Bing West is an ex-Marine officer, Vietnam vet, and now a top civilian advisor on the war in Iraq.

The Providence Journal / Sandor Bodo

Back in Newport the other day, just after his 15th trip to Iraq, Bing West was barefoot and relaxed as he padded around his relatively modest house nestled behind a tall hedge amid the mansions and McMansions along Ocean Drive.

Behind him was the desert heat of a still-deadly country. Ahead lay a grueling tour to promote his third book on the Iraq war, The Strongest Tribe (see review on Page I-7), including appearances on CNN last Wednesday and — of all things — The Colbert Report the following night.

As usual, the 68-year-old ex-Marine spoke his mind:

“The military war is over. The political infighting will continue for 20 years. … Al-Qaida will be finished within 18 months.”

When Bing West speaks, people listen. Important people, like Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, who invited West to make his most recent Iraq visit. And present and/or former secretaries of defense and state, aware of his military scholarship (he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Princeton, taught at the Naval War College in Newport and wrote the bible of counterinsurgency warfare, The Village, in 1972) and his high-level government experience as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs in the Reagan administration.

But above all, he talks with the troops on the ground, who respect West’s tour in the Vietnam crucible. As a Marine captain there, he survived an attack that killed 9 of the 15 Marines in his “combined action platoon” — one of the earliest counterinsurgency efforts in any American war.

Many of the troops he talks with have read The Village, which is subtitled: “The True Story of 17 Months in the Life of a Vietnamese Village, Where a Handful of American Volunteers and Vietnamese Militia Lived and Died Together Trying to Defend It.” (One of West’s previous bosses, former Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger, described it as follows: “The gripping account of the valor of the Marines in the fiercest urban combat since Hue. Yet, the even-handed description of the vacillation regarding policy will likely please neither some of our senior officers nor the White House.”)

West has been embedded with 60 units during his 15 trips to Iraq, living with the troops, patrolling with them, sometimes fighting beside them, sending back reports as a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly among other outlets, then going home to write his three books. Sometimes the men tell him things the generals and the politicians don’t want to hear, and he tells the world, and the men are grateful.

So it wasn’t altogether surprising that when the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed piece by West the day his book was published, last Tuesday, in which he declared the war was over, it was news. Not on the level of President Bush’s “Mission accomplished” speech aboard a carrier in 2003, but enough to set the Blogosphere buzzing.

Stephen Colbert teased him about that Thursday night: “So is it time to declare ‘Mission Re-accomplished?’ ” he asked. Luckily for West, Colbert apparently didn’t know this was his second victory declaration. The first was in July, 2003, when West wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “The Iraqi war is over and the seemingly tedious work of helping that country pull itself together has begun. There will no doubt be more shootouts like the one in Mosul. But make no mistake, the tyranny has been removed; this war is already won.”

President Bush, Gen. Petraeus and those reporting to them have been more cautious since that 2003 euphoria. You won’t hear victory speeches from them anytime soon. But you can hear a lot from West that you won’t hear in official Washington, and if you are committed to either political party’s stand on the war, you won’t like some of it. He lets the chips fall where they may:

“This was the first time in 15 trips that I didn’t hear one shot or one roadside bomb. First time. And I didn’t wear an armored vest or helmet anywhere. I’d never done that before.

“The other thing that was different this time is that none of the Iraqis at the local level wants the Americans to leave. And there are two reasons for that: The Americans bring security, and they also bring money,” which the Iraqi government does not.

“The kindest thing I can say about the Iraqi government is that they are incompetent. At the top, I believe there is much more corruption than we have any notion of, because we have no way of getting inside their books.”

“The essential problem that I see with the war is that President Bush never came to grips with the contradiction between the goal of the U.S. military, which was to hand an ongoing war over to the Iraqis and get out, and his goal, which was victory before we got out. I don’t think he did his homework. Any sergeant could have told him for years, it was not the goal of the United States military to win that war.”

“Bush has the reputation for being decisive, but I don’t buy that. He just let a lot of things go by and just waited for options to be given to him.”

But West reserves his greatest condemnation for anyone he deems to be selling the troops short. Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), for instance.

Murtha, chairman of the defense appropriations subcommittee, was a foremost congressional hawk who turned dovish on the war, sending shock waves through the administration. When a squad of Marines, pushed beyond their limits at Haditha, ran amuck, killing 24 civilian men, women and children, Murtha headed for the cameras and microphones. “I will not excuse murder. And this is what happened. There’s no question in my mind about it,” he said.

In his book, West condemns the incident as “a disgrace to the Marine Corps” and a failure in leadership. “But the world of an infantryman is unlike any other, and a soldier’s motivations in battle are hard to judge from the outside looking in, despite Murtha’s conclusion.”

As for Murtha, West first quotes Sen. Barack Obama in his support — “I would never second guess John Murtha … he’s somebody who knows of what he speaks.” — and then laces into the man himself, and the press:

“Murtha typified the type of politician the mainstream press ordinarily despised — a man who flouted his power, cut backroom deals, and inserted earmarks into appropriations bills that funneled hundreds of millions to special interests, while receiving campaign contributions from special interests that assured his reelection and perpetuated pork barrel politics. Murtha abused his office … Instead of excoriating Murtha for sleazy politics, the mainstream press deified him because it suited their purposes. By burnishing the label of ‘Vietnam veteran’ and gushing about medals awarded for vague wounds and even vaguer acts of courage, the press enshrined Murtha, thus adding gravitas to his charge of cold-blooded murder.”

