Extrait
Chapter 1
RIGHT IN FRONT OF US
Riding at thirty-five miles an hour on a behemoth that can kill from more than two miles away, wind and sand in your face, diesel fumes in your nose, men yelling in your ear on a radio, bad guys dying on the side of the road, you are exhausted—you haven’t slept in thirty-six hours, and when you do sleep, it will be in a hole you dig—but absolutely elated, knowing you and your brave men are finally doing what you have been trained to do for so many years.
All this was going through Colonel Dave Perkins’s mind as he led his brigade of tanks and mechanized infantry across the Iraqi desert in March 2003. His soldiers were performing perfectly. His unit was ahead of the plan. He was a warrior god doing what he does best.
Perkins got his 5,000-man unit to a spot outside of Baghdad where his superiors wanted him to stop and wait. They wanted him to be a “good colonel” and ask permission before he entered the capital. He could have sat back, waited for permission, and spent days as a sitting duck while his superiors had three meetings, two briefings, and an ass-chewing before determining whether Saddam Hussein had set a trap inside Baghdad. Instead, Colonel Perkins took a risk: he made a dash for Baghdad. He called it a “Thunder Run” because of the speed, power, and noise of that many tanks running down the road.
It was an audacious, tactically risky move. And it was goddamned brilliant. Perkins’s brave decision shortened the war and saved his guys. Colonel Dave Perkins is exactly the type of leader that makes our military great; we need more like him.
A few miles to the south of this great guy and his great men, a different story was unfolding.
Task Force Tarawa was a 1,000-man Marine unit moving up the right side of Iraq. Intel told them that the town they were about to hit, Nasiriya, was full of Shiites and very friendly to us. The operation was going to be a piece of cake. But the Marines didn’t find friendly crowds in Nasiriya; they found a fight, a fight so bad that at several points they thought they might lose—not a thing any Marine contemplates well. An Army maintenance company had already come under attack there, and several soldiers, including the now famous Private Jessica Lynch, were missing inside the city. Bad maps, bad communications, and “friendly” civilians who took up arms alongside the Sunni Saddam Fedayeen troops and some desperate foreign jihadis all conspired to give us a wake-up call that the Iraq war was not as it had been advertised.1
Unfortunately, we did not hear it.
These two battles demonstrate the underlying systematic problems we are having fighting the Global War on Terror. After we took Baghdad, we paraded around using the swift capture as an example of our might. We touted our win in Baghdad like the government touts the fact that we have not been attacked on American soil since 9/11: as if that demonstrates victory. It does not.
The guys who took Baghdad did a great job, but this one instance did not a winning strategy make, especially when at the same time there was also Nasiriya. What did we do after the Nasiriya battle? We did nothing. We ignored it. We ignored the fact that the Marines almost lost the battle like we would later ignore the insurgency, like we would ignore terrorist attacks that happened all over the world as if they didn’t have anything to do with us. We didn’t look at Nasiriya and figure out what went wrong. We didn’t study it and learn how to prevent that kind of thing from happening in the future. We hid our heads in the sand and missed the lessons that we should have learned. The re- sult of this is the chaos in Iraq and the terrorists who are winning in such places as Lebanon and Palestine. We ignore these lessons at our own peril.
In all wars, and specifically the wars we are fighting now, how well we do is important, but how badly we do is more important—not only because our guys get killed and maimed and our country suffers but also because hidden within the losses and mistakes are the keys to winning the next battle and ultimately the war.
In order to win the War on Terror we need to look at things as they truly happen and not as we wish them to be. We covered our eyes after Nasiriya when it should have alerted us to all the things that were go- ing to go wrong—bad intelligence, bad communications, bad gear, bad leadership, bad training, ill-prepared soldiers, and flawed rules of engagement.
This book takes a hard look at the stuff that has gone wrong—on the battlefields abroad and right here at home—in the hopes that we will be able to take from them the things we need to know to prevent the next attack.
