E-mail a friendCol. Peter Mansoor
airdate September 30, 2008
(Ret.) Army Col. Peter Mansoor is a highly decorated officer with more than 25 years of military service. He's served as executive officer and advisor to Gen. Patraeus and was a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Strategy Group that proposed the surge in Iraq. A West Point grad, Mansoor teaches at Ohio State, where he earned his master's and doctoral degrees in military history. In his memoir, Baghdad at Sunrise, he addresses the military, political and cultural impact of staging the war.
Former U.S. Army Brigade Commander explains why the dual-containment strategy in Iraq failed and how that led to the proxy war being fought today. (2:58)
Full interview. (11:01)
Col. Peter Mansoor
[Clip]
Tavis: John McCain and Barack Obama, of course, offering up their thoughts about the war in Iraq at last Friday night's debate in Mississippi. Tonight here on this program, two unique perspectives about the war, beginning with Colonel Peter Mansoor, the first U.S. brigade commander to write about his experiences in Iraq and now retired, Colonel Mansoor is the chair of the military history department at Ohio State. His new book is called "Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq." Colonel, nice to have you on the program.
Col. Peter Mansoor: A pleasure, Tavis.
Tavis: I guess I'd better back up before I get hate mail. Since I went to IU in the big 10, I know better than this, excuse me - the Ohio State University. Get that right for all my friends in Columbus. Glad to have you on the program. What's your sense so far of the debate between Obama and McCain as we are now just 30 some-odd days from Election Day?
Mansoor: Well, I think it's interesting that in those two clips, they're both right. I think going into Iraq was -
Tavis: Wow, and they agree.
Mansoor: It was a major strategic mistake. We had a dual containment policy of Iraq and Iran that was working and we didn't have to have a war of choice in this regard for our national security interests. But having said that, we are where we are. It's a no go-back game; you can't return to go and collect $200, and we have to deal with the situation as we find it.
And in that regard, Senator McCain is exactly right - you can't have an inappropriate strategy and expect good things to result from it.
Tavis: You used a phrase a moment ago that those of us who are not military experts might need you to unpack a little bit. When you say we at one point had a dual containment strategy for Iraq and Iran, break that down for me.
Mansoor: Well, what we were doing was with the no-fly zones in Iraq we were keeping Saddam Hussein and his forces in the box, we were making sure they weren't a threat to their neighbors.
On the other hand, we were also containing the power of Iran and their hegemonic tendencies to want to expand out into the Middle East, and Iraq was actually a piece of that strategy. By toppling Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad, we made it possible for Iran to break out of that containment and we find ourselves in the situation where we are now, with a proxy war in Iraq, waged by Iranian back forces.
Tavis: So Iran came up, of course, in this debate the other night; hence we raise it now on this conversation, but Afghanistan also came up in that debate the other night - Jim Lehrer of PBS specifically asked questions about that. What's your sense, militarily, of the mistake that we have made in rushing into Afghanistan, rushing out to Iraq, now Afghanistan has come back to bite us in the behind, essentially, and we're backtracking now, trying to contain the problem that seems to be expanding in Afghanistan again.
Of course there's debate about this, but as a military guy, what's your take on this?
Mansoor: Well, we have a strategic culture in the United States that favors short wars fought with high technology at extended distances, and we have to realize that wars in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, Iraq, they tend to be long, drawn-out affairs, and it was a mistake to take our eye off the ball in Afghanistan, we're paying for that mistake now.
But look, in Iraq you can see a way forward. It's got oil, it's got water, it's got a talented population, a modern communications infrastructure. I think the surge has succeeded in improving the security situation and provided the political situation comes along, you can see a way forward in Iraq.
In Afghanistan, if we're wildly successful in the next 10 years we can succeed in pushing this country headlong from the 13th into the 14th century. It's just a different situation, and it's going to be a long, drawn-out affair.
Tavis: I want to go into your text in just a moment and raise some issues that you, of course, write about in the book, but to the point first that you raised a moment ago about being able to see a way forward in Iraq, for you, having been there and having led troops in Iraq, what is your definition of victory in Iraq now? Because one of the complaints that Senator McCain made immediately after the debate about Senator Obama is that he never used the word "victory" in reference to Iraq. That was McCain's critique of Obama.
So what does, for you, having been there, victory at this point for the U.S. mean in Iraq?
Mansoor: I think victory at this point means sustainable stability. You have an Iraq that can serve as a bulwark against Iranian expansionism in the region, that can control its own territory so there's no terrorist safe haven, that has a fairly stable economy so that it's not exporting chaos to the rest of the region and allows oil resources to flow out of the Gulf, and is able to meet the needs of its own population so you don't have an increase to the two million refugees that have already flowed across Iraq's borders.
Tavis: All right, so we talked about the present - that is, the debate that's going on now between Obama and McCain; we've talked about the so-called way forward in Iraq. Let me know go backwards, which is what your book is all about, your time spent there, "Baghdad at Sunrise." If I'm reading the book correctly, one puts the book down with a sense of this - that what went wrong in Iraq was that the goals by the politicos in Washington was fundamentally different than the reality on the ground, yes?
