I think that is interesting that Sabadabaloo and Rock have not signed up to fight in Iraq. Both believe it is a just and worhtwhile war against a dangerous opponent who will stop at nothing to destroy us. Why not help with the struggle to protect the homeland?
First of all I'm 48 years old.....not only can I NOT sign up, they don't want my old ass...believe me.
I'm doing my part by paying $35K+ a year in taxes, some of which I'm sure, goes to the war effort.
this is by far the stupidest argument ever. If you believe in health care for everyone then you should go to med-school, if you believe in housing for everyone, then you should be joining habitat for humanity, if you believe in lower carbon emissions then you should walk everywhere. Should I keep going?
I just think its interesting that you both are convinced that we are invovled in a epic struggle against a facistic and blood thirsty opponent who will stop at nothing to destroy our entire culture (as they are apparently already successfully doing in Europe) and you are not ready to sign up. Pat Tillman thought we needed to deal with the the threat. He gave up riches, celebrity and potential super bowl rings to fight against islamo facists. Homelessness, health care and environmental degradtation on the other hand are not out to destroy us. Why wouldn't you leap at the chance to stop them. Want a doorman too badly?
I think that is interesting that Sabadabaloo and Rock have not signed up to fight in Iraq. Both believe it is a just and worhtwhile war against a dangerous opponent who will stop at nothing to destroy us. Why not help with the struggle to protect the homeland?
First of all I'm 48 years old.....not only can I NOT sign up, they don't want my old ass...believe me.
I'm doing my part by paying $35K+ a year in taxes, some of which I'm sure, goes to the war effort.
this is by far the stupidest argument ever. If you believe in health care for everyone then you should go to med-school, if you believe in housing for everyone, then you should be joining habitat for humanity, if you believe in lower carbon emissions then you should walk everywhere. Should I keep going?
I just think its interesting that you both are convinced that we are invovled in a epic struggle against a facistic and blood thirsty opponent who will stop at nothing to destroy our entire culture (as they are apparently already successfully doing in Europe) and you are not ready to sign up. Pat Tillman thought we needed to deal with the the threat. He gave up riches, celebrity and potential super bowl rings to fight against islamo facists. Homelessness, health care and environmental degradtation on the other hand are not out to destroy us. Why wouldn't you leap at the chance to stop them. Want a doorman too badly?
My family came to the U.S. in the early 1900's and I am the first of 3 generations that did not serve in the Military. Besides ranting here, I've worked 25 years, 40 hours a week to clean up our environment and minimize pollution. In '04 I was awarded a patent for a device that reduces the amount of pesticide used in one specific area of application by 75% and in '05 it was approved for use by the EPA. I also have raised two children and instilled values that promote education and encourages them to work hard for what they want without looking for free hand outs from our government. I don't have a doorman but if I did I'd demand that he be an illegal alien and that his family get free health care and an education.
My family came to the U.S. in the early 1900's and I am the first of 3 generations that did not serve in the Military. Besides ranting here, I've worked 25 years, 40 hours a week to clean up our environment and minimize pollution. In '04 I was awarded a patent for a device that reduces the amount of pesticide used in one specific area of application by 75% and in '05 it was approved for use by the EPA. I also have raised two children and instilled values that promote education and encourages them to work hard for what they want without looking for free hand outs from our government. I don't have a doorman but if I did I'd demand that he be an illegal alien and that his family get free health care and an education.
I think that is interesting that Sabadabaloo and Rock have not signed up to fight in Iraq. Both believe it is a just and worhtwhile war against a dangerous opponent who will stop at nothing to destroy us. Why not help with the struggle to protect the homeland?
First of all I'm 48 years old.....not only can I NOT sign up, they don't want my old ass...believe me.
I'm doing my part by paying $35K+ a year in taxes, some of which I'm sure, goes to the war effort.
this is by far the stupidest argument ever. If you believe in health care for everyone then you should go to med-school, if you believe in housing for everyone, then you should be joining habitat for humanity, if you believe in lower carbon emissions then you should walk everywhere. Should I keep going?
I just think its interesting that you both are convinced that we are invovled in a epic struggle against a facistic and blood thirsty opponent who will stop at nothing to destroy our entire culture (as they are apparently already successfully doing in Europe) and you are not ready to sign up. Pat Tillman thought we needed to deal with the the threat. He gave up riches, celebrity and potential super bowl rings to fight against islamo facists. Homelessness, health care and environmental degradtation on the other hand are not out to destroy us. Why wouldn't you leap at the chance to stop them. Want a doorman too badly?
My family came to the U.S. in the early 1900's and I am the first of 3 generations that did not serve in the Military. Besides ranting here, I've worked 25 years, 40 hours a week to clean up our environment and minimize pollution. In '04 I was awarded a patent for a device that reduces the amount of pesticide used in one specific area of application by 75% and in '05 it was approved for use by the EPA. I also have raised two children and instilled values that promote education and encourages them to work hard for what they want without looking for free hand outs from our government. I don't have a doorman but if I did I'd demand that he be an illegal alien and that his family get free health care and an education.
So what do YOU do??
Rock, while I applaud your work with the environment. It does not change any of my feelings about warriors who will not war. In your case it is obvious that you yourself do not qualify to join the armed services. Fair enough. I offer a softball hypothetical then which is "if you could join up, would you?". As far a the doorman comment that was directed at our aspiring lawyer friend, savvy.
As for my do-gooder bona fides, which are beside the point since my comment about serving in the military has nothing to do with your commitment to a better world. Well, let's see. Until very recently, I was social worker. First, working for years with the chronically mentally ill (you know the guys standing on street corners screaming at Elvis to stop controlling them) as a vocational trainer and therapist. My job was to teach them job skills as both a therapeutic task and as a way to gain a measure monetary independence. After five years doing that I helped found a residential treatment program for gang affected youth. Mentally and physically exhaustd after working 80 hour weeks for several years (with no doorman in sight), I quit when my wife told me, "it's the job or me".
Still wanting to change the world I shifted my attentions to the sustainable development field. I worked with the county doing research on all manner of projects pertaining to sustainable materials and design. At the same time, I sat on the board of one the most advanced used building materials non-profit retail businesses in the world (think Goodwill but with 2x4s and old cabinets). The buisness generates over 2 million in sales while employing over 40 people in living wage jobs with benefits. We used the profits of the operation to initiate a community rebuilding process aimed at repairing the torn social fabric we all experience these days. The basic gist of the community development process is that we cannot expected gov'ts and other outside groups to solve our problems (isolation, violence, economic misery). By helping people connect with one another in their neighborhoods, they could band together to come up with much smarter and effective means of solving their own problems. I know this sounds a little right wingish but our years of working in the community lead us to believe that the status quo is not going to ameliorate these problems.
When an opportunity arose several years ago, I decided to go into the family real estate development business. These days I spend my time trying to grow the business. Being a capitalist has afforded me new avenues to explore my do-gooder tendencies. The building world is flush with people with problems. So my extensive backgorund in drug and alcohol treatment has come in quite handy, helping several employeess get treatment and still have a chance to make a living. Now that I have a young girl and another on the way I don't have nearly as much time to devote to the community but frankly my kids need me now.
Rock just so you know, I assume that you and I share more in values and interests than these last few weeks' posts might indicate. People here say your good people. I believe that. I don't want this to get lost in a heated debate about politics. We simply disagree about invading Iraq. Now, do us all a favor and buy Sababaloo a copy of James Risen's new book on Bush and the CIA so he can finish his goddam homework assignment.
I just think its interesting that you both are convinced that we are invovled in a epic struggle against a facistic and blood thirsty opponent who will stop at nothing to destroy our entire culture (as they are apparently already successfully doing in Europe) and you are not ready to sign up. Pat Tillman thought we needed to deal with the the threat. He gave up riches, celebrity and potential super bowl rings to fight against islamo facists. Homelessness, health care and environmental degradtation on the other hand are not out to destroy us. Why wouldn't you leap at the chance to stop them. Want a doorman too badly?
Dr. Wu,
This is an evasion. Would you agree with the arguments about the nature of the threat had it come from a soldier? More important the chickenhawk line essentially says that only people serving or having served in the military are qualified to have opinions on war and peace. That is a feature of spartan, non-democratic societies.
Evading what? You actually have it backward. My questioning of the their positions had to do with the facts, not their willingness to serve. It is only after prolonged debate that I began to see these guys as "true believers". As I said, I am "curious", based upon their stated beliefs, why they haven't joined up. All through Vietnam and right after 9/11 thousands of Americans joined the armed services to fight a mortal enemy. This seems like a logical step for someone who feels this way. Consequently, it is very reasonable to ask Rock and Sababaloo where they stand on joining up.
"Rock just so you know, I assume that you and I share more in values and interests than these last few weeks' posts might indicate. People here say your good people. I believe that. I don't want this to get lost in a heated debate about politics. We simply disagree about invading Iraq."[/b]
I'll cosign on this and even though we disagree I respect your right to have your opinion, and unlike some others here, you appear to respect mine as well. I lost a childhood friend at the WTC which probably makes me biased. I don't think Bush and his folks have handled the war well, and I certainly don't agree with him on MANY issues. War sucks...always has, always will. But when your enemy doesn't play by the/any rules, almost any action you take can backfire.
As far as people saying that I'm "good people", I appreciate that but I'll ask you to judge for yourself.
And as far as your hypothetical question I'll answer it this way.....
