Writing the war.

THE Iraq War promises to be the Lewinsky scandal of George W. Bush's presidency: the most interesting event and the occasion for an outpouring of books. Three new ones are all valuable in their ways. The Assassins' Gate by the New Yorker writer George Packer was published last year to much acclaim. Packer was a liberal hawk, which sometimes seems to mean someone whose support of the war was contingent on nothing going wrong. His book reflects the conventional State Department/mainstream-media analysis of the administration's mistakes in Iraq (i.e., all the Pentagon's fault), but it has literary flair and affecting on-the-ground reporting.

Cobra II is by New York Times reporter Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard E. Trainor, a retired Marine general and military writer. It is an extremely detailed account of the planning for the war and of the invasion itself. The book tilts heavily anti-Rumsfeld, reflecting the view of Army officers who oppose the defense secretary's vision of military transformation and happen to be major sources for Gordon and Trainor. Cobra II is not a fun read, but it is an important resource.

No True Glory is Marine veteran and author Bing West's report on the fight for Fallujah. West has astonishingly detailed accounts of battles in and around Fallujah, Black Hawk Down-style, bullet-by-bullet narratives. Of the authors of these three books, West is the most sympathetic to our project in Iraq, but his telescopic approach means he has less to say about the war in general. He vividly reminds us of the saving grace of our intervention in Iraq: the Marines and the soldiers whose valor and smarts so often kept the mission from foundering.

Some of the material covered by these books is tiresome. Can another debate about the number of "boots on the ground" hold anyone's interest? But it is important for conservatives to understand as thoroughly as possible what has happened in Iraq, if for no other reason than to inform themselves for the coming debates over post-Bush foreign policy.

Packer traffics in typically stupid analysis of the neocons. But he picks up on how the riskiness of the Iraq War somehow endeared it to certain hawks. In January 2002, William Kristol and Robert Kagan blamed September 11 partly on "the failure of the United States to take risks." Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya said an Iraq war would be worth trying even if it had only a 5 to 10 percent chance of success. (Caution will surely have a new vogue in conservative foreign policy after Iraq.)

Donald Rumsfeld and his commander Tommy Franks learned to love risk as much as the intellectuals. Franks explained that his slimmed-down invasion force wouldn't have the traditional 3:1 ratio of attackers to defenders, but a 1:6 ratio. How was that possible? "Acceptance of risk," he said. After the invasion, Franks talked the same way, pushing to pull out troops as quickly as possible even if it meant Iraq was unsecured by American forces. "The generals should be prepared to take as much risk departing as they had in their push to Baghdad," Gordon and Trainor write of Franks's view. This would have been a risk too far.

Rumsfeld and Franks were rewarded for the boldness of their invasion plan. Saddam was surprised when the U.S. moved with a much smaller force than in its first war against him, and before it had a launched an extensive air campaign. The sprint to Baghdad allowed the U.S. to grab key bridges before the Iraqis could destroy them, and take the capital city before its defenses were fully prepared. The campaign was a classic exercise in "jointness," the smooth cooperation of all branches of the military.

It was the post-war operation that went wrong. The conventional narrative, largely repeated by Packer, is that the State Department had all the answers, contained in that Rosetta Stone of post-war planning, the "Future of Iraq Project." But the neocons at the Pentagon willfully ignored it.

Gordon and Trainor write a paragraph about the project that should be memorized by anyone writing on post-war planning for The Atlantic or The New York Times Magazine, two publications that spread the above mythology: "The more than 1,000-page study was the product of seventeen working groups and was of uneven quality. It offered a useful way to bring Iraqi exiles together to discuss the problems of a new Iraq and proposed some good ideas but it was far short of a viable plan."

The administration did plan for the post-war, especially how to react to a humanitarian crisis and how to secure the oil wells that Saddam might torch. But the planning was based on faulty assumptions, and it didn't get the attention it deserved.

A retired Army Special Forces officer told Packer, "What [the post-war phase] became over the years for American military planners was that's when you put everything back in the sea, air, and land containers and ship it back to Fort Stewart, Georgia." Franks exemplified this attitude. "I don't want to get into the business of managing bus schedules," he said. The tough-talking Franks surely thought that was a good line, but since the absence of basic services in Iraq helped undermine much of what he had accomplished, he shouldn't have been so dismissive.

