Mindless in Iraq

By Peter W. Galbraith
New York Review of Books

Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq
by Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor

Pantheon, 640 pp., $27.95
Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco
by David L. Phillips

Perseus, 292 pp., $15.95 (paper)
The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq
by Fouad Ajami

Free Press, 378 pp., $26.00
Ahmad's War, Ahmad's Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq
by Michael Goldfarb

Carroll and Graf, 354 pp., $15.95 (paper)


On the evening of March 19, 2003, Marine Lieutenant Therral "Shane" Childers was part of the first American contingent to cross the Iraq–Kuwait border. His battalion's mission was to secure the key oil installations in the south and it went smoothly. Iraqi army defenses were weaker than expected and the oil wells had not been sabotaged. Childers's platoon easily seized its objective, a pumping station, after which Childers ordered his men into their AAVs (amphibious assault vehicles) in preparation for clearing enemy fighters from the nearby bunkers. In their minutely chronicled account, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, Michael R. Gordon, the chief military correspondent for The New York Times, and Bernard E. Trainor, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general, describe what happened next:

...a tan Toyota pickup truck began to approach Childers's platoon. The Marines were not sure how to respond. They had been primed to take on Iraqi T-72s, T-55s, and Soviet-designed armored personnel carriers called BMPs—not a lone civilian vehicle. The truck picked up speed until it was bouncing across the desert at seventy miles per hour. As it flew by the platoon, civilian-clad Iraqis in the cab and bed of the truck raised AK-47s and sprayed the Marines with automatic weapons fire. Most of the bullets ricocheted off an AAV, but one bullet struck Childers just below his flak jacket.... When the day's toll was tallied, the Marines determined that Childers had been the first allied soldier killed as a result of enemy action in the war.

Childers's death was a signal that the Iraq war was not going as planned. The CIA had prepared the troops to expect the most formidable opposition to come from Saddam Hussein's Republican Guards and Special Republican Guards, predominantly Sunni Arab soldiers whose officers at the highest level were members of Saddam's own Tikriti clan. The American troops were told that the demoralized regular army, filled mostly with Shiite conscripts, would not put up much of a fight and that civilians—at least in the Shiite south—would welcome the Americans as liberators. But as they headed northward, the US troops faced the problem of figuring out which civilians were harmless and which were potential killers or suicide bombers. Before long, the civilian fighters became America's most formidable adversary and the tactics used to protect troops—shooting at vehicles approaching checkpoints too rapidly or convoys too closely—killed thousands of Iraqis and made enemies of hundreds of thousands.

(There's more, here.)