Cakewalk: Getting it Wrong

U.S. Military Might and Myths

On February 13, 2002, Defense Policy Board member Kenneth Adelman wrote in the Washington Post that “demolishing Hussein’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk.” Not everyone in the defense establishment agreed. General Richard Myers, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a press conference in December 2002, “I would just say there’s nobody involved in the military planning . . . that would say that this sort of endeavor-if we are asked to do it-would be a cakewalk . . .” But the image had legs, so to speak, and on April 22 Nicholas Kristof could write in the New York Times, “No one got the level of resistance quite right. We doves correctly foresaw that the war would not be a cakewalk . . .”

In fact, by the time American troops entered Tikrit, the metaphor had become almost wholly unmoored from any analytic specificity, and the tenacity with which the disputants clung to the word was baffling. Coalition troops in Iraq had routed perhaps four times their number in three weeks-but the critics clearly felt they had gained some moral advantage when Kenneth Adelman used the word, and thought that they might still win the argument.

The cakewalk, popular on American plantations in the 1850s, and the first dance to cross over from black to white society, had couples promenading, high stepping, and kicking; Adelman’s phrase might have suggested that the war would be no more than an exuberant parade. This was probably a misreading: the first definition is simply “something easily accomplished,” and as early as 1916 the word was used to denote a comparatively effortless military endeavor. What, precisely, had Adelman meant?

If you were looking to pillory Adelman, you could land on the fact that he’d asserted that tactical air power, special forces, and Kurdish irregulars would suffice to topple Saddam’s regime: our Afghan War, redux. This was an old, old dream: first, air power’s prophets, then, its lobbyists had repeatedly predicted that air power would make possible cheap imperial policing operations, or would allow capital-rich states to make inexpensive and ever victorious war upon their less sophisticated enemies, or would prove so frightful that the next war would be the last, or would make manpower-intensive traditional militaries obsolete. In an alleged irony that the critics never tired of asserting, Afghanistan and Iraq were two of the first places imperial air war was tried (in the 1920s).

But the much-predicted future of cheap, independent, and ever successful air operations has yet to arrive, and in the event, Coalition combat units in Iraq included five divisions. Although three of those divisions seem to have done almost all of the fighting, one can not argue that a minimal commitment of manpower sufficed to shatter Saddam’s regime: in addition to the hundred thousand Coalition troops in ...