I have two teen-age children and while I'm not going to encourage them to join the Military, if they make that decision I'll support it 100% and will be proud of their decision.
"Rock just so you know, I assume that you and I share more in values and interests than these last few weeks' posts might indicate. People here say your good people. I believe that. I don't want this to get lost in a heated debate about politics. We simply disagree about invading Iraq."[/b]
I'll cosign on this and even though we disagree I respect your right to have your opinion, and unlike some others here, you appear to respect mine as well. I lost a childhood friend at the WTC which probably makes me biased. I don't think Bush and his folks have handled the war well, and I certainly don't agree with him on MANY issues. War sucks...always has, always will. But when your enemy doesn't play by the/any rules, almost any action you take can backfire.
As far as people saying that I'm "good people", I appreciate that but I'll ask you to judge for yourself.
And as far as your hypothetical question I'll answer it this way.....
I have two teen-age children and while I'm not going to encourage them to join the Military, if they make that decision I'll support it 100% and will be proud of their decision.
Fair enough. Now where is Sababaloo with his homework?
We talk. They fought. Sunday, January 08, 2006 HARRY ESTEVE In the political uproar over the war in Iraq, it's easy to miss the voices of those who served there.
Yet some of the grittiest, most clear-eyed assessments can be heard from the soldiers, Marines and airmen who saw the war as it happened and came home to talk about it.
For that kind of ground-level view, The Oregonian interviewed a Marine who was awarded a Bronze Star after an intense firefight during the 2004 occupation of Fallujah; an Oregon Air National Guard major who left his job as mayor of Monmouth to direct airstrikes against insurgents near the Syrian border; and an Army reservist who interrupted his business management career to walk the streets of Mosul with a backpack full of cash, paying Iraqi contractors to rebuild schools and bridges.
The questions were basic: What did you do in Iraq, and do you think it did any good -- that it helped end terrorism and make the country a more stable, more secure place?
The answers, which lie at the heart of the nation-splitting debate over U.S. policy, are more complex.
The three witnessed violence, up close and from afar, and saw the reaction in the faces of Iraqis and on nightly newscasts beamed around the world. They participated in hands-on humanitarian and rebuilding efforts. They encountered joyful hospitality, open hostility, desperation and hope.
Their conclusions reflect the same range of pride, conflict and anger that grips the nation about the war.
Marine Staff Sgt. Dennis Nash
If Marine Staff Sgt. Dennis Nash has any doubts, they don't crack the rigid, all-business expression on his face.
After two tours of duty in Iraq, both of which involved intense combat, he came home more certain than ever that the war not only is justified but also is making the post-9/11 world safer.
We talk. They fought. Page 2 of 4 "If we weren't dealing with the terrorists and insurgents and making a stand over there," he says, "it would only be a matter of time before we start seeing the exact same kind of attacks on a regular basis right here in the United States."
Nash, 30, now a recruiter at a Marine center in Beaverton, led a squad of Marines into some of the fiercest battles of the war. He first went to Iraq in April 2003, less than a month after the initial invasion, as a member of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, based at Camp LeJeune, N.C. He went back in June 2004 with Charlie Co., 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment.
"I pretty much begged to go with the next designated unit," Nash says. It was dangerous, thrilling and, he believes, necessary duty.
Nash fits the Marine image impeccably. Most of his sentences end in "sir," a clutch of medals gleams from his freshly pressed uniform, he makes eye contact with a fiery stare.
On Nov. 9, 2004, his platoon swarmed into Fallujah, a stronghold for the insurgency. What happened next earned Nash the Bronze Star for heroism.
Nash's squad "came under withering insurgent machine gun fire, cutting them off from the rest of the platoon," according to the medal citation. Nash led his men to safety in an empty building. "From the roof of the building, he spotted an enemy sniper, engaged him with accurate fire and eliminated him."
Taking Fallujah, Nash says, was a huge move forward in the war. Insurgents lost a base of operations, and, once rebuilding got under way, local residents regained confidence that their lives would improve, he says.
"It saved a lot of lives, both Iraqi civilian and American."
Apart from the combat missions, one of Nash's most vivid memories is seeing a young girl, barefoot, crossing frozen ground to find drinking water for her family. Nash, who has four daughters, ordered his troops to bring supplies to her family, who were huddled in a two-room apartment.
"They tried to invite us all in for tea," he says, emphasizing that it was common reaction among Iraqi people. "I wish the press would show more about the positive side."
Air Force Maj. Paul Evans
The war should never have been fought and has gone badly from Day One, says Air Force Maj. Paul Evans, a disarmingly candid expert in aircraft tracking systems.
Yet, Evans, part of the Oregon Air Guard's 728th Air Control Squadron, served voluntarily and without complaint when asked -- twice. His unit tracked tactical aircraft in Iraq and directed airstrikes from an outpost in Baghdad.
"My job as air battle manager is to break things and kill people," he says. He says his unit did both with all the efficiency modern weaponry offers.
The effect? Not much good that Evans can discern, making clear that he keeps his opinions separate from the National Guard. What he saw was a further descent into chaos and unchecked violence, and a nation that poses more of a threat now than it did before the war.
Evans, 35, views the war from two perspectives -- as a civic leader, based on his two terms as mayor of Monmouth, a small college town west of Salem, and as a warrior, with 13 years in the military.
He saw missed opportunities daily, whether it was the failure to protect key power and water sources or treating locals with suspicion or derision rather than respect.
Evans knows the Persian Gulf well. Shortly before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he was stationed in Kuwait, monitoring air traffic over the Iraq border, where U.S. jets patrolled the "no-fly zone."
"I can tell you without a doubt, Iraq was contained," Evans says, despite President Bush's assertion that it had become the new frontline of the war on terror. "I'm actually offended by that because I spent a good part of my life working to make sure that wasn't the case."
Invading was the first major error, Evans says. The next came when the Pentagon set troop levels at about half the early recommendations of 300,000 or so.
The smaller force was enough to rout Saddam Hussein and his Republican Guard, but not nearly enough to provide the broad-based security that would have stifled the insurgency, restored power, water and other basics and kept Iraq from tumbling into the violent nightmare it has become.
"You can't have democracy without security. But security doesn't mean Abrams tanks in the streets," Evans says. "It means Mom and Dad being able to go to the grocery store without being bombed."
To understand how we got to where we are in Iraq you need to look at the planning put into the war and what the Administration did and expected to happen in the immediate postwar/reconstruction period. When you look into the matter the findings are shocking.
1st the President was absent from almost all of the planning. Bush thought Saddam was bad and wanted him out, other than that he really took no part in the war plans and didn???t even know anything about Iraq itself. His National Security Advisor Rice, whose job it is to manage the National Security Council, was completely ineffective as a manager. The Bush administration was split in two between the pro-war faction of Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and the neoconservatives versus Powell???s State Department. Cheney, Rumsfeld and the neoconservatives were able to make an end-run around Rice and Powell through their various positions throughout the administration bureaucracy that skipped the normal chain of command and communication networks. Rather than stop this, Rice let it happen for the most part.
When you look into the actual plans for Iraq it gets even worse. The general position of Cheney and the neoconservatives was that this was going to be a quick war. Americans would be welcomed as liberators and Iraqi exiles, especially Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress (INC), would take over the governing of Iraq. Rumsfeld didn???t even want to plan for after the war. Even when the Pentagon set up its own organization to take care of postwar Iraq it was given no money and attention. Basically, Iraq was suppose to take care of itself after Saddam was overthrown.
When looting broke out after hostilities the leaders back in Washington were congratulating themselves over a quick victory rather than paying attention to what was happening on the ground. It took the administration a month to figure out that things in Iraq weren???t going as well as they had thought. By then, most of Iraq???s infrastructure had been stripped by looting, there was widespread crime and murder, and the insurgency had started against the U.S. This is the story of how the U.S. lost the peace they had just won.
A Divided Administration[/b]
From the beginning of the Bush presidency, his national security staff had been divided in two between Colin Powell and the State Department on one side and Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and the neoconservatives on the other. It was the job of National Security Advisor Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley, who was himself a neoconservative, to manage these opposing views and personalities. Instead, Rice was only interested in her relationship with the president and was never able to stop the bickering and in fighting in the administration. Powell, his deputy Richard Armitage and Paul O???Neill, Bush???s first Secretary of the Treasure all called Rice???s management ???dysfunctional.??? Right from the beginning then, the Bush administration had no coordinated plan for Iraq as the Pentagon, Cheney???s office, and the State Department all did their own thing. Bush himself was completely out of the loop. He wanted Saddam removed and left the details to his divided staff.
The neoconservatives had a decided advantage in this internal battle since they occupied key positions throughout the national security staff and would often communicate directly with each other rather than go to their superiors or follow the normal channels of command and communication between agencies. In the Pentagon there was Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone, Undersecretary of Defense for Near East and South Asia William Luti, and Abraham Shulsky and David Wurmser in the Pentagon???s Office of Net Assessment. Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman and James Woolsey were also on the Defense Policy Board, which advised the Pentagon. In Cheney???s office there was the Chief of Staff was I. Lewis Libby and Cheney???s Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs John Hannah. In the National Security Council there was Rice???s deputy Hadley, Middle East director Elliot Abrams, and Zalmay Khalilzad who would become the president???s liaison with Iraqi exiles and later Ambassador to Afghanistan and the current Ambassador to Iraq.