Mansoor: Yes.
Tavis: Unpack that for me.
Mansoor: There's a military philosopher whose named Carl von Clausewitz, and he once famously wrote that the first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of a statesman is to determine the type of war in which you're going to embark, if you're going to embark on a war, and this administration decided that Iraq would be a war of liberation, and from that flow a whole bunch of assumptions that the Iraqis would support us, that their infrastructure would be relatively intact once we toppled the Saddam Hussein regime, and that we could turn things over to an Iraqi government relatively quickly and leave.
By the summer of 2003, at the latest, those assumptions should have been re-looked. It was quite clear to us on the ground that an insurgency had begun, started really by our own actions in disbanding the Iraqi army and de-Ba'athifying the Iraqi government to such an extent as we did, and at the strategic level there should have been a clear-eyed review of where we were and where we were going, and that did not happen.
Instead, we had a secretary of Defense who basically said, “Nah, we're just up against a few dead-enders, and as soon as we kill or capture them we can get on with turning this thing over to the Iraqis.” And year after year after year of this conflict, that kind of very muddled view of what was going on persisted until 2006, unfortunately.
Tavis: When you say muddled view, I'm wondering if the view wasn't muddled from the very beginning. And what I mean by that, and to the point you make now, is that I'm still not clear, these years later, whether or not the goal really was liberation - that is to say I don't know how you define it, but maybe I'm not hearing you correctly. Was the goal really liberation? That is to say, to free these people from a horrific dictator named Saddam Hussein, or was the goal really about those weapons of mass destruction and protecting us from what he may have done with those WMDs?
And as you know, we were told a couple different stories going into that, and those two are two of the three or four stories that we were told. So I mean, I'm not sure that I'm clear - you wrote the book about it. Were they ever clear about what the goal really was? You say liberation so easily, but were they clear about that?
Mansoor: Well, I think you're right. The story keeps changing, and there's different goals that are put forth. It was justified in the administration's view in terms of national security - the proverbial mushroom clouds over American cities metaphor was used time and again.
But in terms of the context, the character of the war that they believed once they went in that the Iraqis would welcome us, and it was in that context that the lack of planning for post-war Iraq took place - that this would be easy, that all we had to do was plan for humanitarian issues but not nation-building, and certainly not counterinsurgency.
Tavis: So you've done a good job explaining to me what you think the muddled process created for you and your troops when you got there, your command troops. What was the reality now on the ground when you actually got there?
Mansoor: The summer of 2003 was very chaotic. We had organized crime in our area, we had a budding insurgency, we had people who had real needs, which your next guest I'm sure will talk to you about, and we had to deal with all of that, and yet I had 3,500 troops in an area that comprised 2.1 million Iraqis, with no Iraqi army, because it had been disbanded, and a very distrusted Iraqi police force, and not enough of them.
So we had a lack of troops to do what we needed to do, but it was more than that - it was a conception at the Coalition Provisional Authority that things should be centralized at their level, and so Ambassador Bremer held on to needed resources that could have been used by brigade commanders to spend money on immediate needs of the people, and we had a lack of money.
Money is a weapons system in this kind of conflict, and we could have used it. The brigade commanders were the ones who knew what was happening on the ground, and we were consistently under-resourced by the higher.
Tavis: Let me ask this, then - how frustrating is it as a brigade commander to be given an assignment that you know (laughs) isn't really possible, given what you're up against on the ground, and yet the commander in chief, or Bremer, at that point, who was in charge, has said this is how it's got to be done, here's how we're going to do this.
How frustrating is it to know that this is the goal, but we can't get there with these kind of instructions?
Mansoor: Actually, to be fair, Ambassador Bremer was not in the chain of command, but he certainly had an influence on what was going on.
Tavis: Not the military chain of command, you're correct, yes.
Mansoor: What you do is you're given a mission and you do the best you can with the resources you're given. You ask for more resources, which I did, and then you adjust at the margins where possible.
One of the things I did is I realized that the mission that was given to me to destroy all the insurgents in my area was not attainable by the time my unit would depart Baghdad, and so I changed that to say well, let's just neutralize them. And from that flows a whole bunch of operations, but also a way of thinking about the problem - that this is going to be a long, drawn-out affair, that the way we treat the population in these operations matters because we need to keep them on our side.
And therefore, we're not just going to go kick down doors and hunt down insurgents and terrorists because we probably create more than we would get rid of.
Tavis: This war, for lack of a better word, has been fascinating and still is on so many different levels and in so many different ways, and I suspect as the years roll on there'll be more books giving us better insight into what happened in Iraq on the ground, and one of those books is out now by Peter Mansoor, now at the Ohio State University.
But the book is called "Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq," and Colonel, I'm glad to have you on the program.
Mansoor: Pleasure to be here, thank you.
Tavis: Thanks for sharing your story.
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