A New Terminal Digestive Aperture for Rummy *

* Courtesy of David Brooks of the New York Times. (Remember, although the Times is a liberal paper, Brooks is a conservative columnist.)

I'll have the whole Op-Ed piece for you in class on Monday. Here's a preview.

Some weeks nothing happens; some weeks change history. The week of March 24, 2003, was one of those pivotal weeks. U.S. troops had just begun the ground invasion of Iraq. They were charging north, but hadn't reached Baghdad. The Fedayeen had begun to launch suicide attacks and were putting up serious resistance in Nasiriya.

Everybody denigrates pundits and armchair generals, but immediately the smartest of them recognized that something unexpected was happening: the U.S. was not in the midst of a conventional war, but was in the first days of a guerrilla war.

Michael Kelly, embedded with the Third Infantry Division, wrote a column describing how Fedayeen guerrillas had taken control of towns like Najaf. Kelly predicted the war would be long and tough. David Ignatius in The Washington Post wrote that it was "time to shelve the rosy scenarios" for the war and face the fact that the U.S. was confronting a difficult battle against resistance fighters.

If newspaper columnists could see what was happening, why didn't the generals and the White House?

The officers on the front lines saw the same thing the smart pundits saw, and in more detail. But Rumsfeld and Franks stifled the free exchange of ideas, and shut out the National Security Council. They dismissed concerns about the insurgents and threatened to fire the one general, William Wallace, who dared to state the obvious in public. The military brass followed the war in real time on computer screens. As long as the blue icons representing U.S. troops were heading north to Baghdad, the U.S. was deemed to be winning. The technology seemed to provide real-time information, but it was completely misleading.

The week of March 24 is vital because if Rumsfeld had made adjustments to the new circumstances then, much of the subsequent horror could have been averted.

But it is also a reminder of the reality one sees again and again: Debate inside any administration is less sophisticated and realistic than the debate among experts outside. The people inside have access to a bit more information. But they are more likely to self-censor for fear of endangering their careers. Debate inside is much more likely to be warped by the egotism, insecurity, power lust and distracting busyness of people at the top.

Brooks's outlook has been changed due to a book that he recently read: Cobra II, by New York Times reporter Michael Gordon and former Marine Gen. Bernard Trainor.

Here's a short blurb about the book appearing on the NPR webiste. If you're interested, follow the link to the Talk of the Nation radio show, where Gordon and Trainor are interviewed. There's also an audio clip from the book on the same page. This is a book that will be getting a lot of media play in the coming days, I would think.

On Monday in class we'll watch Gordon and Trainor in a short interview on PBS's Newshour. Then we'll see David Brooks elaborating on his Op-Ed piece on the same show.

Just one question: if these pundits knew, and were trying to tell us -- why didn't we listen?