Shame and Disgrace

Andrew Sullivan has criticized the decision to award Tommy Franks, George
Tenet and Paul Bremer the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The ceremony was
described by

ABC News:

President George W Bush has bestowed the highest US civilian honour on
three former top officials, sidestepping their ties to controversies over the
Iraq war and its aftermath. In a televised ceremony at the White House, Mr
Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to former CIA director George
Tenet, retired General Tommy Franks and the civilian overseer for Iraq, Paul
Bremer. "This honour goes to three men who have played pivotal roles in great
events and whose efforts have made our country more secure and advanced the
cause of human liberty," the President said in prepared remarks.

Sullivan felt that the awards were not only undeserved by given despite
their failure and incompetence.

The presidential medal of freedom goes to George "Slam Dunk" Tenet, Tommy
"We Have Enough Troops" Franks, and Paul "Disband the Iraqi Army" Bremer. It's
one thing never to punish error, but to reward it so magnificently!

The accuracy of Sullivan's characterizations of George Tenet and Paul Bremer
are best left to the reader to judge. But it seems unjust to characterize Tommy
Franks, the commander of

Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) and

Operation Iraqi Freedom  in such disparaging terms. A more accurate
appraisal of Franks' campaign was articulated at a recent seminar at the

American Enterprise Institute held to discuss an Army War College postmortem
of operations in Iraq. The ensuing discussion recognized OIF's achievements
without minimizing the shortcomings which now evident in hindsight --
achievements and shortcomings that are General Franks' to a certain extent. The
basic indictment is that while the President's strategy called for a campaign of
"regime change" military plans were drawn up for "regime removal". The question
is whether Franks could have done differently.

The decisions made to limit the size and the capabilities of the invasion
force had unintended, but at least predictable, consequences. Almost from the
start the desire to fight a just-in-time war meant that even small
surprises--the resistance of the Saddam Fedayeen or even the terrible
sandstorm of late March--sapped the strength of a force that was just large
enough to, essentially, conquer Baghdad. And in particular, disrupting the
normal deployment procedures deprived the force of the logistics wherewithal
necessary to continue operations beyond Baghdad. By the time that force got to
Baghdad, its reserves had been committed, it was fully absorbed in trying to
pacify the capital itself. And the question of whether the force had the
necessary means, the strength, to push out beyond Baghdad, and particularly
into the so-called Sunni Triangle, I think, is a very debatable proposition.
In my judgment, to use a military term of art, the attack essentially
culminated in and around Baghdad. ...

Just the centrality of winning the war in the Sunni Triangle appears,
certainly from this vantage point, to have been what a campaign planner would
describe the center of gravity. This was a goal that was not conceived in the
war plan and, I have argued, was beyond the abilities of the invasion force as
it found itself in early April. You can only speculate about what effect the
4th Infantry Division might have had if the Turks had permitted an attack
through northern Iraq. There's no guarantee that there wouldn't have been an
insurgency of some sort--Moqtada al-Sadr and his Iranian sponsors would still
be a problem, jihadists everywhere would still be outraged and just as willing
to kill Americans as they have proven otherwise. But you have to say that the
Sunni heartland did not feel the full shock and awe of the invasion, and the
problem there persists.

The study recognizes that the mismatch between American goals -- "to rebuild
an entire region" -- and its means, an armed force whose manpower and doctrine
were legacies from the Cold War, not only constrained Franks at the start of the
campaign but persists to a large extent today. Military bloggers have noted that
pre-OIF photographs show few troops in body armor because it was not then widely
issued. Nearly all the logistics vehicles, the Humvees and trucks, were
unarmored at the start of the campaign. Arabic translators were comparatively
scarce, rear echelon troops were not expected to see combat in the halcyon days
of February, 2003. That was the army Franks had. Nearly all of that has changed.
But while many of those equipment defects have been redressed, the basic problem
of force size -- the number of brigades the US military can field -- has not.
Critics often forget that the call for 'more boots on the ground' really amounts
to a number that can be sustained until the job is done. In this respect, the
ground forces have now exchanged places with the Navy, which for most of the
1990s rotated Task Forces in and out of the Persian Gulf enforcing pointless
embargoes, sometimes for nearly a year at a stretch, wearing out ships and
sailors. People who complained of having only two carriers forward were apprised
it took at least six, allowing for transit and the refurbishment, to keep that
presence in place.

it's not so much about the immediate level of forces in Iraq or anything
like that, but ... whether the right number is 100,000 or 150,000, our ability
to sustain that over a long haul. And also to do the other strategic tasks
both in the region and elsewhere in the world that we ask our military to do,
I think, is, again, just fundamentally out of whack.

General Franks was the CINC of Central Command and while Iraq was the major
theater of operations, he had the responsibility to prosecute the ongoing
efforts in Afghanistan, then where Iraq is now, and maintain a reserve against
contingencies. But to set against these shortcomings lay one fact: the US
military had toppled the Saddam regime and was on its way to winning against the
Baa'thist insurgency.  That achievement was in large part due to General
Franks.

