'Blair's Generals' (II): Some surprises about American actions in the Iraq war -- like not telling the Brits about the surge!

British Generals in Blair's Wars offers some new views
of, and information about, the Iraq war. It made me wish I had interviewed more
Brits for my books Fiasco and The Gamble. On the other hand, I doubt
they would have told me back then, in the thick of things, some of the things
they say here. In sum, for the British, the Americans
appear to have been friendly but often unthinking allies, rather painful to
deal with.

Most
startling to me in this volume was the revelation
that L. Paul Bremer, III, the American proconsul in Baghdad in 2003-04, had
officially requested the removal of the British commander in Iraq, Maj. Gen.
(ret.) Andrew Stewart. This is discussed by Stewart and others. "I was charged
with not killing enough people," he recalls. "The CPA asked for my removal."
Another officer, Gen. (ret.) John McColl, adds that, "The demarche had gone
from Bremer to Washington to London without the military commanders being
consulted. Indeed, they, the [U.S.] military leadership, seemed to be content
with the British approach."

In
the spring of 2004, adds Col. (ret.) Alexander Alderson, when he and another
British officer tried to brief U.S. Army Lt. Gen. David McKiernan on counterinsurgency
doctrine, the American officer pounded the table and stated that he was not
going to face an insurgency. "Damn it," he shouted, according to Alderson,
"we're warfighting."

I
also was surprised to see Maj. Gen. (ret.) Jonathan Shaw's comment that the Americans
decided in December 2006 on "the surge" in Iraq later the same winter without
consulting the British: "This shift happened over Christmas 2006 after all our
Whitehall briefs which had focused on transition and reductions in troop
levels. I arrived with national orders to reduce our footprint, at a time when
the US was increasing its."

But
Colonel Alderson does note that as the surge occurred, "There was now a much
greater level of coherency in what the US was trying to achieve." I had
observed the same phenomenon in Iraq in 2007 and had tried to write about it in
The Gamble, but did not summarize it
as well as Alderson does in that one sentence.

(One
more to come.)