How Not To Plan For A War[/b]
Since the Pentagon was out front in pushing for war it felt that the Iraq operation was its baby. Thomas White, Secretary of the Army until after the invasion said, ???With DOD [Department of Defense] the first issue was, we???ve got to control this thing ??? so everyone else is suspect. And the second thing was, we had the mind-set this would be a relatively straight-forward manageable task, because this would be a war of liberation and therefore the reconstruction would be short-lived.??? White continued, ???Their view was almost theological in nature ??? that it was going to go the way they said it was going to go.???
The main goal of the Pentagon staff was starting and planning a war. Nothing else mattered. Rumsfeld refused to consider the postwar situation. To him, what happened after the war was someone else???s responsibility. To Wolfowitz and the neoconservatives, they believed that Iraqis, especially the exiles they were close to such as Ahmad Chalabis??? Iraqi National Congress, would take over Iraq after the war. Either way, postwar planning was not important and even considered a detriment to the more important war phase.
People who spoke up or questioned the leadership were reprimanded and eventually forced out of office. The examples of these casualties are well known. First there was the issue of the cost of the war. Because the war planners thought conquering Iraq would be so easy the Office Of Management and Budget only asked Congress for $2.5 billion in reconstruction funds in April 2002. In September 2002 however, Bush???s economic advisor Lawrence Lindsay told the Wall Street Journal that the war and occupation of Iraq could cost up to $200 billion. He was fired at the end of the month.
Another issue was how many troops would be needed to occupy Iraq. On 2/25/03 General Shinseki, Army Chief of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that several hundred thousand soldiers would be needed to do the job. Immediately after the hearing Wolfowitz called up Secretary White to complain. Wolfowitz later told the House Budget Committee that Shinseki was ???way off the mark.??? Wolfowitz would later confront Shinseki over his testimony. Afterwards an Air Force officer said, ???After seeing Wolfowitz chew down a four-star, I don???t think anyone was going to raise their head up and make a stink about it [the war plans].??? Like Lindsay, Shinseki was later forced out. People in the bureaucracy and military got the message that if they spoke up it would be professional suicide.
Later Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz forbade the Pentagon from making estimates about the cost of the war. They repeatedly said that since wars were uncertain, they couldn???t make predictions about their costs. Wolfowitz told the House Budget Committee on 2/27/03, ???Fundamentally, we have no idea what is needed unless and until we get there on the ground.??? Eight days into the war, Wolfowitz told the House Appropriations Committee that Iraqi oil would pay for reconstruction of the country. Various oil experts said this was not possible, but the Pentagon wasn???t listening to anyone outside of their own circle.
Rumsfeld also expressed his disdain for postwar operations in mid-February 2003 in a speech in New York entitled ???Beyond Nation Building.??? In that speech he said that Iraq would be like Afghanistan with few troops and little commitment afterwards. Like Bush claimed in his run for the presidency, this administration would be against nation building and untidy peacekeeping operations. Rums
feld would have none of that in Iraq. To make his point clear the Office of Stability and Peace Operations in the Pentagon that was in charge of peacekeeping was not included in the Iraq war plans and their memos were ignored.
In September 2002 the Pentagon created the Office of Special Plans (OSP) under Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of Defense of Policy and William Luti, Undersecretary of Defense of Near East and South Asia. Abram Shulsky from the Pentagon???s Office of Net Assessment was put in charge of running the Office. All three were neoconservatives who had been pushing for war with Iraq since the end of the first Gulf War. OSP was supposed to manage information about Iraq and control policy out of the Pentagon. The OSP brought in Middle East experts to plan for postwar Iraq. All of them were neoconservatives who shared the same view that Iraqis would greet the Americans as liberators and that the war would be the beginning of bringing democracy to the entire Middle East.
The actual planning for the war was the responsibility of General Franks and the Pentagon???s Central Command (CENTCOM). The initial plans were based upon the first Gulf War and called for a fighting force of up to 400,000+ soldiers. Rumsfeld felt that this was the ???old thinking??? of the U.S. military that he was trying to change with his military modernization program. Rumsfeld was about military transformation using high-tech internet connections, precision guided bombs, etc. This was going to be a ???Shock and Awe??? campaign, therefore Rumsfeld only wanted to send in 75,000 troops. Beginning in November 2002 he began cutting units one by one from the deployment orders. Eventually Rumsfeld and General Franks agreed upon a force of 160,000 to enter Iraq after many objections over the cuts.
Franks himself only had one plan for the war. The Iraqi government would be quickly overthrown, security would be turned over to the Iraqi police and army, international peacekeepers would arrive, and U.S. soldiers would be home in a few months. Rumsfeld and Franks both agreed that there was no need to plan for after the actual fighting. It was part of U.S. military doctrine that when the enemy was defeated, the only thing that needed to be done was go home. By March 203 as the invasion was about to begin CENTCOM and the Pentagon had no postwar plans for the troops.
Retired Genearl Zinni, who had been in charge of CENTCOM before Franks had drawn up plans for Iraqi reconstruction in 1998 called ???Desert Crossing.??? He called up the Pentagon and told them they ought to look into it, but he was told that it was discredited because it had been drawn up during the Clinton administration. The Bush administration would have nothing to do with it. Franks actually tried to contact Zinni once before the war about Iraq but was stopped by Rumsfeld???s office.
The civilian leadership at the Pentagon even stopped active duty generals from participated in their Iraq plans. A few months before the war started there was a planning session at the Pentagon. General Abizaid, director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was waiting outside when he was told he couldn???t take part.
On 1/10/03 3 Iraqi exiles including Kanan Makiya who had written a famous book Republic of Fear about Saddam???s dictatorship, met with Bush, Cheney, Rice and Zhalmay Khalilzad, the president???s liaison with Iraqi exiles. Bush didn???t seem to know anything about Iraq, and while one exile warned of possible problems after the war like civil disorder, Makiya assured Bush, ???People will greet [American] troops with sweets and flowers.??? Cheney and others would use this idea as they told the U.S. public and press that the Americans would be welcomed in the streets of Iraq as liberators not occupiers.
Counter Ideas About Postwar Iraq[/b]
The main opponent of the Pentagon???s plans, or lack thereof for Iraq, was the State Department. Beginning as early as October 2001 State had begun planning for postwar Iraq. In March 2002 they announced the creation of the Future of Iraq Project led by Tom Warrick. Working with Iraqi exiles, the Project produced 1000s of pages compiled into 13 volumes on major issues that could fact Iraq after a war. Specifically, two reports warned of the problems following a conflict. One said, ???The removal of Saddam???s regime will provide a power vacuum and create popular anxieties about the viability of all Iraqi institutions.??? The U.S. needed to quickly fill this power void. Another report warned, ???The period immediately after regime change might offer these criminals the opportunity to engage in acts of killing, plunder and looting.??? Security and law and order were therefore of first priority. Because the Pentagon was in charge of the war effort however and were opposed to Powell and the State Department all of these reports were shelved until Congress asked to see them when things had gone wrong after the invasion.
The CIA also became involved in postwar Iraq planning in late May 2002. They carried out a series of gaming situations to look into possible scenarios that might occur after the war. One recurring theme was the threat of civil disorder. They also didn???t think a quick turnover of political sovereignty to Iraqis was possible because of the deep seated rivalries within the Iraqi populace and the lack of political culture after years of dictatorship. The Pentagon initially joined in on these planning sessions, but when Rumsfeld found out in the Summer of 2002 he forbid Pentagon personnel from participating. Iraq was suppose to be the Pentagon???s show and no one else???s.
Beginning on 7/31/02 the Senate Foreign relations Committee began its own investigations into what Iraq would be like after a war. They were told that an occupation would be a longterm commitment for U.S. forces and that they needed to ensure public safety immediately after the fighting was over. An Iraqi exile warned, ???The system of public security will break down, because there will be no functioning police force, no civil service, and no justice.??? On the first day after fighting, ???There will be a vacuum of political authority and administrative authority. The infrastructure of vital sectors will have to be restored. An adequate police force must be trained and equipped as quickly as possible. And the economy will have to be jump-started.???
In September 2002 the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) began its planning sessions. They contacted various Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and relief groups and held weekly meetings. On October 12, 2002 this was named the Iraq Working Group. An odd thing happened at these meetings however. The NGO???s kept on coming up with ideas about refugees and looting and comparing postwar Iraq to Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo and other countries, and the USAID officials would just look at them and not respond. ???We would tell them stuff, and they would nod and say, Everything???s under control. ??? They were there just to dribble out the clock but be able to say they???d consulted with us,??? said Joel Charny of Refugees International. The NGOs never heard anything back from USAID about their plans, couldn???t meet with higher officials, but were told that Iraq would be different than those other countries because the Americans would be greeted as liberators. It seemed that USAID had gotten the memo from the Pentagon about staying on message. By January 2003 the NGOs who had been meeting with USAID got fed up with the lack of action and began making public warnings about the breakdown of law and order in Iraq after the war. USAID still kept to the rosy forecast when on 4/23/03 while Iraq was being looted and sporadic attacks had already started against U.S. troops, a spokesman went on Nightline and told Ted Koppel rebuilding Iraq would only cost $1.7 billion. When questioned about this figure USAID said that the rest would be paid for by other countries.
In that same month of September, Rice tried to
manage the interagency squabbling over Iraq by forming 4 working groups. The group responsible for postwar planning said that reconstructing Iraq would only cost $50-$60 million. The low figure was based upon the assumption that Iraqi oil would pay for reconstruction and that Iraq???s infrastructure would be in tact and working after the war.
