the last few days of war. \"I don't   think that physically controlling the important parts of the country   need be as difficult as many people fear,\" Chris Sanders, an American   who worked for eighteen years in Saudi Arabia and is now a consultant   in London, told me. \"But of course it all depends on how one finds   oneself in a victorious position--on what you had to do to win.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    What would Saddam Hussein, facing defeat and perhaps death, have   decided late in the war to do with the stockpiled weapons of mass   destruction that were the original justification for our attack? The   various Pentagon battle plans leaked to the media all assume that   Iraq would use chemical weapons against U.S. troops. (Biological   weapons work too slowly, and a nuclear weapon, if Iraq had one, would   be more valuable for mass urban destruction than for battlefield   use.) During the buildup to the Gulf War, American officials publicly   warned Iraq that if it used chemical weapons against U.S. troops, we   would respond with everything at our disposal, presumably including   nuclear weapons.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302328684773,"sku":"NP9780307277961","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307277961.jpg?v=1767722768","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/blind-into-baghdad-isbn-9780307277961","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}