George Bush Finds a General

I’m sure that wasn’t the intention, but Bob Woodward’s The War Within paints a scene of George W. Bush’s wartime White House I find very recognizable as a Civil War scholar.

Lincoln’s big mistake was to be too deferential to his generals in the opening years of the war. Lincoln had commanded a company of volunteers during the Black Hawk War, never saw action and finished his service as a private. The generals in his Union Army –not including the men who won their stars thanks to their political connections—were professional soldiers, many of them schooled at West Point or VMI. Deference to their professional opinion came easily.

Better equipped, better fed and better armed than their enemies, however, the Union Army (at least in the Virginia Theater) took one beating after another as each illustrious commander, in his turn, was humiliated by the irrepressible Confederates. Bull Run was the ruination of Irwin McDowell. George McClellan got his comeuppance from a much smaller Rebel army outside the gates of Richmond in the Seven Days’ battles and failed to pursue a defeated enemy after Antietam. General John Pope was disgraced at second Bull Run.

Ambrose E. Burnside reorganized the army and then broke it to pieces charging up Marye’s Hill at Fredericksburg. Fighting Joe Hooker marched into the enemy’s country at Chancellorsville with victory in his grasp and stood stunned, like a deer in candlelight, as Stonewall Jackson flanked him and then routed him. The summer ended with a big Union victory at Gettysburg that was squandered when General George Gordon Meade smashed an entire corps of Robert E. Lee’s army and then failed to pursue it closely enough to finish off the Rebels.

Lincoln sometimes wondered if his generals were fighting for a win, or just for a tie, where the states came back together –with slavery. Undoubtedly some of the generals felt just that way. Some of his generals were heartsick at the slaughter of the battlefield. Improvements in arms and ammunition, especially the range and accuracy of the Minie ball rifle round meant that any big battle was going to produce a bloodbath. At Shiloh (1862) more soldiers died during the two days of fighting than in all the wars and Indian wars America had fought from 1775 onward.

It opened the eyes of Major General Ulysses S. Grant. Until Shiloh, he thought the Confederates would collapse after a few losses. Now he knew that only long and bitter fighting involving the dismantling of the south’s military and industrial war-making capabilities, the destruction of enemy’s will to resist –and the loss of tens of thousands of Union soldiers in the process-- would have to happen if the war was to be won. This became a school of thought in the army, attracting such men as Phil Sheridan, George Thomas and, of course, William Tecumseh Sherman.

Lincoln had been looking for a general who wanted to seize the initiative and never let it go. Grant’s plan that all Union forces attack at pretty much the same time in 1864 had been Lincoln’s thinking for a long time…though his generals didn’t buy into it. Now the Union had a coordinated strategy for the entire war. Every Confederate army was to be attacked, allowing none of them to send troops in aid to another.

In 2007 matters looked just as grim at the White House. Bush’s generals were espousing the astounding notion that by drawing down forces in Iraq the war would be won more quickly because the Iraqi government would be forces to train up an army for its self-defense that much sooner. This was astoundingly illogical to Bush, who saw it as a way to turn Baghdad 2007 into Saigon 1975.

Bush cast about for new leadership, and came up with his own U.S. Grant in the form of General David Petraeus. Petraeus wanted five more brigades –about 30,000 men including 4,000 Marines to implement a plan whereby the U.S. would stay in the neighborhoods it fought for, rather than fight and go home to Camp Liberty. Petraeus went after Al Qaeda in Iraq and enlisted the help of our former Sunni adversaries in Anbar Province. He let the Shiite militias know he meant business, convincing Muqtada Al Sadr to call off his Mahdi Army and to personally exile himself to Iran.

Bush gave Petraeus the cover he needed to do all this, shielding him from the jealousy and intrigues of fellow officers in the Pentagon –much in the same way that Lincoln upheld Grant through the horribly bloody summer of 1864. Lincoln’s instincts proved to be accurate. Grant’s plan eventually dismantled the Confederacy. Bush’s instinct to go outside the box to find Petraeus and trust in the Surge has been rewarded with a war that is virtually won.

History may yet be kind to George W. Bush.

Psst! Hey! We Won the War! Pass It On…

Iraq’s bloody Anbar Province is no longer an American battlefield.
Anbar, along with Baghdad, was the birthplace of the Iraqi Insurrection, which developed after we beat Iraq’s conventional forces in 2003 without any kind of cogent plan for military government afterward. Thank you Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush.
Beginning as the kind of lawless destruction and looting you typically get when no one is in charge of enforcing the law after a war, the Insurrection evolved into a loose coalition of tribes and Sunni veterans of Saddam Hussein’s army out to make the U.S. Occupation of Iraq as costly (and brief) as possible.
The world’s attention was finally caught by the insurrectionists when they ambushed a carfull of Blackwater civilian security personnel in Fallujah, lynched them and strung up their mutilated remains on a bridge.
Our response was slow in coming, but the city of Fallujah was to enter the annals of the U.S. Marines as one of its great battlefields. We fought in that city repeatedly, and in Ramadi, and along the highways of the province. We fought two enemies in Anbar, the Sunnis themselves and Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), which was made up mostly of foreign fighters.
We were on the defensive. We reacted to events. We won our battles, but typically went back to our snug bases after victory, leaving the battlefields, like Ramadi and Fallujah for the enemy to reclaim. We did not have the confidence of the civilian population, who said nothing when they knew when and where improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were being planted to mine the highways. Amputated limbs and grisly head wounds caused by the IEDs became symbolic of our war there.
In February 2007, General David Petraeus took command of coalition forces in Iraq. He authored The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century, which had become the Army’s counterinsurgency manual. Now he would apply it’s precepts practically.
Petraeus told Congress before shipping out that his plan called for decentralizing U.S. forces, especially in places like Baghdad. We would no longer concentrate in places like Camp Liberty, but go out to meet the enemy and stay on the battlefield after we’d won. It would require more troops to do this, which Bush and his new Defense Secretary provided –the famous Surge.
One thing that makes a commander great is that he is lucky. AQI made Petraeus lucky by acting like a combination occupying army, de facto government and Gestapo in Anbar Province. These Jordanians, Saudis and Syrians tried to run the Sunni province using terror and murder to enforce their fundamentalist Islamist rule over the native clans and their sheikhs. The Sunnis turned to the Americans for help just prior to Petraeus’ command.
Petraeus eagerly accepted the friendship of our erstwhile Sunni enemies and the two sides began to work in concert to crush AQI between them. With the people themselves on our side now, letting us know who were planting IEDs and where and where the enemy was basing their forces, American casualties began to taper off while AQI deaths and captures soared. Together, the Coalition armies, the Iraqi Army and the Sunnis drove AQI out of Anbar.
And now with AQI (for the moment) thoroughly beaten, with a competent Iraqi Army in existence, with the civilian government gaining more confidence and credibility every day ruling over a united Sunni-Shi’a Iraq, the most violent province of the war, Anbar, has been turned over to complete Iraqi control.
You might have missed the news, because the announcement came while Gustav threatened New Orleans, while Sarah Palin and her family was in the news and the Republican Convention was getting under way.
That’s how a modern war ends these days –slowly, gradually and unspectacularly. There is no surrender ceremony on the USS Missouri, just a statement to the press that, in effect, the war is over and we won.