In the appendix to his book, West reprints a memo he sent four years ago to Army Gen. George W. Casey, then in charge of U.S. military operations in Iraq. It contains some blunt observations, such as this one about our ostensible allies, the Iraqi Security Force:

“The ISF has not one hero, not one single battalion commander who has taken the fight offensively and persistently to the enemy … This is scary.”

West says he has no political ambitions. A civilian now, making a transition from businessman (he ran a company that developed war games) to full-time writer, and enjoying the Newport social scene and other summer attractions with his wife, Betsy, (and sometimes his four children and six grandchildren), he sees himself as just an observer.

“I’ll talk to any of them,” he says of the high-ranking civilian and military leaders who’ve sought his advice. “But I’m dispassionate. I’m strictly a journalist. At my age I can tell any of those generals exactly what I think. They get angry sometimes, you know, one of them will say, ‘I think you’re flat wrong,’ and I’ll say, ‘Well, I think you’re flat wrong.’ But it’s not personal.”

He clearly enjoys his elder statesman role, especially among the grunts. They have been close to his heart for more than 60 years now, since he was a kid of 4 or 5, in the Dorchester section of Boston. A bunch of Marines, home on leave from the battlegrounds of World War II, would hang out in the large attic West’s father, a doctor, let them use as a kind of clubhouse.

“My mother thought, well, these are perfect babysitters. So from the age of 2 on, my babysitters were Marines, come back from the war. That obviously had a terrific effect. I remember walking back and forth, marching, having a great time. You learn some good values in the Marines,” he joked: “To be kind, understanding, docile … ”

(He was born Francis West, by the way. The un-military “Bing” was bestowed as a nickname by an aunt, taken with the fact that he was born on Bing Crosby’s birthday, May 3. Over the years the nickname lost its quotation marks and hardened into the real thing.)

A great-uncle and two uncles were Marines, as is West’s son, Owen — with whom West collaborated on a screenplay based on his second Iraq book, No True Glory. Harrison Ford has expressed interest in playing the starring role, but nothing is firm yet.

In Iraq sometimes, West said grinning, “after the troops have been in a fight, especially the Marines, they’ll turn to me and say, ‘How’d I do, sir?’ ” He laughed out loud. “It’s nice to have the old guy sitting on the football bench, you know?”

Does he see any conflict between his roles as advisor and journalist?

“Let me put it this way: I don’t see as a journalist that I stop being an American. I still want us to prevail, to crush al-Qaida. And if I have a notion about how to crush al-Qaida, I’ll tell my government how to do it, because I consider al-Qaida to be my enemy.

“But to say that I’m an advisor… they don’t go rushing out to ask Bing West. I don’t have that big an ego.”

Maybe not, but West is in the spotlight now in large part because he has the key to the strategy that has brought, if not victory, at least a major turnaround in Iraq. He spells it out in detail in The Strongest Tribe — the title of which was provided by an Iraqi colonel who remarked to West as they both watched a Marine patrol walk by, “You Americans are the strongest tribe.”

But he has possessed the key since 1972, hiding in plain sight in the pages of his Vietnam book, The Village. The need to move among the people, befriend them, bribe informants, become a good neighbor rather than a heavily-armed occupying force hiding behind concrete barriers and all the other tools that, in retrospect, seem so self-evident.

“The interesting thing is that all the captains, lieutenants and sergeants have read The Village,” West said. “I believe that when you get to a senior rank, you no longer have time to read. You really don’t. You just go with your accumulated experience. And many of the experiences of the generals were the central-front conflicts. The concept of the American way of war was the decisive battle. You bring the other side to the decisive battle and you win. That was the mindset that they went into Iraq with.

“But give them credit: even though for the first few years they were flailing around, as I say in the book, they’ve changed tactics, and it’s as if General Motors had changed its entire product line within a couple of years. That’s a pretty good turnaround.”

The book is getting favorable reviews, many reviewers citing West’s vivid descriptions of battle, Iraq-style. Like this one:

“Battlefields are primordial. Before the guns open up, tenseness pulses in the air. It’s like stepping outside just before a thunderstorm. The civilians sense it and get off the streets. When the firing starts, it’s almost comical to watch sergeants and lieutenants gesturing wildly, swinging their bodies in a primitive dance to direct their men, who can’t hear a thing. Troops move at top speed once they hear rounds cracking so close they know someone is aiming at them, not just throwing rounds downrange. Advancing a block or two, you see the bodies. Wounded Marines lie propped against walls out of the line of fire, corpsmen tightening bloody tourniquets while waiting for a Humvee to rush up. Luckless civilians lie crumpled in the streets and in cars. Someone will bury them when the battle swirls by.”

So now, with the war winding down, will “the old guy sitting on the bench” retire anytime soon?

Don’t count on it.

“I think I’ll have to go to Afghanistan next,” he said.

driggs@projo.com