The problem with this orthodox interpretation is not that it’s wrong but that it is inadequate. The reflexive tendency to see every antagonist as another Hitler (or Stalin) and every sensitive diplomatic encounter as a potential Munich (or Yalta) has produced an approach to statecraft that is excessively militarized, needlessly inflexible, and insufficiently imaginative. The remedy is not to engage in a vain effort to change the way Americans remember World War II, however, but to restore that conflict to its proper context.

Ripped out of context, the war, especially the struggle against Nazi Germany, has become a parable. Whatever their value as a source of moral instruction, parables offer less help when it comes to understanding international politics. Parables simplify - and to simplify the past is necessarily to distort it. (my emphasis)

In fact, that conflagration and the peacemaking process that followed offer a mother lode of instruction for American policymakers today.

World War I does not easily reduce to a parable. Even a polemicist as talented as [neocon godfather Norman] Podhoretz would be hard pressed to render it as a story pitting good against evil or freedom against totalitarianism. It was instead a vast, complex, and utterly avoidable tragedy, a war of empires on behalf of empire. A handful of naïve and stupid statesmen, who fancied that in war lay the solution to all manner of problems, inflicted incalculable moral and material damage upon Western civilization, while accelerating the decline of European power and leaving a poisonous legacy.(my emphasis)

Yet OSD never actually intended that Iraqis - other than those chosen in advance by the United States - would determine their own nation’s fate. For Feith and his colleagues, "liberation" was a codeword that meant indirect control. OSD sought to exercise that control in three ways.

First, it established under Pentagon jurisdiction an agency designed to direct developments in Baghdad after Saddam’s removal. This was the misleadingly named Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), created by OSD in January 2003 and headed by retired army Lieutenant General Jay Garner, Rumsfeld’s handpicked choice for the job.

Second, against bitter opposition from the CIA and State Department, Feith and his colleagues tried to ensure that OSD would have the final say in deciding exactly which Iraqis would occupy positions of influence in the IIA [Iraqi Interim Authority]. Contemporary press reports identified neoconservative favorite Ahmad Chalabi as the Pentagon’s preferred candidate to run the IIA. Feith denies that OSD was promoting Chalabi, but his relentless attacks on Chalabi’s critics, professing bafflement at how others could malign someone of such manifest decency, belie those denials. (Subsequent charges that Chalabi was playing a double game, leaking sensitive intelligence to Iran, number among the matters that Feith ignores altogether.)

Third, even as it was touting the Iraqi Interim Authority as an embryonic government run by Iraqis, OSD established narrow limits on that government’s prerogatives. For example, as Feith notes in passing, under the IIA, the United States would retain “the authority to appoint top officials for the ministries of Defense, Finance, Interior, and Oil.” That authority provided the ultimate guarantee that the United States would continue to call the shots. The IIA would be a puppet regime, Feith and his colleagues apparently expecting Iraqis either not to notice or not to care who was actually pulling the strings. (my emphasis)

When Sanchez assumed command, evidence of a brewing insurgency was already mounting. While back in Washington Feith was lovingly perfecting his vision of an Iraqi Interim Authority, Baghdad was already coming apart at the seams. By the time Sanchez departed Baghdad a year later, chaos had engulfed Iraq, and U. S. forces were caught in the middle of a civil war that Sanchez himself reports “our actions had undeniably ignited.” Punctuating this deteriorating situation was the Abu Ghraib scandal, which seemed to affirm that something had gone fundamentally wrong.

In short, when the animals in Iraq escaped their cages, Ricardo Sanchez was the chief zookeeper. His mission was to secure Iraq. He failed egregiously. The results of his efforts were almost entirely negative. As measured by the number of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians killed and wounded, they were also costly. Yet none of this, Sanchez insists, was his fault.

According to a core value of the military professional ethic, commanders are responsible for everything that occurs on their watch. The whole point of Wiser in Battle is to suggest that in the case of Ricardo Sanchez the principle of command responsibility should not apply. (my emphasis)

Sanchez refrains from criticizing the president directly, depicting him as well-intentioned yet utterly out of his depth. During a videoconference in the midst of the notorious first Fallujah offensive of April 2004, Bush offered the following guidance to his field commander: "Kick ass! If someone tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! . . . Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out!" Two days later orders from above directed Sanchez to suspend the offensive. "Politics"—Sanchez employs the term as shorthand for any intrusion by ignorant civilians with ulterior motives - had produced "a strategic defeat for the United States and a moral victory for the insurgents." (my emphasis)