Those disappointed with the invasion itself for not producing the
anticipated quagmire have found a little more food for speculation in the
fighting of the past year and certainly the fighting of the past month, and
especially in Fallujah. But I have to confess that, in my analysis and, I
would say, by pretty much any historical standard, this has been a pretty
successful counter-insurgency campaign. And I measure that in two fundamental
ways: First, it does appear that insurgents in Iraq, the rejectionists, have
had very little luck in shaking American political resolve to stay the course.
... Secondly, the insurgents have also failed to provoke a civil war in Iraq,
which, to listen and to remember the expert commentary prior to the war,
sounded like the easiest thing in the world to do. And journalists are
constantly discovering that civil war is about to happen, but, at least in my
eyes, it hasn't happened yet. ... Now, the insurgency has had one notable
strategic success. I can't say quite what it's bought them, but you have to
grant them that they've fractured the international coalition that backs the
United States in Iraq.

Probably the most eye-opening suggestion that the United States has moved to the permanent offense, not only inside Iraq but within the region was
made by

Marc Ruel Gerecht, who argues that the Iranian mullahs are now facing a
mortal geostrategic threat from a post-Saddam Iraq which they now cannot hope to
prevent but at best to misdirect.

Today in Washington there are many within the foreign-policy establishment
expressing their fear--and hope--that America's entanglement in Iraq may well
compromise the Bush administration's ability to confront the Islamic
Republic's quest for nuclear weapons. ... But does this reasoning make sense?
Are Iraq and Iran so intertwined that America is essentially handcuffed in its
dealings with Tehran's mullahs? In all probability, not at all. Indeed, the
current interplay between the peoples of Iraq and its eastern neighbor
actually ought to encourage the Bush administration to be more hawkish toward
the clerical regime's growing interference in Iraq and pursuit of nuclear
weapons.

The strongest trump playing in favor of America and against Iran is Iraqi
nationalism. ... Iraq's Shiites are the progenitors of modern Iraqi
nationalism. They, much more than their Sunni Arab compatriots, who were the
driving force behind pan-Arabism in Mesopotamia, have shaped an Iraqi Arab
identity which is distinct from the Sunni Arabs to the west and Shiite
Iranians to the east. ... Which brings us to the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq.
Clerical Iran's primary objective is to ensure that Iraq remains destabilized,
incapable of coalescing around a democratically elected government. Such a
government supported by Iraq's Shiite establishment is a dagger aimed at
Tehran's clerical dictatorship.

If Gerecht's analysis is correct, OIF stands within an ace of not only
achieving its operational goals, but is on the verge of winning its initial
strategic goals.

The clerical regime is currently handcuffed to Iraq's democratic process
and timetable. All of the principal groups through which Iran hopes to
exercise influence in Iraq--the Iranian-created Supreme Council for the
Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the Dawa (or "Islamic Call") party, and
the Sadriyyin, followers of Muqtada al Sadr, the young clerical firebrand who
has been engaged in a spiritual tug-of-war with the country's traditional
clergy--are committed now to the election process. Iran has probably been
pouring money into Iraq, to all three of these Shiite groups, which don't
share much affection for each other, and in the case of the Dawa and the
Sadriyyin, have had distinctly mixed, often hostile, emotions about things
Iranian. Both the Dawa and the Sadriyyin have regularly belittled Grand
Ayatollah Sistani for his "Persianness" and snarled at clerical Iran's habit
of talking down to the Iraqi Shia. Tehran's motivation in giving aid to these
parties is to encourage some dependency and, more important, keep the three
most provocative Shiite groups in the forefront of Iraqi politics.

It is Iran and Syria, not the United States, which may now find itself
embedded in an Iraqi quagmire. Leaving aside Mr. Gerecht's impressive
credentials, how much of this analysis is accurate and how much wishful
thinking? That question returns us to the central fact that both Operation
Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom have been victorious campaigns.
Their defeat of the Taliban, Saddam and the Ba'athist insurgency bodes fair for
the prospect of success against the Mullahs. Victories are not proof, as some
have suggested, that defeat is imminent.  It can be rightly pointed out
that OIF could have benefitted from more armor, troops, better plannning and
fewer casualties. It has been argued that Osama should never have escaped
Frank's net. And all of those criticisms can be true. Yet none of those
criticisms can erase the essentially successful nature of the campaigns. We are
not talking about the pitiful remnant of Lord Elphinstone's Army of the Indus
arriving

haggard at Jalalabad; nor about Lord Chelmsform finding Lieutenants Chard
and Bromhead lonely survivors at
Rorke's Drift; nor
about listening to General Christian de la Croix de Castries's pathetic final
message from Dien
Bien Phu. We are talking about Tommy Franks, the victor of Afghanistan; the
nemesis of Saddam; and the man who may have set the possible stage for strategic
victory in the entire theater. We may no longer like the British, style
victorious general officers Viscount Nelson of the Nile or Lord Kitchener of
Khartoum. But in justice, General Franks deserves better than the title of
opprobrium Tommy "We Have Enough Troops" Franks.