The ugly U.S. war with Iran, past, present, and future

A review of The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran, by David Crist

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

If you were among those who sighed with relief when Barack Obama was reelected because you’d been concerned that a Republican administration would invade Iran, David Crist has news for you. In fact, The Twilight War is full of surprises, even for one who stays relatively well informed about world affairs. The underlying message — the meta-message, if you’ll permit that conceit — is that what we normally consume on a daily basis as “news” is an awkward mixture of critical opinion, wishful thinking, rumor, partisan posturing, self-serving news leaks, and a smattering of hard information.

When it comes to Iran, the purveyors of news have done an especially poor job of keeping us informed. As David Crist makes clear in this illuminating report on the three decades of conflict, tension, miscalculation, and profound misunderstanding that have characterized our two countries’ relationship, we have indeed engaged in what can only be described as war for several extended periods. And when I say war, I mean soldiers, sailors, and air force pilots shooting at one another, laying mines, launching missiles at ships and ground facilities, and generally forcing one or both of the two governments to decide between escalation and retreat. There was even one heart-stopping incident during the Reagan Administration when a rogue, high-ranking U.S. Admiral conspired with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to invade Iran with massive force — and, apparently, was ordered to pull back from the brink largely because the Administration was consumed with covering up the President’s active role in the Iran-Contra affair.

The 2004 Presidential election campaign brought into the spotlight the U.S. support for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s because Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had been photographed shaking hands with Saddam. Then we learned, some of us for the first time, that the U.S. had supplied weapons and munitions to Iraq. However, what went largely unreported was the extent to which the U.S. military built up its forces in the Persian Gulf to prevent Iran from flanking Iraq or widening the war to the Gulf Arab states, provided combat intelligence that helped Iraq turn back Iranian advances, and even intervened with force on Iraq’s side from time to time.

It was this history — combined with an understanding of the neoconservative design on the region — that led the Iranian leadership to conclude in 2003 that the U.S. invasion of Iraq presaged an imminent attack on Iran itself. The Ayatollah Khamenei and his minions were so frightened of this prospect that they used every backchannel available to them to attempt to get the U.S. to the negotiating table, where they were prepared to arrive at a grand solution to the differences between the two countries. Are you surprised to learn that the Bush Administration flatly rejected the overtures?

In other words, this has been a nail-biting relationship. Even worse, the outlook today doesn’t look any brighter than it ever has.

Author David Crist is a military historian for the U.S. Government, a reserve Marine Corps colonel, and the son of one of the early four-star commanders of CENTCOM, which was created in the 1980s to coordinate U.S. military affairs involving Iran and the Middle East. Given this pedigree, it’s not unfair to wonder whether Crist himself is guilty of some of the same sins I attributed earlier to the news media. Clearly, he’s extremely well informed and had access to military and government archives that  might well be closed to other writers. However, a little poking around on the Web reveals that Crist got at least a few of his facts wrong, and in some places his interpretation of events has clearly been colored by his official associations.

The Twilight War is an especially dense work. The hardcover edition runs to 656 pages, but it reads as though it’s a thousand, largely because Crist (military historian to the core) seems to include a capsule biography of every other officer and combatant engaged in every firefight he reports. Like the epic dramas of Cecil B. DeMille, The Twilight War has a cast of thousands. All in all though, this is a revealing and important book, well worth reading, even if that means slogging through the mud.

Obama’s Wars, by Bob Woodward

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

We may not always say so, at least by using the same term, but what we look for in a President is, above all, leadership. Obama’s Wars — Bob Woodward’s most recent behind-the-scenes report, a sort of current history — provides a front-row seat on the leadership style of Barack Obama. As I view the scene Woodward portrays, President Obama comes off looking really good as a leader.

Obama’s Wars is, essentially, an account of the months-long period in 2009 when President Obama, the members of National Security Council (including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton), and the Pentagon brass were wrestling with one another over how to approach the war in Afghanistan. It’s the stuff of which a graduate school case study in policy-making might be made — and quite a good one at that.

If you approach this book with the often-oversimplified notion that the battle lines would break down neatly, with the generals and the admirals on one side and the civilians on the other (especially in a Democratic Administration), you’ll be very surprised. As Woodward vividly shows, some of the most dogged opposition to the proposed U.S. troop buildup in Afghanistan came from military men, both active and retired. And one of the most consistently hawkish figures in the exhausting debate was Secretary Clinton.

