misleading and dangerous: the ‘centre of gravity’ was not the Republican Guard or even Baghdad; it was ‘the entire Sunni triangle and more broadly the Iraqi people themselves’. The US therefore failed to bring the right tools to the fight, putting too much confidence in technology — the second grievous error. For while hi-tech served Centcom brilliantly during the drive on Baghdad, once the city fell the requirements for success were reversed: mass, not speed, was needed for sealing the victory. Allied to this second error was a third: failing to adapt to developments on the ground. The US war plan was never adjusted at the top: ‘Tommy Franks never acknowledged the enemy he faced, nor did he comprehend the nature of the war he was directing’, denigrating the Fedayeen as ‘little more than a speed bump on the way to Baghdad’. But Rumsfeld himself failed to heed his own advice on defence planning, ‘to be prepared for the unexpected’: a week after Baghdad was seized, ‘the administration was focussed on withdrawing troops and replacing them with less capable foreign troops instead of deploying the assets that would be needed to hedge new threats’. The President famously declared ‘mission accomplished’ from the deck of an aircraft carrier. A fourth grievous error exacerbated this: the ‘dysfunction of American military structures’. In the US command system the four service chiefs of staff (army, navy, air force, marines) are only as influential as the Secretary of Defense or the President permits: the individual C-in-Cs of the various geographical or functional commands answer directly to the President as the commander-in-chief, though in practice the Defense Secretary has operational control delegated to him. In the first Gulf war, say the authors, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney listened to Colin Powell, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, as did Norman Schwarzkopf, C-in-C Centcom. Air Force General Richard Myers, Rumsfeld’s chairman, was merely ‘pliable’, however, while Franks’s attitude to both Myers and Shinseki, the army chief of staff, was openly contemptuous. Nor did the State Department have the lead, as would be expected, in post-war planning (or, apparently, even much influence) because Rumsfeld persuaded the President that post-war planning was not an issue, simply the equivalent of reorganisation and consolidation after a successful attack. Thus differing political and military perspectives were stifled before and during the campaign. It is perhaps instructive that in the British military lexicon one of the principles of war is ‘Cooperation’; in the US manuals it is not. The final ‘grievous error’ was the President’s disdain of peace-keeping. It was at the root of much of Rumsfeld’s desire for Transformation, and therefore of much of the whole sorry mess. Peace

THE SPECTATOR13 May 2006 42

keeping was not what US forces did; they did war-fighting. Bush and Rumsfeld would have heard many a supportive voice within the military, for no self-respecting soldier wants to do peace-keeping. The trouble is, peace-keeping, in all its untidy ambiguity, is an inescapable necessity, and as Dag Hamerskold said, peace-keeping isn’t a job for soldiers but only soldiers can do it. Peace-keeping was also what President Clinton had done, in the Balkans. Peacekeeping was a messy, unfocussed piece of Democrat evasion (doubtless made messier by European ‘allies’ who were prepared to throw men at a problem but not spend on technology and modernisation). In Kosovo the ratio of troops to population had been 1:50; on that calculation Iraq would need almost half a million troops after the fighting (even the more benign Bosnia model indicated a similarly large figure). But Kosovo was the Democrat, Clintonian way: the new, Republican way was the recent Afghanistan model. Following the Afghan template, only 14,000 troops would be required. It is striking, say the authors (as well as surprising to many an outsider) ‘how much of the United States post-war strategy was the product of careful deliberation’. But the ‘careful deliberation’ was also late in conception and severely out of balance: ‘Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks spent most of their time and energy on the least demanding task — defeating Saddam’s weakened conventional forces — and the least amount in the most demanding — rehabilitation of and security for the new Iraq.’ Did Whitehall have any influence in planning the campaign or occupation? It was, after all, to influence US planning that the Prime Minister moved immediately to Bush’s side when the President declared his intention to face down Saddam. The 600 pages of this book reveal no evidence of any significant influence, although there is implicit military influence at the operational level in the capture of Basra and the southern oilfields. But the British contribution was hardly of great moment to the Rumsfeld-Franks concept, for Baghdad was the centre of gravity. Before the invasion, when there was a suggestion that we might not be able to contribute, Rumsfeld famously described British troops as ‘workarounds’. There is but a single reference to the Foreign Secretary: While British officers were worried about the state of US planning, the civilians in Blair’s cabinet were more assured … Surely, argued Jack Straw, the United States would not take the momentous step of invading and occupying Iraq unless it was persuaded that it had a winning plan.

This faith-based assumption was repeated at every subordinate level, indeed. The failure of post-war planning surely remains the unaddressed question for this country: the failure of intelligence

and the botched assessments have been dealt with by official inquiries, fudged as they may have been. But the failure to anticipate the insurgency stands as the worst charge against Whitehall, not least the MoD, as well as of the Pentagon. Even though victory was eventually ours in the Boer war, Kipling was trenchant in ‘The Lesson’. After the war there were brutally honest inquiries into the whole paraphernalia of defence. Without them and the consequent reforms, the British Expeditionary Force of 1914 would not have existed, let alone performed so crucially well. There are serious lessons to be drawn from the Iraq intervention, not least in the problems of asymmetric coalition warfare; and there are old ones to be relearned on the importance of mass. Yet the nation’s armed forces, the army in particular, just get smaller and smaller. What is going on?

Public skool monkey business

Eric Anderson

W ICKED ! by Jilly Cooper Bantam, £17.99, pp. 846, ISBN 0593052994 ✆ £14.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Imisjudged this book. I thought the airport fiction promised by the literary editor would take me nicely to New York, where I was going the next day. However, at 846 pages, weighing in at one kilo, Jilly Cooper’s Wicked! is long enough to get you to Australia. On my second evening in America the waitress, after reciting in a sing-song monologue the specials for the evening, added, ‘And I also must recommend that you see Wicked , the musical, while you’re here.’ ‘What’s so good about it?’ I asked. ‘Oh, the flying monkeys,’ she said. ‘They’re marvellous and they really fly.’ It turned out to be a different Wicked . There are no flying monkeys in this book, although plenty of monkey business, some of which is described below. Jilly Cooper’s tale of two schools adds another famous public school to the list of those in which fictions have been set. Rugby has Tom Brown’s Schooldays , Sherborne The Loom of Youth and Shrewsbury Bending of a Twig . Eton and Sherborne share le Carré’s Murder of Quality and Fettes inspired Ian Hay’s wonderfully funny Lighter Side of School Life . It is the immaculate playing-fields, mansion,