Where We Are Now
People who recognize me from my appearances on the Fox News Channel often come up to me and ask, “Colonel, where are we in the War on Terror?” I’m not a big fan of sugarcoating or bullshitting, so let me tell you, right here at the beginning, that I won’t be putting a happy face on this war. I can’t. Our brave soldiers, Marines, and Special Forces are doing amazing things for us, and many of them are giving their lives to protect us. We long to believe that the incredible things they’re doing are bringing us close to victory in this war. Hell, I’d love to be able to tell you that we’re winning. But I can’t do that. The truth is, the War on Terror is not going well, not well at all. We’ve known from the beginning of this war that we’re engaged in a monumental struggle for our very survival, one that will take not months or years to win but decades. The way we’ve been fighting, however, doesn’t make it seem like we get that. Not at all.
It’s not just Iraq. We’ve got huge problems in Afghanistan. The rest of the Middle East is screwed up. We’ve badly mishandled Iran and North Korea. (Can you say “Axis of Evil”?)
In 2005, I wrote a book called They Just Don’t Get It because I was scared and pissed off. I knew we were making mistakes in the War on Terror and I tried to show how we could win the war and protect ourselves better. Our leaders needed to make some big changes, and fast.
Sadly, though, they still don’t get it.
Don’t get me wrong—we’ve done some great things in the War on Terror. Anyone who denies our successes is a fool or, worse, trying to score political points. Just look at some of our achievements:
·Our armed forces have heroically taken the fight to the terrorists in back alleys and caves around the world. They fight in the frigid cold and lung-destroying altitudes of Afghanistan, and in 125-degree, hot-enough-to-fry-an-egg-on-your-helmet heat in Iraq.
·We’ve given other countries a chance at this thing we call freedom. In Afghanistan more than 12.5 million people, including 6 million women, have registered to vote. Iraq has held free elections for the first time in history.
·We have inoculated the children of Iraq and rebuilt, or built from scratch, thousands of schools, hospitals, roads, and bridges.
·Oh, yeah, and we kicked Saddam Hussein’s ass. Don’t think that matters? Tell that to the families of the victims of terrorists Saddam supported—the Palestinian suicide bombers he funded over the years, or terrorist honchos like Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal, for whom the Iraqi dictator provided safe haven.
·Even our intelligence agencies—which I’ve been very critical of over the years—have done some good things. The bottom line is that there hasn’t been another major terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11. That’s good, for sure. Our intelligence community has stopped some other bad things from happening and arrested some very bad people. We’ve foiled at least three different al-Qaeda hijacking plots—one targeting London, another focusing on the U.S. consulate in Pakistan, and a third aimed at the United States, Britain, Italy, and Australia.2 And this is just the stuff we know about.
All this is important. We can and should be proud of our list of accomplishments. But the list should be much longer and much stronger. And in particular, it should include a lot more things that directly affect the enemy—like, say, killing the terrorists’ leaders.
A lot of this is common sense, whether some of our military and political leaders want to admit it or not. When a forty-year-old baseball player has arms, neck, and a chest bigger than Hercules’, it’s common sense to think he might be taking something stronger than vitamins. It’s the same thing with the War on Terror. When, five years into the War on Terror, Osama bin Laden can go on television time and time again and his buddy Ayman al-Zawahiri and Taliban leader Mullah Omar are still kicking around, it’s common sense to ask, “How come these guys aren’t dead yet?” Silly me, I always thought that if we ever had an actual War on Terror we would begin by killing, oh, I don’t know . . . terrorists!
When more than 3,000 American service members have given their lives in the War on Terror, it’s common sense to wonder how in the world we can still be fighting a lethal insurgency in Iraq, contending with a rejuvenated Taliban in Afghanistan, and watching terrorists launch brutal attacks all over the globe.
When Iran supports the terrorists in Iraq, boasts about its nuclear program, test-fires dozens of long-range missiles, and openly calls for the destruction of Israel, our only true friend in the Middle East, it’s common sense to ask how these guys can get away with making the United States look more useless than a eunuch in a whorehouse.
When Hamas, a terrorist group supported by Iran, gets voted into office in the Palestinians’ democratic elections, it’s common ...
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