But even those characterizations are highly misleading. The debate Obama led in 2009 about the Afghanistan war was an immensely complex matter with a multitude of possible policy outcomes — none of them good. The resulting compromise — and it was that, after all — incorporated ideas from all sides. However, if a good compromise is marked by making “both” sides equally unhappy, Obama’s compromise was a curious one. It appears to have made “both” sides happy. The Pentagon exulted in receiving a large number of fresh troops for Afghanistan, believing that conditions on the ground there would require them to pursue their recommended tactics despite opposition from the White House, and convinced that the July 2011 withdrawal data Obama insisted on would slip by months and years. The political staff in the White House, by contrast, were content to give the generals the extra troops, believing that conditions on the ground would make it impossible for them to pursue their recommended tactics and knowing that the President would insist on sticking with the July 2011 date for the beginning of a withdrawal.

What most impressed me about Barack Obama — and I firmly believe historians of the future will bear this out — was the fortitude he displayed in resisting simple-minded formulas and half-baked claims. In the course of the great debate about Afghanistan, there was an abundance of both. The President, with considerable support from Vice President Joe Biden, more than held his own with the military brass. And, judging from the history of our last half-dozen Presidents or so, that’s saying a lot.

Woodward’s strength as a reporter is that he gets the story right — or so it would appear, since to the best of my memory no one has ever successfully refuted any of the incidents reported in his books. He relies on intensive and repeated interviews with all the principals. (After all, who would dare turn down the man who toppled Richard Nixon’s Presidency?) Even if a statement here or an interpretation there may be off a few degrees, Obama’s Wars can give you the feeling that you are witnessing up close one of the most fateful national policy debates of recent years.

ISBN-10: 1439172498

ISBN-13: 978-1439172490

ASIN: B003VPWY3M

War, by Sebastian Junger

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

So, here you are. You’re a reporter who’s long since proven he has the guts and the physical stamina to outlast most people, and now you’ve decided to tell the story of the war in Afghanistan — the story of all wars, really — through the eyes of soldiers on the front line. So, you pick the fightingest company in the most actively engaged battalion in the whole goddam U.S. Army. In fact:

“Nearly a fifth of the combat experienced by the 70,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan is being fought by the 150 men of Battle Company. Seventy percent of the bombs dropped in Afghanistan are dropped in and around the Korengal Valley,” where the company is stationed, close to the Pakistan border. And, as if that isn’t enough, you decide to embed yourself with Second Platoon, Battle Company’s toughest and most combat-hardened unit. And you spend 15 months with these guys, on and off, until their deployment is up and the survivors depart the country.

And what do you learn from all this? It isn’t pretty. You learn that war, as experienced by the young men who do most of the fighting, is most assuredly not “the continuation of politics by other means,” as the military theorist Karl von Clausewitz famously asserted. And it’s not even mostly about surviving: killing the enemy before he has a chance to kill you. War, Junger shows us, seems to boil down to obsessive attention to keeping your buddies alive. That’s why soldiers dash through waves of bullets to drag a wounded comrade to safety, or even fall on a grenade that would otherwise kill the guys around you as well as you yourself.

War is much more than the honest, unvarnished account of men in battle that I was expecting. From time to time, Junger turns from straight reporting to analysis, relating the findings of his research into the psychology of combat, the psyche of the ideal soldier, and the psychic consequences of experiencing combat. It turns out, Junger reports, that some of the “behavioral determinants” that are typical of an effective soldier “– like a willingness to take risks — seem to figure disproportionately in the characters of young men. They are killed in accidents and homicides at a rate of 106 per 100,000 per year, roughly five times the rate of young women. Statistically, it’s six times as dangerous to spend a year as a young man in America than as a cop or fireman, and vastly more dangerous than a one-year deployment at a big military  base in Afghanistan. You’d have to go to a remote firebase . . . to find a level of risk that surpasses that of simply being an adolescent male back home.”

Previously, Sebastian Junger was best known as the author of The Perfect Storm. During the writing of War, he also shot footage that became the documentary Restrepo, a film that won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.

ISBN-10: 0446556246

ISBN-13: 978-0446556248

ASIN: B0035II95C