In the Belly of the Green Bird:
The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq
Nir Rosen
Free Press, 2006
$26.00, 288 pages

Fiasco: The American
Military Adventure in Iraq
Thoomas E. Ricks
The Penguin Press, 1006
$27.09; 496 pages

When history looks back on the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, the greatest tragedy (beyond its occurrence) might be the inability of Sunni and Shia groups to unite early on against the U.S. occupation.  If the tactically adept Sunni Arab resistance, based mainly in western Iraq, had been able to combine forces with religious Shia groups in the South that are anti-imperialist but lack military training, the occupation might have become untenable years ago.

The Achilles heel of the U.S. war is its supply line.  Patrick Lang, a military analyst, recently noted, “All but a small amount of our soldiers’ supplies… pass through the Shiite-dominated south of Iraq.” The people have remained largely unmolested but a tenacious insurgency could turn them into a “shooting gallery” more than 400 miles long.  Other supply routes - such as through northern or western Iraq - are far mroe dangerous and lack the needed storage infrastructure, while aerial transport is incapable of satisfying the gargantuan appetite for supplies.

this is not just an abstract fear.  At one point in April 2004, as noted by Thomas Ricks in Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, U.S. commanders were so worried about their supply lines that they ordered the Green Zone to go on food rationing and “thought they’d have to evacuate Baghdad.”

Sectarian Spinnings

The failure to forge a coordinated national resistance has allowed the U.S. military to sustain the occupation and simultaneously helped plunge Iraq into a civil war.  Internecine warfare is a theme central to Nir Rosen’s In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq.  Born of an Iranian father and speaking Iraqi-accented Arabic, Rosen was able to blend into Iraqi society better than any other American reporter.  He arrived in Baghdad days after it fell on April 9, 2003. Rosen’s reporting from the mosque, street an marketplace illuminates the forces unleashed after the toppling of Iraq’s regime.  All “that remained was the mosque.  Old authorities were destroyed and angry young clerics replaced them, arrogating to themselves the power to represent, to mobilize, to govern.”

While it was the Sunni Arabs who first picked up the gun, it was Shia clerics who denounced the occupation most harshly and demanded an Islamic state.  It wasn’t just Moqtada al-Sadr, the scion of the revered Sadr family.  Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, who is currently trying to form a breakaway state in the oil-rich region in the south that he and his party would control, took an oppositional stance at first: “There are no more excuses for the U.S. presence and it is not accepted by the Iraqi people.”

During the first month of the occupation, Sheikh Muhammad al-Yaqubi (later a self-annointed ayatollah), held a conference in Najaf to found his Fudala party, at which he announced “We are at war with the West… represented by American imperialism.”

As for Moqtada al-Sadr, he capitalized on his father’s “network of mosques and social services,” which gave him a leg-up in the postwar chaos.  Rosen notes Sadr’s fondness for street slang - unusual for a Shia clergy - a mark of his broad appeal, which was underestimated by both the U.S. and Shia establishment: “No other leader in Iraq had such a personal relationship with his followers.”

Sunni clergy, meanwhile, counseled restraint at first. For there is little evidence of a coordinated resistance.  During a six-week period from April to May of 2003, only five U.S. troops were killed by hostile fire. This undercuts the arguments that Hussein’s regime planned the insurgency.  The Pentagon itself concluded in The Iraqi Perspectives Report (2006, Naval Institute Press) that “there were no national plans to embark on a guerrilla war in the event of a military defeat.”

It was a heavy-handed occupation - house raids, mass arrests, checkpoint killings - that provided the spark.  The fuel was throwing hundreds of thousands of bread-winners out of work by disbanding the army and carrying out a blanket “de-Baathification.”

By the spring of 2004, Rosen argues, Sunnis and Shia “hated each other.” This is at odds with the standard history that the national resistance peaked in April after the first U.S. attack on Fallujah coincided with the uprising of the Mahdi Army.  He may well be right, that sectarianism was bubbling up even as public solidarity peaked, but his analysis would have benefited from specific evidence instead of generalities like “Sunni and Shia newspapers grew more brazen in their attacks on each other,” and “Mosques were attacked every night and clerics killed, leading to retaliations against the opposite sect.”  Interestingly, Rosen’s initial reporting - which is more extensive than the book and is available through the Asia Times website - is much more sanguine about Sunni-Shia solidarity.

Missing the Point

Like Rosen, Thomas Ricks speculates on a potential civil war and breakup.  Curiously, Ricks ends his book by imagining a “worst-case scenario”: a new Saladin, someone who unites not just Iraq but the Arab world, “combining popular support with huge oil revenues” and potential nuclear weapons.

It’s a feverish fantasy that defies the modern history of the Middle East and points to the failings of a book that is at times masterful.  Fiasco is an impressive tome, marshalling reams of evidence and hundreds of interviews with U.S. military and political figures to describe an ideological crusade that has ended in disaster.

Ricks’ work is full of gems, like the fact that Rumsfeld, to prove his new military doctrine that speed, information, and high-tech weapons could largely replace ground forces, wanted to launch the invasion with a miniscule force of 10,000 troops.  What Ricks doesn’t discuss is the desire to launch an invasion-lite was probably linked to Bush administration plans to not wear out the military so as to keep the juggernaut rolling into Syria and Iran.

At times his narrative takes ludicrous turns, setting up monumental decisions as a clash between villains and heroes.  The first villain we meet is Paul Wolfowitx.  Ricks would have us believe that an undersecretary with a few allies on Cheney’s staff was able to push the United States to war with Iraq. (The hero in this case is Gen. Anthony Zinni, who oversaw a four-day bombing campaign of Iraq in 1998.)

Later in the book, he returns to the history-as-individuals-sparring approach, suggesting that the unctuous Ahmed Chalabi maneuvered Paul Bremer into his decrees, dissolving the Iraqi army and de-Baathifying the state.  Ricks doesn’t consider that there were a lot of other political and economic interests eager to see the old order swept out.

He is insightful with the details - invaluable interpreters being used “to buy chickens and soft drinks” for troops or U.S. trainers so distrustful of their Iraqi charges they carry “loaded pistols at a graduation ceremony in case of a mutiny” - while often missing the historical picture.  His section on the looting of Baghdad makes an important point that it wasn’t just the image of chaos that damaged the U.S. presence, but the stripping of government offices that left them unable to function once the occupation was up and running.

He recognizes that Abu Ghraib was symptomatic of a larger problem with the whole U.S. prison system in Iraq but fals back on platitudes that the United States has a “proud heritage of treating its prisoners better than most” - something patently untrue about the U.S. treatment of POWs during the Vietnam War.  Again and again he suggests that the biggest problem was a lack of U.S. troops and only occasionally acknowledges that perhaps it was their presence and actions that were stoking the resistance.  For such a long book, nearly 500 pages, there is almost no discussion of the broader regional context, the reconstruction disaster, or the role of petro-politics in the invasion and occupation.

While Fiasco has its flaws, like In the Belly of the Green Bird, it is a welcome contribution to the growing body of literature of a war that will reverberate for decades to come.