Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib

Customer Reviews

In short: if you can read only one book in this genre this year, you’ve found it.

A reader examining Mr. Hersh’s work for the first time here may not realize how far ahead of the curve he has been in exposing scores of intelligence failures, poorly thought out national security initiatives, and the horrible Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Many of Mr. Hersh’s points were treated with suspicion when they were made, only to be accepted as common wisdom when the full story became known (though the book’s editors would have done well to make that clearer, but more on that in a moment).

His main point in Chain of Command is all these issues — the selective evidence regarding weapons of mass destruction, the sidestepping of the federal bureaucracy and the diminished importance of Congress, the misuse of intelligence, the abuse of human rights abroad, foreign policy zealotry, and so on (I might add elections-related shenanigans from four years ago) — amount to a kind of coup d’état, and it’s hard to argue against his points.

Clearly, Mr. Hersh is outraged in Chain of Command, but what earns my respect the most if the fact that his anger is not partisan, but instead based on what he seems to see as a widening gulf between what is happening in the U.S. and because of the U.S. and what comes out of the mouths of senior government officials. Mr. Hersh is an old-fashioned muckraker and proud of it.

Now allow me to quibble for a moment.

The vast bulk of Chain of Command was distilled from around 20 articles Mr. Hersh wrote for the New Yorker, though editors updated a few subjects and juggled the order a bit, most obviously to emphasize new reporting regarding Abu Ghraib. I would have argued in favor of printing the original articles as they were published, in chronological order and with dates on them — something that would have elegantly presented the material without begging the question of what was known when. The updated information could have easily been presented in a short epilogue to each chapter or to the whole book.

Additionally, Mr. Hersh on a few occasions threatens to undermine some of his credibility by relying on speculation on subjects like prison conditions at Guantánamo, and by making only passing references to minor evidence that could weaken his arguments, on subjects such as troop movements between Afghanistan and Iraq. But he never crosses the line in a way that has damned many of the other books out this political season, thanks in a large part to his solid reputation launched when he broke the story about the My Lai massacre in Vietnam 35 years ago.

But these points are very, very minor compared to the points this very important book makes. I rarely give five-star ratings to books, but I have no second thoughts in doing that here.

Hersh draws on numerous sources – most legitimate, some apocryphal – at senior levels of the government and intelligence community, from foreign officials, and from those on the battlefield, all of whom substantiate his investigation. Sadly the message appears to be that the buck does not seem to stop anywhere. While the investigation faults the Army for “failing to provide leadership,” senior commanders in Baghdad and the top commander himself, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, as well as senior Pentagon officials, “were found to have had no role in ordering or permitting the abuse.” The message is muddled to the rest of us – it is the system’s fault, not the fault of those running it. The book sadly reveals that a lack of leadership equals exoneration of the leaders. There comes a point where closing one’s eyes to such evidence is a form of complicity, that ignoring the warnings may be closer to a war crime than anyone cares to admit. In raw terms, Hersh brings the brutality of the post 9/11 journey this nation has taken, and while there have been moments of inspiration, the road has unfortunately been riddled with lapses that spread the imperial hubris this country denies globally rather than the greater good of democracy. This is essential reading on what the war on terrorism has brought us, completing a triumvirate that includes Senator Bob Graham’s “Intelligence Matters” and a senior CIA officer’s treatise, “Imperial Hubris”.

First, the idea that Hersh sympathizes with Al Qaeda is a slander. Hersh does suggest the war in Afghanistan was a mistake, because, he argues, there were elements within the Taliban who could have been bribed to hand over Bin Laden. Agree or disagree with Hersh, he still begins on the fundamental principle that Al Qaeda is an enemy that must be defeated. It is only the means that differ. To compare such a position to Jane Fonda (who openly supported a North Vietnamese victory) is outrageous. What makes this book fascinating is that it is not a stream of extreme leftist drivel about empire, but a carefully compiled collection of dissenting voices from within the intelligence, defense and diplomatic services. (Which does not mean, of course, that their analyses is automatically right.)

Neither does Hersh smear the soldiers. While he is unflinching in recounting the crimes that occurred, the entire point of the book is to put those crimes into a larger context, one that cannot help but make one feel a certain sympathy for the soldiers (without excusing them). They were often untrained to handle interrogations and were being told that they needed to perform these acts in order to help stop the daily attacks that were killing their fellow soldiers. One of the heroes in this book is the National Guard officer who refused to follow a Military Intelligence officer’s command that he order his soldiers to keep prisoners awake. The Guard officer explained that he was not going to put his men in the position of performing such a duty without the proper training, for fear they might get “creative.” Hersh’s contempt is for those higher up in the chain of command (get the title?) who did put soldiers in such positions, where abuses were bound to occur (if not directly ordered), and then left those same soldiers to take all the blame. The pseudo patriotism and overblown rhetoric of those who have attacked this book is frightening because it embodies perfectly the mentality of this administration: come to a conclusion based upon ideology, seek out the facts that support that conclusion, when reasonable criticism is raised, impugn the critic personally, and then – as the bill comes due and facts on the ground show up the inaccuracy of your original conclusion – meet that reality with ever greater levels of self delusion. They forget, we are a democracy, our nation is ultimately only that which we make of it. It is the sum of our actions. Taking that principle seriously is the beginning of true patriotism.