America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (62 page)

King David: In Iraq, his achievement was to camouflage failure. (© Thomas Dworzak/Magnum Photos)

The Afghanistan surge, 2010: Leaflets announce NATO’s imminent arrival in Marja and promise “government in a box.” (US Army)

Abandoning invade-and-occupy, Washington embraces targeted assassination; not everyone approves. (epa european pressphoto agency b.v. / Alamy Stock Photo)

With AFRICOM joining the fight, U.S. trainers teach their charges new routines. (Staff Sgt. Steve Cushman/US Marine Corps)

The rise of ISIS enmeshes the United States in a Fourth Gulf War.

To Nancy

In writing this book, I accumulated
MANY
debts—so many in fact that I am hard pressed to know where to begin expressing my gratitude to all who helped along the way.

Grace Chang, Harrison Meyer, and Amanda Roth got me started by assisting with preliminary research. As things picked up steam, Derrin Culp became my go-to guy for locating documents and tracking down stray facts. I owe him an immeasurable debt. I am likewise grateful to Professor Mary Ann Tetreault for generously sharing materials that she had collected for a similar project but was unable to complete.

As I turned to the actual writing, Columbia Provost John Coatsworth invited me to spend a semester at the university’s School of International and Public Affairs as the first George S. McGovern Fellow. This proved a wonderful opportunity. I thank Provost Coatsworth along with the faculty and staff of SIPA for their kind hospitality.

Once chapters began taking shape, Casey Brower, Chris Gray, Rick Swain, Nick Turse, and Scott Wheeler all read various bits and pieces, offering suggestions and needed encouragement. Kalev Sepp, who knows more about irregular warfare than anyone else of my acquaintance, shared firsthand insights regarding the U.S. occupation of Iraq. My dear friend Lawrence Kaplan read the entire manuscript with a keen eye and offered an invaluable critique.

As the manuscript approached final form, I approached David Lindroth about possibly designing maps to accompany the text. He agreed and in remarkably short order transformed my vague ideas into pleasingly concrete form. It was a treat to work with such a gifted professional. Fred Courtright demystifed the process of locating photos and securing permission for their use.

My thanks to Graham Allison of Harvard’s Kennedy School for hosting a luncheon seminar where I could test-drive my conclusions. The feedback from those in attendance was most helpful.

My agent, John Wright, has to be the best in the business. I treasure our relationship. Like John, David Ebershoff, my editor at Random House, is a pro through and through, someone who knows books and loves them. To collaborate with a person of such extraordinary gifts was for me an undeserved blessing. When David moved on to new opportunities, Will Murphy assumed the position of “point man” and saw matters through to completion with efficiency and skill. Others at Random House who played critical roles include Barbara Fillon, Evan Camfield, Toby Ernst, Mika Kasuga, and the estimable Caitlin McKenna. Martin Schneider’s copyediting saved me from more than a few gaffes and infelicities. My thanks to one and all.

I have dedicated this book to my wife, Nancy. The day we met, to my amazement now a full half-century ago, remains the luckiest of my life. My dearest hope is that we may grow old together.

A Note to Readers

 1.
Henry James,
Notes on Novelists with Some Other Notes
(New York, 1914), 121.

Prologue

 1.
For a detailed account of the mission, see Mark Bowden,
Guests of the Ayatollah
(New York, 2006), 223–33, 409–13, 431–68.

 2.
Jimmy Carter, “Address to the Nation on the Rescue Attempt for American Hostages in Iran” (April 25, 1980). Unless otherwise specified, all presidential speeches and statements, along with other White House documents cited in this book, are readily available at the American Presidency Project,
presidency.ucsb.edu
.

 3.
The Pentagon’s “Iran Hostage Rescue Mission Report,” completed in August 1980 and more commonly known as the Holloway Report, recounted while soft-pedaling some of those errors. A declassified version is available at
www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB63/doc8.pdf
, accessed on August 21, 2014. Far more scathing was a report prepared for the Senate Armed Services Committee that cited a “poor commander, poor organization, and failure to anticipate emergencies” as major problems. Nicholas Daniloff, “Hostage Rescue Mission Laid to Poor Command,”
The Boston Globe
(June 6, 1980).

 4.
The “Greater Middle East” exists primarily as a device to facilitate the exercise of Western and especially American power. It is an invention. Yet for the purposes of this book, more traditional terms like “Middle East,” “Near East,” and “Persian Gulf” do not suffice to describe the scope of U.S. military activities or the ambitions inspiring those activities. So I have chosen to employ the formulation that more accurately accords with Washington’s mental map of the world. See Dona J. Stewart, “The Greater Middle East and Reform in the Bush Administration’s Ideological Imagination,”
Geographical Review
(July 2005), 400–424.

1. War of Choice

 1.
C. Wright Mills,
White Collar
(New York, 1951), xv, xvii. Other important publications in this vein include David Riesman,
The Lonely Crowd
(New Haven, 1950); William Whyte,
The Organization Man
(New York, 1956); and Vance Packard,
The Hidden Persuaders
(New York, 1957).

 2.
U.S. Energy Information Administration, “U.S. Field Production of Crude Oil,” and “U.S. Imports of Crude Oil and Petroleum Products,”
eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler
, both accessed August 22, 2014.

 3.
Nominally, the purpose of putting U.S. forces on alert was to deter any possible Soviet military action. Yet evidence suggests that the Nixon administration was also considering direct military intervention to seize control of Saudi oil. Lizette Alvarez, “Documents Show U.S. Considered Using Force During Oil Embargo,”
The New York Times
(January 1, 2004).

 4.
Richard Nixon, “Address to the Nation About National Energy Policy” (November 25, 1973).

 5.
Robert W. Tucker, “Oil: The Issue of American Intervention,”
Commentary
(January 1975), 21–31.

 6.
Miles Ignotus, “Seizing Arab Oil,”
Harper’s
(March 1975), 45–62.

 7.
Andrew Higgins, “Power and Peril: American Supremacy and Its Limits,”
The Asian Wall Street Journal
(February 5, 2004).

 8.
Beginning in 1949, the U.S. Navy did maintain a token presence, using leased space in a small British base in Bahrain. This so-called Middle East Force consisted of two destroyers and a seaplane tender, which doubled as a flagship. It possessed negligible combat capability.

 9.
Elliot L. Richardson,
Annual Defense Department Report, FY 1974
(April 10, 1973), 25.