In October 2002, Rice was offered some outside help with planning. The Council on Foreign Relations contacted her and her deputy Stephen Hadley about forming a consortium with the Heritage Foundation and the Center for Strategic and International Studies that could provide expert advise and reports to the administration on Iraq. Rice agreed to the idea, but said that the Heritage foundation couldn???t take part because it had questioned the need for war. Instead she suggested using the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank dominated by neoconservatives. On 11/15/02 representatives from the three think tanks met with Rice and Hadley at the White House. When the topic of helping with postwar plans was brought up however, the American Enterprise Institute objected. ???This is nation building, and you said you were against that. In the campaign you said it, the president has said it. Does he know you???re doing this? Does Karl Rove know???? That was the end of that idea. Two weeks later Hadley called up the Council on Foreign Relations and said thanks but no thanks for the help.
The Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the RAND Corporation, the Army War College, and others all ended up writing their own reports on the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. All said that a large peacekeeping force and ensuring security were essential. None of these reports effected the administration. Rice couldn???t even manage the National Security Council as her four working groups failed due to rivalries within the administration.
Control of Postwar Iraq[/b]
On 1/20/03 President Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive No. 24 giving the Pentagon, instead of the traditional State Department, control of postwar Iraq. The directive also created the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA). Rumsfeld picked former general Jay Garner to head the new office.
In early February ORHA opened offices in the Pentagon right below the Office of Special Plans (OSP), which was in charge of Iraq planning within the Defense Department. However there was hardly any communication between the two. ???OSP had as little do with us as possible,??? said Army Colonel Paul Hughes, ORHA???s chief of planning. ???It was a pain in the ass just to get them to open the door up there,??? he continued. OSP gave one PowerPoint slide show to ORHA and that was the end of their interaction. OSP didn???t mind policing ORHA though. When Hughes suggested drawing up a political-military plan for Iraq, Douglas Feith who was in charge of OSP stopped it.
As part of the early planning Garner broke down the postwar operations into 3 categories: humanitarian assistance, reconstruction and civil administration. Humanitarian planning was the only part that was given serious consideration. Garner said this was because he was never given much money to work with and the Pentagon didn???t seem to care about the other 2. For example, during a planning session with CENTCOM postwar looting was brought up, but the CENTCOM officers said they couldn???t talk about that. Not only that, OHRA had little information about the internal working of Iraq anyways such as what Iraq???s ministries did so they didn???t plan for how to make them work after the war.
A decisive decision OHRA did make was the awarding of Halliburton a secret $7 billion no-bid contract to rebuild Iraq???s oil fields. Michael Mobbs Chief of Civil Administration made this decision. Mobbs only other notable action was a rambling presentation on Iraqi oil to the National Security Council. After that he flew to Iraqi Kurdistan to meet with Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress and wasn???t heard of again by his staff.
In March 2003 Garner tried to hire Tom Warrick who had headed the State Department???s Future of Iraq Project. Rumsfeld told Garner he couldn???t hire Warrick because Cheney hated him since Warrick was skeptical of the war. This would set a pattern where the Pentagon would block State Department officials from joining OHRA, often by denying them the necessary clearance.
One State Department official that did get a job with OHRA was career diplomat Barbara Bodine who was appointed administrator of Central Iraq. The first time she met with Wolfowitz to talk about her job, he asked whether the U.S. shouldn???t redraw all of Iraq???s provinces as if the country was new territory. She later met with Rumsfeld and told him that paying Iraq???s civil servants immediately after the war would help stop resistance to the U.S. Rumsfeld said that it was not important and that they could get paid in a couple weeks if not months after the invasion. When Bodine brought up the possibility of disorder in Iraq???s cities, Rumsfeld said Europe could be persuaded to send in peacekeepers and deal with it. It was not the U.S.???s problem.
In February 2003 the Pentagon formed its own group of Iraqi exiles. They met with Wolfowitz in Michigan and were called the Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council. Already, in 2002 the Pentagon had begun interviewing Iraqi exiles. If they didn???t support the Iraqi National Congress (INC) the Pentagon cut off their support. The new Council were given offices in Virginia just outside of Washington where they broke up into groups to handle the different ministries for a transitional Iraqi government. This project was not coordinated with OHRA. Eventually, Wolfowitz would have these officials flown into Iraq after the invasion to help out with the administration of the country.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP) at the Pentagon had also come up with the idea of sending in Ahmad Chalabi with 6000 INC fighters with the U.S. forces as they invaded Iraq. Camps were set up in Hungary to train the troops but only 70 showed up. Long after the war, Chalabi and various neoconservatives would blame the looting in Iraq on the State Department for not creating this force of Iraqi exiles. They forgot to mention that this was a Pentagon plan that never materialized.
In early March Rice tried to reassert her authority over Iraq planning. She was tired of the OSP who were good at infighting but never came up with any plans for Iraq. Rice pushed aside the OSP and created her own agency under Frank Miller. This was only days before the invasion. Miller briefed the National Security Council and Bush on postwar plans. He said that de-Baathificatin would get rid of the top 1% of party members from government jobs, the Iraqi army would be cut and used for public works, and an interim government would be set up. The White House approved these plans, but no one in the Pentagon, OSP, OHRA, or the military in Kuwait waiting to go into Iraq were told of the plans.
Garner didn???t want instructions from the White House anyways. He had his own ideas. Garner said of the White House that it was, ???At best disruptive. They were a pain in the ass. Whatever we were doing, they were trying to achieve the opposite. From my side of it, they were determined to make sure it [postwar planning for Iraq] failed. That???s a strong statement, but they did everything they could to cause us [OHRA] problems.???
Garner would run into his own problems when he gave his one and only press conference before flying to Kuwait. He was asked whether the U.S. would hand over power to Ahmad Chalabi and the INC. He said no. Immediately afterwards he was called several times by Douglas Feith and told that his comments had damaged the INC and embarrassed Chalabi. Garner told Feith why didn???t he call his own press conference and say that the U.S. was going to put Chalabi in power. Feith said
he couldn???t do that. Garner told him, ???Then get off my ass.??? Garner wasn???t allowed another press conference by the Pentagon on orders of the White House, probably meaning Cheney???s office.
After that Garner and OHRA were on a tight leash. Feith sent 2 Pentagon officials to oversee OHRA and help Chalabi in Iraq. Rumsfeld???s own spokesman Larry Di Rita was assigned to follow Garner everywhere. OHRA officials felt like the Pentagon was spying on them so they stayed in line with the administration???s message about Iraq.
Off To Kuwait[/b]
On 3/16/03 the OHRA staff flew to Kuwait. There Garner and his inner circle of advisors disappeared into their hotel rooms where no one saw them for 2 days. Garner had almost no contact with his staff even after that. OHRA couldn???t even get phones and Pentagon officials usually shut out the State Department at meetings leading to little serious work. During its short existence, OHRA had only come up with one document, ???A Unified Mission Plan for Post-Hostilities Iraq.??? The document was never sent back to Washington for approval so it wasn???t even official. It said that the plan was for the U.S. to be out of Iraq by August 2003. Iraq???s utilities would be rebuilt, ministries would be reformed, an interim government would be appointed, a constitution would be written, elections held, and then Iraq would govern itself. Garner also got the approval of Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith that the Iraqi army would be kept in place to help with reconstruction. Garner said he was going to work for 90 days and then go home. There was one little problem with this plan. It was never communicated to the general staff of OHRA or listened to by others. Rice wasn???t the only one standing atop a dysfunctional bureaucracy.
Whether Garner was really in control anyways, was beginning to be questioned by his staff because of the presence of Rumsfeld???s spokesperson Di Rita. In early April 2003 a USAID member said that the U.S. needed to show early success to win over the Iraqis to which Di Rita replied, ???We don???t owe the people of Iraq anything. We???re giving them their freedom. That???s enough.??? A few days later Di Rita got up during a staff meeting and said the State Department had screwed up Bosnia and Kosovo and the Pentagon wasn???t going to the same thing in Iraq, ???We???re going to stand up an interim Iraqi government, hand power over to them, and get out of there in three to four months. All but twenty-five thousand soldiers will be out by the beginning of September.??? These ideas of course, came from Rumsfeld, but this was the first time OHRA heard them.
As if this wasn???t enough, officials from the Office of Special Plans (OSP) showed up in Kuwait. OHRA felt like they were further spies from the Pentagon to keep tabs on them. The OSP hardly told anyone what they were doing anyways, although some stayed with the INC and pushed for an interim government led by Chalabi.
The War Begins and Chaos Follows[/b]
On the 2nd day of the war, a USAID contractor for ORHA asked some military officers in Kuwait what the plan was for policing Iraq. He found out there was no plan. ORHA was suppose to take care of that but no one told them.
The war progressed quickly and by 4/9/03 the U.S. took Baghdad, and on 4/14/03 the Pentagon announced that the fighting was over. On 5/1/03 Bush made his famous speech that the mission was accomplished in Iraq. As soon as the war ended however, looting broke out throughout Iraq. Rumsfeld famously told a press conference, ???Stuff happens and it???s untidy, and freedom???s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes, and commit crimes and do bad things.??? It seemed like Rumsfeld thought that robbing and stealing were ok after living under Saddam. This was an expression of freedom to him. U.S. soldiers in Iraq were never given orders after fighting ceased so they just stood around and watched. The Ministry of Oil was the only location protected by U.S. forces.
