Atkinson Offers an Inside Look at War

By: Greg Mitchell When Rick Atkinson learned that he'd won the 2003 Pultizer Prize for history for his book An Army at Dawn, he was in Iraq covering the 101st Airborne's push towards Baghdad for The Washington Post. A year later, at Pulitzer time, he was back in Washington and his acclaimed book about his embedded experience in Iraq, In the Company of Soldiers, was climbing the bestseller charts. One thing had not changed: He still opposed the war he had covered with such distinction.

That shouldn't come as a surprise. The most-noted quote from

his new book belongs to its protagonist Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the 101st. About a week into the war last spring, he said to Atkinson, "Tell me how this ends." Atkinson considered it a "private joke" at the time, but it soon became Petraeus' mantra.

Atkinson, 51, has unassailable credentials in this field. He has written four books related to war, with another two in the works on World War II campaigns in Sicily and in Western Europe. His father is a former infantry officer. As a writer, he considers war "my theme."

With that background, he feels "some obligation to be an interlocutor between the military and the public. There aren't many of us who have spent much of our lives trying to understand military culture and what the Army does." Beyond that, he considers war a useful lens for exploring who we are, even if it sometimes "requires looking through the glass darkly."

When I interviewed Atkinson recently, I knew how he felt about the war today but not a lot about his doubts while he was traveling with the troops through the heat and dust storms last spring, "embracing the suck," as the grunts put it. His book concentrates on observing Petraeus and his division up close without commenting at great length about the run-up to the war or Atkinson's political views at the time.

In the postwar epilogue, however, he speaks frankly. Petraeus and his soldiers had performed well, taking relatively few casualties, and showing both restraint and courage in battle. But they "were better than the cause they served." It was "vital not to conflate the warriors with the war." The casus belli for the war, that Iraq posed an imminent threat to America, "was inflated and perhaps fraudulent." And if "the war's predicate was phony, it cheapened the sacrifices of the dead and living alike."

So I asked Atkinson, who has captured so well the glory-filled allied struggle in World War II, whether he felt the new book was somewhat hollow, documenting the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. Did he have mixed feelings about his own effort?

"There's nothing mixed about it at all," he fired back. "I was against the war before, during and after it. I have no mixed feelings about the hundreds of dead soldiers ? it was a poor use of their lives. I was certain last March that we as a nation had not done all we could to make sure lives were not lost, but I'm dogmatic about it now."

Doubting the war, and with another book due, why had he put his life on the line to cover it? "I'm as weak-kneed as the next fellow in terms of getting killed or wounded in a war," he admitted. "You have to pick and choose in putting your life on the line. I just felt it was part of my responsibility to the Post and as a reporter, that I will share some of the risks."

Now, as a scholar of World War II, the lesson he draws is "that if you're going to fight a global war, whether it's against the Axis in the 1940s or against terrorism today, nothing is more vital than nurturing a powerful, righteous coalition." Failing to do this has placed a tragically unfair burden on our military. "They took down a country the size of California in three weeks," he pointed out, "but there was not much thought devoted to the question of what happens next. It's astonishing how little thought was given." And he cited Machiavelli's warning, "War begins where you will, but they do not end where you please."

But what about the argument that leaving Iraq now would dishonor the soldiers who have died so far? "It's not George Bush's military," he replied, "but the country's as a whole, and the collective proprietorship means we collectively decide if it is used properly and the cause is worth their sacrifice ? and whether that cause should be truncated or we stay there forever."

So what can newspaper correspondents do now? Wars that last as long as this one inevitably become "corrupt," Atkinson said. "Even righteous wars corrupt soldiers and documenting that is one of the responsibilities of reporters. A more concerted effort to watch this inevitable process of corruption is a hard, but an important, task."