For his inattention to the post-war phase and his rush to leave his job to land a book contract, history should judge Franks harshly. Rumsfeld shares the blame. While demanding refinement after refinement in Franks's war plan, he didn't bring the same focus to the post-invasion phase, which could have used a big dose of his probing, skeptical intelligence. Especially given that there was, as Gordon and Trainor point out, something of a contradiction at the heart of the strategy: The war plan was dependent on collapsing the Iraqi government, while the post-war plan was dependent on the institutions of the just-collapsed Iraqi government.

The administration figured it didn't need massive numbers of troops occupying Iraq because it could rely on the Iraqi army, the Iraqi police, and foreign troops to help shoulder the security burden. Wrong on all counts.

Behind most of the big, flawed assumptions lurked the CIA. With no network of operatives on the ground in Baghdad and the south, the CIA got almost everything important wrong. It thought entire Iraqi units would surrender to the U.S., and therefore be available for post-war tasks. It didn't happen. It believed the Iraqi police were well respected and professional, when actually they were corrupt and hated, evaporating after the fall of the regime. Finally, of course, substantial foreign forces never materialized either, because the security situation never stabilized enough.

It was Saddam's paramilitary force, the Fedayeen, that was the nugget of the insurgency. The Fedayeen were designed to quash a revolt by the Shiites, which was always Saddam's greatest fear. But the Fedayeen turned out to be the vanguard of the fight against us. So many weapons were distributed and stashed for them in schools and mosques in the south, some had to be stored in bathrooms. The CIA missed it. Well into the war, we continued to believe that the main threats to our forces were Saddam's WMD and Republican Guard, and that the invasion would often be a matter of accepting surrenders.

The Fedayeen's fanatical resistance was the first sign that we were in for nasty surprises. The next was the looting after Baghdad's fall. The military watched it happen. Marine major general Jim Mattis said, "We didn't come to Iraq to shoot some fellow making off with a rug." Like Franks's comment about bus schedules, it's a nice line, reflecting the attitude of a traditional warrior. But it was self-defeating.

Already, Iraq had been falling apart. The Iraqis had shut down the electrical grid during the war because it experienced power surges, and they couldn't get it back on again. When the Marines secured an oil facility early in the war they thought it had been sabotaged--until Iraqis assured them that the state of disrepair was normal. In an arresting metaphor, Packer says that if Iraq were a used car, Saddam got rid of it at just the right time.

Into this environment stumbled Jay Garner, the retired three-star general who was put in charge of post-war Iraq. He had seven weeks to prepare for his job. A Pentagon official told Packer, "That's what it takes to get a computer connection at the Pentagon." When Garner told people at a dinner just before deploying to Iraq in the spring that the country would have a functioning government by August, someone asked, "Which August?"

Garner was quickly replaced by Paul Bremer, who had all of ten days to prepare. Bremer's approach was to take charge and make decisions, for which he had a talent. It's just that they weren't necessarily the right ones. His sweeping de-Baathification order and decommissioning of the Iraqi military have been widely panned. It is understandable why he made those decisions--they were popular with the Kurds and the Shiites--but they contributed to Sunni disaffection. In retrospect, it would have been worth trying to reconstitute the army in some form. Bing West writes, "Every American battalion commander was being besieged by Iraqi officers offering to come back to work and bring their soldiers with them."

The military-training program stumbled badly. According to West, an American official wrote in March 2004, "Ten months into the operation there is not a single properly trained and equipped Iraqi security officer in the entire Al Anbar province." Given that none of the security props that the administration had been depending on materialized--Iraqi troops and cops, foreign troops--more of the burden fell on the United States. But we never added significantly to the initial invasion force.

Packer, Gordon, and Trainor are persuasive when they argue that the U.S. effort was harmed by limited forces. The invasion plan had substituted speed for mass--successfully. But as Gordon and Trainor write, "Mass, not speed, was requisite for sealing the victory." Certainly, if we had it to do over again, we would try the option of sending more forces. But more troops probably wouldn't have been a magic bullet, because just as important as mass in dealing with an insurgency is finesse.