Later, Garner would tell PBS??? Frontline that they expected the Iraqi police to fall apart after the war. OHRA had signed contracts with the State and Justice Departments to train new policy forces, but that would take time. When asked why the U.S. just didn???t send in more military or foreign police, Garner said he???d never thought of it. The police weren???t a priority anyway and it was never given money. Not only that, but the contracts for rebuilding the police weren???t even signed until a month after the war ended. In fact, 10 out of 13 major reconstruction projects were not signed until May 2003.
The looting quickly turned violent as organized gangs joined in. Carjackings, kidnappings, rapes, murders, revenge killings of Baathists, and sporadic attacks on Americans all began. Later, the U.S. would estimate that the looting cost $12 billion, the entire projected revenue of Iraq for the 1st year after the war. The looting caused more actual damage to Iraq than the U.S. bombing during the war did.
As things were going to hell in Iraq, Garner couldn???t??? even go there because General Franks wouldn???t give him permission. On 4/21/03 Garner finally flew into Baghdad. He was stunned by the looting. The next day he flew to Iraqi Kurdistan to meet for a few days with Iraqi exiles about forming an interim government. The plan was for the Pentagon organized exiles plus some Iraqis from within the country to form the government. Chalabi and Shiite leader al-Hakim of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution of Iraq however objected and killed the plan. They didn???t want anyone new to join because that would challenge their leadership.
Already, Chalabi was getting a head start on his rivals. Without telling the White House, the Pentagon flew Chalabi and 700 fighters with U.S. uniforms and weapons into Iraq. The idea was for them to get to Baghdad where they could set up shop and take over. Instead, the INC began seizing documents, snatching up prime property, and joined in on the looting.
The CIA were opposed to the Pentagon???s plans and the INC. They put together a meeting with OHRA, the U.S. general in charge of ground forces in Iraq General McKiernan, and 15-20 leading Iraqis from Baghdad. The Iraqis asked for martial law to restore order. McKiernan said he couldn???t do that. While the meeting was going on, some INC gunmen stole the host of the meeting???s car.
McKiernan, like Franks, had no place for postwar ideas. He had told his officers not to think about what would happen after the conflict because it would only distract from the actual war plans. Faced with the chaos in the country, McKiernan declared the U.S. the military authority in Iraq to stop the looting on 4/19/03. When the order was relayed to the State Department, they were surprised to find out that this was the first legal responsibility of an occupying power under the Geneva Conventions. No one had checked before hand. Rumsfeld and Franks didn???t support the order because they didn???t want the U.S. to be responsible for Iraq. Rumsfeld had already cancelled deployment of an additional division to Iraq and gave orders for the beginning of U.S. withdrawal by mid-April. OHRA, not the military was supposed to take care of these matters.
OHRA was having its own problems at the time. Because of the looting and violence, OHRA officials couldn???t leave their offices in Baghdad without military escort, but because there were so few troops they could hardly be accommodated. That meant they stayed in their offices isolated from the rest of Iraq for most of the time. They didn???t have enough translators anyways and didn???t know much about how Iraq worked.
The Office of Management and Budget was determined to keep OHRA???s budget to a minimum as well because the White House had said that Iraqi reconstruction would be cheap. As a result, OHRA was only given $25,000 to rebuild Iraq???s administration. This wasn???t even in cash, but rather a
grant that took weeks to be approved.
Meanwhile Garner had returned from Kurdistan and held a meeting with 350 Iraqis in Baghdad. The meeting had no agenda. An Iraqi exile gave a speech about the need for a constitutional democracy, but all the questions were about the chaos in Iraq. A tribal sheikh said, ???I have no running water, no electricity, no security ??? and you are talking about a constitution???? Another asked, ???Who???s in charge of our politics???? Garner told him, ???You???re in charge.??? There was a gasp in the audience. An American present said, ???They were losing faith in us by the second.??? The Iraqis expected the U.S. to be running things after the invasion and here they were told they were suppose to do it themselves. Garner later claimed that this meeting was a success and the beginning of Iraqi democracy.
Chaos was spreading in Iraq as Baathists joined in on the looting to undermine the U.S. and attacks on Americans increased. Officials in OHRA were sending warnings back to Washington that things were not going well, but no one seemed to get the message. The main supporters of the war were having parties and congratulating themselves over the easy victory over Saddam. Suddenly, on 5/6/03 Bush announced that Paul Bremer would take over from Garner. A State Department official believed that it was Tony Blair who told Bush that something needed to be done in Iraq and that a change was necessary.
On 5/9/03 the U.S. and England formally presented a draft resolution to the U.N. Security Council to be the occupying powers of Iraq. Rumsfeld changed his tune and said that U.S. troops would stay in Iraq as long as it took to secure the country. At the same time Pentagon officials began discussing permanent military bases in Iraq.
On 5/12/03 Rumsfeld took Garner to the White House to meet Bush. Garner read a memo saying that Iraq was rebuilding and was just a few weeks away from full recovery. Cheney and Rice came in half way through the meeting. Bush thanked Garner for all his work and at the end joked, ???You want to do Iran for the next one???? No one asked a single question about what was going on Iraq the whole time.
OHRA was quickly merged into the new Coalition Provisional Authority and Bremer disbanded the Iraq army, fired the top four levels of Baath party officials from government, disarmed the INC, and ended the formation of an Iraqi interim government. When U.S. Army commanders realized that they would have to stay in Iraq for occupation duties they asked for postwar plans of operation. They were told there were none. By May 2003 there were already 20 attacks on U.S. forces a day. Without any counterinsurgency program, U.S. forces would set up roadblocks and go on patrol. When attacked they responded. They also had sporadic and uncoordinated rebuilding programs by individual units and commanders. That was the plan to fight the burgeoning insurgency, which at this time the administration denied existed. At the time, a senior administration official told Time, ???We have a month to [turn things around]??? before Iraq exploded. The U.S. never did gain control and we???re paying the price to this day.
Bush thanked Garner for all his work and at the end joked, ???You want to do Iran for the next one????
haha. so not funny. havent been keeping up with the thread, so i dont know if yall touched on ran, but the situation is ugly. we can do nothing about it either. and our little iraq escapade undoubtedly influenced the election of the new nutball they got leading things. sanctions arent going to be agreed to by russia, china or most of europe. we dont know where their nuclear spots are. they got a much bigger army than iraw ever did not pretty
The Mess - New York Review Of Books By Peter W. Galbraith
My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope by L. Paul Bremer III with Malcolm McConnell
Simon and Schuster, 417 pp., $27.00 The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq by George Packer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 467 pp., $26.00 1.
Late last month Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite leader in Baghdad, traveled to Tehran to confer with his Iranian sponsors, who help pay for his ten-thousand-man private militia, the Mahdi Army. Commenting on the impending crisis between the United States and Iran over Iran's nuclear program, al-Sadr said, "If neighboring Islamic countries, including Iran, become the target of attacks, we will support them. The Mahdi Army is beyond the Iraqi Army. It was established to defend Islam."
Moqtada al-Sadr is the son of a revered Iraqi Shiite ayatollah. Still in his early thirties, he commands the loyalty of millions of impoverished Iraqi Shiites. On April 10, 2003, his followers seized Majid al-Khoie, a senior Shiite cleric with strong liberal convictions, in the Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf. The crowd dragged al-Khoie to al-Sadr, who allegedly ordered him killed. The American occupation government in Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), issued a warrant for al-Sadr's arrest, but the US military refused to enforce it.
From a band of some six hundred in the summer of 2003, the Mahdi Army grew to six thousand in April 2004. At the end of March 2004, the CPA's chief, L. Paul Bremer III, decided to take action against al-Sadr. He closed his newspaper for sixty days. This measure was compared to attacking a tiger with a flyswatter. The Mahdi Army rapidly seized much of Shiite southern Iraq, overrunning CPA offices that Bremer left undefended. The new Iraqi army and police???recruited and trained at a cost of billions of dollars???collapsed. Many Iraqis defected to al-Sadr. Advertisement
For two months, the Coalition and the Mahdi Army fought pitched battles around Shiite Islam's holiest shrines. Iraq's senior Shiite clerics and politicians, all of whom saw al-Sadr as a threat, assured Bremer of their support and did nothing to help him. Iraq's Shiites were the prime beneficiary of Saddam Hussein's overthrow, but America's stock in Iraq had fallen so low that only Iraq's Kurds were prepared to stand with the United States against al-Sadr. By May 2004, al-Sadr's insurgency so disrupted US supply lines in Iraq that Bremer considered ordering food rationing for the thousands of Americans working in Baghdad's highly fortified Green Zone. A year after liberating Iraq, the world's only superpower was finding it difficult to feed the Americans in charge of the occupation.
Today, Moqtada al-Sadr controls one of the largest factions within the victorious United Iraq Alliance (UIA), the coalition of Shiite religious parties that won the December 2005 national elections. Nor is he the only member of the Alliance likely to side with Iran if war comes. SCIRI???the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq???is Iraq's largest political party. It was founded in Tehran in 1982, and its name gives an accurate idea of its politics. The Iranians also created, trained, and apparently still fund SCIRI's military wing, the Badr Corps, which has over 12,000 troops. Iraq's interior minister, Bayan Jabr, is the former head of the Badr Corps, whose members he has helped place throughout Iraq's national police. Dawa, the third major element in the UIA, also has close relations with Iran.
With the US Army vastly overextended in Iraq and Iran's friends in power in Baghdad, the Iranians apparently feel confident that the United States will take no action to stop them if they try to make a nuclear weapon. This is only one little-noticed consequence of America's failure in Iraq. We invaded Iraq to protect ourselves against nonexistent WMDs and to promote democracy. Democracy in Iraq brought to power Iran's allies, who are in a position to ignite an uprising against American troops that would make the current problems with the Sunni insurgency seem insignificant. Iran, in effect, holds the US hostage in Iraq, and as a consequence we have no good military or nonmilitary options in dealing with the problem of Iran's nuclear facilities. Unlike the 1979 hostage crisis, we did this to ourselves.
In his State of the Union address, President Bush told his Iraq critics, "Hindsight is not wisdom and second-guessing is not a strategy." His comments are understandable. Much of the Iraq fiasco can be directly attributed to Bush's shortcomings as a leader. Having decided to invade Iraq, he failed to make sure there was adequate planning for the postwar period. He never settled bitter policy disputes among his principal aides over how postwar Iraq would be governed; and he allowed competing elements of his administration to pursue diametrically opposed policies at nearly the same time. He used jobs in the Coalition Provisional Authority to reward political loyalists who lacked professional competence, regional expertise, language skills, and, in some cases, common sense. Most serious of all, he conducted his Iraq policy with an arrogance not matched by political will or military power.
These shortcomings have led directly to the current dilemmas of the US both in Iraq and with Iran. Unless the President and his team???abetted by some oversight from Congress??? are capable of examining the causes of failure in Iraq, it is hard to believe he will be able to manage the far more serious problem with Iran.
Two books, George Packer's The Assassins' Gate and L. Paul Bremer's My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope, written with Malcolm McConnell, are essential for those who want to understand what went wrong. Packer's book is written with great clarity and draws on his experience as one of The New Yorker's more perceptive reporters. He is clearly a thorough and careful notetaker. As a result, the people he writes about???Washington neoconservatives, CPA bureaucrats, and ordinary Iraqis whose lives were turned upside down by decisions made elsewhere???speak to the reader in their own voices. In analyzing the war, Packer begins with the ideologies that shaped its architects' thinking and then brilliantly describes the unrealistic assumptions and bureaucratic maneuvering that resulted in the US taking over Iraq with no plan for its postwar administration. Bremer, as his title suggests, does not believe that the occupation was a complete disaster. He provides a briskly written account of an eventful year, assigning most of the blame to others, notably Donald Rumsfeld, General Ricardo Sanchez, and the members of the Iraqi Governing Council whom he appointed. The value of his book lies in his often inadvertent revelations of failure. 2.
In late April 2003, Donald Rumsfeld contacted L. Paul Bremer III, known as Jerry, to ask if he would be interested in becoming Iraq's postwar administrator. Bremer, a former career diplomat, had been Henry Kissinger's special assistant, ambassador at large for counterterrorism in the Reagan administration, and ambassador to the Netherlands before leaving government in 1989 to become managing director for Kissinger Associates. Although he did not know Bush before, the two men immediately got on well, partly thanks to their shared interest in physical exercise. Even while representing an international coalition in Baghdad, Bremer was careful to emphasize his partisan credentials; he told George Packer in his Green Zone office that he was "a bedrock Republican." (This struck me as odd to tell a reporter, since in my view a US ambassador represents the entire US, not one political party.) Bremer had a reputation as a good manager, and many thought that if he had a successful record in Baghdad, he had a chance to be secretary of state in a second Bush administration.
Bremer knew nothing about Iraq. He had never been there, did not speak Ara
bic, had no experience in dealing with a country emerging from war, and had never been involved in "nation-building." During the two weeks he was given to get ready, he recruited a senior staff including several retired ambassadors, a former assistant secretary of state for administration, and a high-powered Republican Washington lobbyist. Only one of his recruits had any background in the region.
Bremer flew into Baghdad on May 12. While it was not literally true that "Baghdad was burning" on that day, as the first sentence of his book suggests, the previous month had been catastrophic. US forces took Baghdad on April 9. Contrary to the optimistic expectations of the war's planners, the Iraqi police and government did not remain on duty, ready to report to the Americans. They vanished.
This left the way open to looters, who stripped every significant public institution in Baghdad???with the exception of the US-protected Oil Ministry???of whatever they could carry away and set many on fire. Without orders or plans, the US occupation forces simply watched. The looting probably doomed the occupation before it started. With the ministries destroyed, the government could not function. The looting so much damaged the electrical system and other infrastructure that essential government services were not restored for most of the occupation period. This in turn provoked anger at Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority and helped foster the growth of the insurgency. As Iraqis watched their capital being destroyed, many concluded either that the United States was too weak to prevent the looting or that it was so evil as to want Iraq destroyed, or both. If the US was weak, then resistance could succeed. If it was evil, resistance was imperative.
The chaos on the ground in Iraq was matched by chaos within the Bush administration in Washington. President Bush decided on war with Iraq shortly after September 11, and from late 2001 planning for the war was underway. But the President never addressed the big issues of how postwar Iraq would be governed. Would the United States run a prolonged occupation as it had done with Germany and Japan? Would it hand over power to a provisional Iraqi government? If so, who would be in that government? What would be done about the Iraqi military and the Baath Party?
In the absence of leadership from the President, as Packer shows, factions within the administration pursued their own policies. Within the Pentagon, Rumsfeld assigned postwar planning to the Office of Special Plans, which reported to Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith. Packer nicely captures the strangeness of some of the people involved: Feith, whom General Tommy Franks famously called "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth"; Feith's deputy Bill Luti, who once called Franks's predecessor General Anthony Zinni a traitor for doubting the wisdom of the Iraq war; and F. Michael Maloof, who set out to confirm his predetermined belief in a connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda, and eventually had his security clearance revoked. Packer writes that General Franks, the overall commander for the Iraq war, was prohibited from seeking Zinni's advice. Zinni's plan for a comprehensive occupation of Iraq???including providing security with US forces???was put aside as too pessimistic. Presumably this meant his plan would require too many troops to do too much. Packer is devastating about Franks, a tyrant toward his own staff who failed to challenge Rumsfeld's optimistic assumptions that postwar security would not be an issue. Nor did Franks initiate planning for postwar operations, Phase IV, which was a political hot potato. Packer writes: "When an officer at a Centcom meeting raised the question of Phase IV planning, Franks said, 'Mr. Wolfowitz is taking care of that.'" Packer gives a particularly incisive picture of Wolfowitz, who bears a heavy responsibility???precisely because he was by far the brightest of the war's architects ???for the failure to prepare for the postwar chaos. As Packer demonstrates, Wolfowitz promoted the invasion of an Iraq that existed only in his imagination:
Paul Wolfowitz was the intellectual architect of the war. He made the case for war with more passion and eloquence than anyone else in the administration, often speaking publicly about the nature of Baathist tyranny and the stifled talents of the Iraqi people that were just waiting to be set free. Listening to him, you sometimes felt that he had dozens of close Iraqi friends and perhaps even a few distant cousins in Baghdad and Basra. He once told an interviewer who asked whether democracy in Iraq might lead to Islamist rule, "Look, fifty percent of the Arab world are women. Most of those women do not want to live in a theocratic state. The other fifty percent are men. I know a lot of them. I don't think they want to live in a theocratic state."...
For him Iraq was personal. He didn't seem driven by other agendas: Military transformation and shoring up the Likud Party and screwing the Democrats were not his obsessions. He wasn't a religious ideologue possessed by eschatological visions of remaking biblical lands. He was the closest thing to a liberal in the group. He had been pursuing this white whale for years, and he had everything to lose if Iraq went wrong. Why, then, did he find it all [i.e., the realities of Iraq] so hard to imagine?
Whether he agreed with the war plan or not, Wolfowitz was not about to go up against his hugely powerful boss on the subject Rumsfeld jealously owned. Wolfowitz was a true believer, but he was also a bureaucratic survivor of many administrations, and when it mattered he was more than capable of bowing to political reality. In the late 1990s, when regime change in Iraq became his signature issue, Wolfowitz lined up behind the flimsy idea of overthrowing Saddam with a few thousand followers of Ahmad Chalabi, because he understood that the public had no interest in committing large numbers of American troops to the cause. And now that America was about to go to war and finish the job that Wolfowitz had long felt had been left incomplete in 1991, he accepted the terms: light force, little commitment in the postwar. He told the public again and again that the reconstruction would be cheap, that it could be paid for by Iraqi oil revenues. He said this in the face of expert advice from oil company executives who knew the state of Iraq's neglected oil facilities.... The administration systematically kept forecasts of the war's true cost from the public and, by the insidious effects of airtight groupthink, from itself. This would be historic transformation on the cheap. Wolfowitz as much as anyone else was responsible.
In January 2003, Rumsfeld appointed retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner to administer Iraq. Garner understood that his mission was to arrange the fastest possible transfer to an Iraqi government and, in early May, he announced his intention to appoint such a government by May 15. Garner's team established working relations with senior leaders of the Iraqi army with a view to recalling disbanded units to handle security and to become reconstruction brigades. Garner's top civilians were trying to revive Iraq's looted ministries, working with the senior civil servants who remained after the ministers fled. Almost all of them were also high-level Baathists, this having been a prerequisite to advancement in Iraq's public service.