The U.S. would have needed not just more troops, but a different kind of force: more military police, civil-affairs units, interrogators, translators, and special forces. And they would have needed a delicate cultural touch, of the sort it is difficult to have without spending time on the ground. Without that touch, more troops could be counterproductive.

Too often we were clumsy, although shrewd military officers did their best. As Packer writes, "The calibrations had to be finer than even the best prepared units could make, and then each mistake played its part in deepening the ill will and hastening the insurgency." In President Bush's rhetoric, Iraq was held out as a prospective shining city on the hill; on the ground in Iraq, American troops encountered an actual city like ... Fallujah, a hardscrabble town with nothing to recommend it, bristling with Baathists and Islamic radicals.

The city was immune to American charms. Troops spent days building a soccer field, according to West, only to watch a mob immediately tear down the goalie nets, scrape the dirt from the field, and throw garbage all over it. "What kind of people loot dirt?" a soldier asked.

President Bush always says people desire freedom more than anything else. In Fallujah, teenage boys apparently desired nothing more than to get hyped up by the local imams, grab AK-47s, and jump out in front of U.S. troops firing wildly before they got methodically cut down. For some Iraqis, fighting was a kick. West describes a man with a rocket-propelled grenade standing around with some families, before firing it vaguely in the direction of Americans. He got roundly congratulated by the gathered men, women, and children.

Iraq was much more primitive than advertised. In all the talk about how sophisticated Iraqis were, no one mentioned virginity examinations and how women could be shot by relatives outside a clinic if the result was wrong. In all the talk of how talented and urbanized the population was, there was very little made of the sheikhs and imams, the truly important powerbrokers.

West describes the bewildering Fallujah landscape confronting American commanders, who had to try to figure out which sheikhs had real power and which imams were hostile or not. "Think of the Sopranos," advised one American. Putting aside the tangled American chain of command at the top in Iraq, the widely varying tactics of troops in Fallujah, the absurd stop-and-go decisions, it would have been very hard to get Fallujah "right" without lots of trial and error. In the event, that trial and error eventually led to a massive U.S. assault that destroyed much of the city.

Packer is at his best when he writes about the Iraqis he got to know. He says nearly every Iraqi man, after suffering so much under Saddam, looked at least ten years older than he was. Jordanians just across the border looked much better, even if they were members of the same tribe. He describes a conversation with a man in his fifties who had only one tooth left: "I feel young again. Thanks forever to the Americans and British. You can make us whole human beings again."

That is a lot to ask. Packer quotes Saddam's aphorism that "Every Iraqi is a Baathist." He finds truth in it--not literally, but in how Saddam's regime twisted the lives of all Iraqis, encouraged their conspiracy-mongering, and poisoned their ethnic relations.

Packer makes Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya one of the recurring characters in his book. Makiya had a vision of a new liberal Iraq, but it collided with the reality on the ground. The liberal democrats didn't have the guns, nor did they have the organization of the Shiite religious parties. Makiya had been exiled from Iraq for 30 years, and was surprised at what he found upon his return.

During his first journey in Iraq, he had his life threatened over a perceived slight, and wrote in an e-mail to friends, "Every day in the last five weeks of my travels I have come across such damaged and wounded people, people who breathe nationalism, sectarianism, without knowing that they are doing so, and people who are deeply chauvinistic and suspicious toward their fellow Iraqis. These are the facts of life for the next generation in this poor, unhappy and ravaged land."

All these books are ultimately unsatisfying because they tell an incomplete story. We don't know how Iraq is going to turn out, even if we can already draw lessons from it. A key one for conservatives should be a renewed appreciation of the importance of culture and institutions--the former is durable and the latter is fragile. The Bush administration had it backward going into Iraq, believing that Iraqi political culture was easily malleable and that its governing institutions would survive what, in effect, was a war of revolution.

For all that, all is not lost, at least not yet. There are still Iraqis fighting for a better future, despite all the failures and frustrations. A young judge leading the investigation of Saddam Hussein tells Packer, "If I stay at home, and you stay at home, and the other guy stays at home, who will build Iraq? This is a battle, mister. And we're all soldiers in this battle. So there are only two choices--either to win the battle or to die. There's no third choice."