Within a few days of his arrival, Bremer dissolved Iraq's military forces, barred the top four levels of the Baath Party from public service, and told the Iraqi leaders that there would be no handover of power. Packer quotes Garner as saying he woke up the morning of May 17 to find "three or four hundred thousand enemies and no Iraqi face on the government." I think Bremer was right about not reconstituting the armed forces and partially right about de-Baathification. Still, whether he was right or wrong, it was absurd to have had Garner pursuing the exact opposite course of action. Either
the Bremer approach or the Garner approach could have been feasible strategy. Following both was a disaster. The President should have decided on a clear policy before US troops arrived in Baghdad and his failure to do so proved very costly.
Bremer says that Bush "was as vigorous and decisive in person as he appeared on television." But in fact he gives an account of a superficial and weak leader. He had lunch with the President before leaving for Baghdad ???a meeting joined by the Vice President and the national security team???but no decision seems to have been made on any of the major issues concerning Iraq's future. Instead, Bremer got a blanket grant of authority that he clearly enjoyed exercising. The President's directions seem to have been limited to such slogans as "we're not going to fail" and "pace yourself, Jerry." In Bremer's account, the President was seriously interested in one issue: whether the leaders of the government that followed the CPA would publicly thank the United States. But there is no evidence that he cared about the specific questions that counted: Would the new prime minister have a broad base of support? Would he be able to bridge Iraq's ethnic divisions? What political values should he have? Instead, Bush had only one demand: "It's important to have someone who's willing to stand up and thank the American people for their sacrifice in liberating Iraq." According to Bremer, he came back to this single point three times in the same meeting. Similarly, Ghazi al-Yawar, an obscure Sunni Arab businessman, became Bush's candidate for president of Iraq's interim government because, as Bremer reports, Bush had "been favorably impressed with his open thanks to the Coalition." 3.
The day after his arrival, Bremer met with the CPA senior staff. He told them, "We all have to avoid arrogance." Like the President he represented, Bremer spoke of the need for humility and acted the opposite. Three days after arriving, he informed Garner's staff members that the very Iraqis that they had been working with were now banned from official jobs under the de-Baathification decree. For three weeks, the staff had been operating under instructions to work with the high-level civil servants who were now being banned. But Bremer showed no sympathy for their complaints. To his wife he sent a smug-sounding e-mail: "There was a sea of bitching and moaning.... An ungood time was had by all." The US employees responded as bureaucrats do: with unflattering leaks to the press that did much to undermine Bremer's administration.
Not only had Garner publicly committed the United States to establishing an Iraqi interim government by mid-May 2003, but a presidential envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad (now the US ambassador to Iraq), visited the new Iraqi leaders in April carrying the same message. Normally, a presidential envoy speaks for the President. But in the undisciplined Bush administration, it appeared the envoys said whatever they wanted. Bremer clearly had the authority to decide whether or not to form a new government and he decided not to. Bush made no decision one way or another.
On May 16, Bremer summoned the seven members of the Iraqi Leadership Council (ILC) that had been appointed by the US at the end of the war and told them he was now in charge. Again, his memoir conveys his satisfaction: "I was exerting the authority President Bush had granted me, 'putting down the hammer.' ...I did not have to articulate the fact that, with the exception of Chaderchi [a Sunni Arab lawyer], they were all exiles, recently returned to Iraq. 'Surely [Bremer told them] a representative government will have to include many Iraqis who lived here and suffered under Saddam for decades.'"
In fact, the ILC was reasonably representative. It included the leaders of the two Kurdish nationalist parties, the two main Shiite religious parties, two prominent secular Iraqi leaders (Ahmad Chalabi and Ayad Allawi), and Naseer Chaderchi. Contrary to what Bremer writes, the Kurds were not exiles; they had been running a nearly independent state in northern Iraq for twelve years. And in the January 2005 elections, five of the seven ILC members led parties that won 90 percent of the vote. (Chalabi was an exception. In January, he was elected to Parliament on the Shiite slate, but in the December 2005 elections headed a party that got no seats.) To make the ILC more representative, Bremer added eighteen new members, and renamed it the Iraqi Governing Council (GC). Collectively, Bremer's new members won about 3 percent of the vote in 2005. He evidently had no idea of who was representative and who was not.
Bremer treated the Iraqi Governing Council more or less like a student council. In July 2003, he came up with the brilliant idea that the members of the Governing Council should "demand" that the Coalition Provisional Authority do things it was already planning to do, arguing that this would enhance the GC's credibility. When they did not take up his suggestion, Bremer told the astonished members of the Governing Council: "Look, you can't very well hope to run a country of 25 million without working hard. The Governing Council works fewer hours in a week than the CPA works every day."
It seems never to have occurred to Bremer that the leading Iraqi politicians had no real interest in enhancing the credibility of the American-installed Governing Council. And they certainly had better things to do than to demand that the CPA do what it was already doing. Bremer seems surprised that the Governing Council members stopped attending meetings, sending lower-level substitutes. He had no ability to see himself from their perspective.
Two realities developed in Iraq. Inside the Green Zone, Bremer and his staff produced one hundred new laws that were intended to transform Iraq into what America wanted it to be. Some were pet conservative projects like Bremer's decree imposing a flat 15 percent income tax in a country with no taxes; while others dealt with matters like copyrights, patents, telecommunications, and border controls. Meanwhile, outside the Green Zone, the Shiite leaders were building their new Islamic state; insurgents took over Sunni Arab lands; and the Kurds successfully resisted any effort to reduce their independence.
Bremer originally wanted to ap-point Iraqis to write a new constitu-tion with the help of right-wing Americans; it was to be a model for the Middle East, as well as a cause for celebration among Washington's neoconservatives. The Bush administration's bold ambitions were blocked by Ali al-Sistani, the elderly Shiite cleric living in a modest house in Najaf. Sistani insisted that elected Iraqis should both write the constitution and choose the post-occupation government. In the struggle of wills between the two, Sistani, who refused to meet Bremer, emerged as the democrat and the winner, confirming his status as the more important arbiter of Iraq's future, although he was in fact an Iranian citizen.
The CPA's performance on economic matters was abysmal. It never came close to restoring electricity to pre-war levels. In spite of billions spent on Iraq's oil industry, the CPA's ambitious plans to boost Iraq's oil production failed, and in December 2005, exports fell to half the pre-war level. The CPA was never able to spend the billions Congress appropriated for reconstruction; nor could it properly account for $8.8 billion in Iraqi funds entrusted to its care. In his book, Bremer blames Washington red tape for delays in spending reconstruction funds. This is only part of the story. The White House and Pentagon wanted ideologically reliable Americans to take power in Iraq, not career bureaucrats they could not control. To carry out the CPA's work, Washington sent to Baghdad a steady stream of American conservatives, mainly young people with no relevant expertise, no previous experience in the Middle East, and no knowledge of the region. Some were assigned to the budget office, but knew nothing about budgeting or federal procurement procedures; th
ey spent money slowly and without proper accounting. While Bremer is generous in sharing credit with his personal staff, he says nothing about these recruits. Nor does he mention staff members who have written critically about the CPA, like the senior governance specialist Larry Diamond or the constitutional adviser Noah Feldman.[*]
With regard to the CPA's accounting lapses, Bremer asserts that it is unfair to expect normal recordkeeping in a war zone. The CPA's inspector general, in a shocking recent report, describes a situation that went beyond the occasional lapse. Millions of dollars were kept in shrink-wrapped "bricks" of hundred-dollar bills scattered about the CPA offices, often neither guarded nor locked up. Records were not kept. A soldier assigned to assist the Iraqi boxing team gambled away the funds he was given. No one could tell whether he had lost $20,000 or $60,000, since no one kept a record of how much money he had received.
The CPA's other great failure was in maintaining security. Bremer has been harshly criticized for disbanding the Iraqi army. He argues that they had already demobilized themselves, and on this point he is largely right. I traveled around much of Iraq in April 2003, and I saw almost no one in uniform, and certainly no organized units. But, more importantly, the old Iraqi army was a Sunni Arab army. To reconstitute it would, as Bremer rightly points out, have provoked strong reactions from Iraq's Shiites and Kurds; and it was in any case unlikely to have been loyal to Iraq's new Shiite-dominated political order. But since the Baathist army had already dispersed, Bremer's decree dissolving it was quite unnecessary; it was really a way to assert his own authority. To Sunni Arabs???including former officers who had no intention of returning to military service???it was an added, and gratuitous, humiliation.
Bremer argued for more American troops and he was deeply skeptical about the claims of the US military that they were building up a new Iraqi army. His skepticism proved justified when the Iraqi army created by the US largely disappeared in April 2004. Rumsfeld and Bush, he writes, never responded to his request for more US troops.
The Bush administration often cites Iraq's interim constitution, the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), as its crowning achievement. Although the administration proclaimed that the TAL was written by Iraqis and that it was a major document in establishing Iraqi democracy, it was in fact written by US government lawyers, as is obvious from its prose. Bremer's book reveals just how American it was. Not only did he and his staff drive it through the Governing Council, but he personally cleared important clauses with Condoleezza Rice at the National Security Council. Not surprisingly, the American-written TAL never was accepted as legitimate by the people of Iraq. It was convenient for Iraqis to follow the TAL's schedule for elections, but its principal requirements??? including its excellent bill of rights and its provisions for strong central government???have never been applied outside the Green Zone.
Although some commentators have suggested that the Kurds were the big winners in the TAL, the Kurdish leaders felt Bremer bullied them into accepting less than the autonomy they had previously enjoyed. Bremer simply ignored Kurdistan's proposals for the TAL, including the right to have its own military forces, and warned the two Kurdish leaders, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, that they would lose US support if they persisted in their demands. He got his way???but only on paper. The Kurdistan government never implemented the TAL provisions calling for a single national military force or those giving Baghdad control over Kurdistan's oil and border crossings. Resentment of the TAL led the Kurds to organize a referendum in Kurdistan simultaneous with the January elections, in which 98 percent of Iraq's Kurds expressed a preference for independence. And in the permanent constitution approved on October 15, 2005, the Kurds won every point that Bremer had refused. But there were no hard feelings. As one Kurdish leader tells me almost every time I see him, "We will erect a statue of Bremer here in Kurdistan. He did more than anyone else to break up Iraq."
Bremer's book is admirably free of self-pity and at times it is hard not to feel sorry for him. He had to live with the consequences of the administration's failure to plan for Iraq's future, as well as Bush's weak leadership and his desire to win the war on the cheap. But Bremer also compounded White House errors, notably by not insisting that the CPA be staffed with competent professionals. His biggest error, however, was to think he knew best. He was in charge of Iraq, but could not accept the obvious: that Iraqis knew much more about their country than he would ever know. They were not, as he complains in his book, lazy or disorganized. They simply didn't share his goal of a unified, democratic, and Western-oriented Iraq. The more Bremer tried to dictate, the less relevant he and the United States became. Bremer should have started by letting Iraqis run Iraq, not the ones he picked but the seven selected by the Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein. It is possible that Ahmad Chalabi would have emerged as Iraq's prime minister, but only as the agent of the Kurds and the Shiite religious parties who were, and are, Iraq's real power brokers. As deputy prime minister in the current Iraqi government, Chalabi has demonstrated both administrative skills and an ability to build alliances without having any electoral base at all. With all his flaws, an Ahmad Chalabi??? led Iraqi government could not have done worse than Jerry Bremer and the CPA. 4.
On June 28, 2004, Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh escorted Bremer to a West Virginia Air National Guard C-130 plane on the tarmac of the Baghdad International Airport. As photographers snapped the picture that would appear in the next day's newspapers, Bremer stood in the aircraft door and waved goodbye. The door closed, the farewell party left, and nothing happened. When the coast was clear, Bremer and his bodyguard left the C-130, ran to a nearby helicopter, flew to a different part of the airport, and then boarded a waiting jet to Jordan. If insurgents were planning to attack the C-130, he had outfoxed them.
June 30 was the scheduled date for the handover, but the White House decided to advance it by two days to outwit possible terrorists. At 10 AM on June 28, the CPA scheduled a joint press conference with Bremer and Iraq's new prime minister, Ayad Allawi. When they arrived, the reporters were ushered into Allawi's office to watch as Bremer handed a letter to Iraq's Chief Justice formally transferring sovereignty. "I admitted," he writes, "disappointment that we had not been able to establish a secure environment. 'The insurgents have proven better organized and more difficult to penetrate than we had expected.'" There was an open line to President Bush and his team, who were then in Ankara for a NATO summit, but as Bremer, the best-protected man in Iraq, writes,
when the correspondents arrived at the former Governing Council building, our staff collected everybody's cell phones, so that they could not report the event [in] real time, or immediately after, to allow me to leave Iraq first.
What started with neoconservative fantasies of cheering Iraqis greeting American liberators with flowers and sweets ended with a secret ceremony and a decoy plane.
Why Iraq Was a Mistake Lieut. General Greg Newbold (Ret.)
A military insider sounds off against the war and the ???zealots??? who pushed it
Time, Magazine April 17, 2006
Two senior military officers are known to have challenged Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the planning of the Iraq war. Army General Eric Shinseki publicly dissented and found himself marginalized. Marine Lieut. General Greg Newbold, the Pentagon???s top operations officer, voiced his objections internally and then retired, in part out of opposition to the war. Here, for the first time, Newbold goes public with a full-throated critique:
In 1971, the rock group The Who released the antiwar anthem Won???t Get Fooled Again. To most in my generation the song conveyed a sense of betrayal by the nation???s leaders, who had led our country into a costly and unnecessary war in Vietnam. To those of us who were truly counterculture ??? who became career members of the military during those rough times ??? the song conveyed a very different message. To us, its lyrics evoked a feeling that we must neer again stand by quietly while those ignorant of and casual about war lead us into another one and then mismanage the conduct of it. Never again, we thought, would our military???s senior leaders remain silent as American troops were marched off to an ill-considered engagement. It???s 35 years later, and the judgment is in: the Who had it wrong. We have been fooled again.
From 2000 until October 2002, I was a Marine Corps lieutenant general and director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. After 9/11, I was a witness and therefore a party to the actions that led us to the invasion of Iraq ??? an unnecessary war. Inside the military family, I made no secret of my view that the zealots??? rationale for war made no sense. And I think I was outspoken enough to make those senior to me uncomfortable. But I now regret that I did not more openly challenge those who were determined to invade a country whose actions were peripheral to the real threat ??? al-Qaeda. I retired from the military four months before the invasion, in part because of my opposition to those who had used 9/11???s tragedy to hijack our security policy. Until now, I have resisted speaking out in public. I???ve been silent long enough.
I am driven to action now by the missteps and misjudgments of the White House and the Pentagon, and by my many painful visits to our military hospitals. In those places, I have been both inspired and shaken by the broken bodies but unbroken spirits of soldiers, Marines and corpsmen returning from the war. The cost of flawed leadership continues to be paid in blood. The willingness of our forces to shoulder such a load should make it a sacred obligation for civilian and military leaders to get our defense policy right. They must be absolutely sure that the commitment is for a cause as honorable as the sacrifice.
With the encouragement of some still in positions of military leadership, I offer a challenge to those still in uniform: a leader???s responsibility is to give voice to those who can???t ??? or don???t have the opportunity to ??? speak. Enlisted members of the armed forces swear their oath to those appointed over them; an officer swears an oath not to a person but to the Constitution. The distinction is important.
Before the antiwar banners start to unfurl, however, let me make clear ??? I am not opposed to war. I would gladly have traded my general???s stars for a captain???s bars to lead our troops into Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban and al-Qaeda. And while I don???t accept the stated rationale for invading Iraq, my view ??? at the moment ??? is that a precipitous withdrawal would be a mistake. It would send a signal, heard around the world, that would reinforce the jihadists message that America can be defeated, and thus increase the chances of future conflicts. If, however, the Iraqis prove unable to govern, and there is open civil war, then I am prepared to change my position.
I will admit my own prejudice: my deep affection and respect are for those who volunteer to serve our nation and therefore shoulder, in those thin ranks, the nation???s most sacred obligation of citizenship. To those of you who don???t know, our country has never been served by a more competent and professional military. For that reason, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice???s recent statement that ???we??? made the ???right strategic decisions??? but made thousands of ???tactical errors??? is an outrage. It reflects an effort to obscure gross errors in strategy by shifting blame for failure to those who have been resolute in fighting. The truth is, our forces are successful in spite of the strategic guidance they receive, not because of it.
What we are living with now is the consequence of successive policy failures. Some of the missteps include: the distortion of intelligence in the buildup to the war, McNamara-like micromanagement that kept our forces from having enough resources to do the job, the failure to retain and reconstitute the Iraqi military in time to help quell civil disorder, the initial denial that an insurgency was the heart of the opposition to the occupation, alienation of allies who could have helped in a more robust way to rebuild Iraq, and the continuing failure of the other agencies of our government to commit assets to the same degree as the Defense Department. My sincere view is that the commitment of our forces to this fight was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions ??? or bury the results.
Flaws in our civilians are one thing: the failure of the Pentagon???s military leaders is quite another. Those are men who know the hard consequences of war but, with few exceptions, acted timidly when their voices urgently needed to be heard. When they knew the plan was flawed, saw intelligence distorted to justify a rationale for war, or witnessed arrogant micromanagement that at times crippled the military???s effectiveness, many leaders who wore the uniform chose inaction. A few of the most senior officers actually supported the logic for war. Others were simply intimidated, while still others must have believed that the principle of obedience does not allow for respectful dissent. The consequence of the military???s quiescence was that a fundamentally flawed plan was executed for an invented war, while pursuing the real enemy, al-Qaeda, became a secondary effort.
There have been exceptions, albeit uncommon, to the rule of silence among military leaders. Former Army Chief of Staff General Shinseki, when challenged to offer his professional opinion during prewar congressional testimony, suggested that more troops might be needed for the invasion???s aftermath. The Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Defense castigated him in public and marginalized him in his remaining months in his post. Army General John Abizaid, head of Central Command, has been forceful in his views with appointed officials on strategy and micromanagement of the fight in Iraq ??? often with success. Marine Commandant General Mike Hagee steadfastly challenged plans to underfund, understaff and underequip his service as the Corps has struggled to sustain its fighting capability.
To be sure, the Bush administration and senior military officials are not alone in their culpability. Members of Congress ??? from both parties ??? defaulted in fulfilling their constitutional responsibility for oversight. Many in the media saw the warning signs and heard cautionary tales before the invasion from wise observers like former Central Command chiefs Joe Hoar and Tony Zinni but ave insufficient weight to their views. These are the same news organizations that now downplay both the heroic and the constructive in Iraq.
So what is to be done? We need fresh ideas and fresh faces. That means, as a first step, replacing Rumsfeld and many others unwilling to funda
mentally change their approach. The troops in the Middle East have performed their duty. Now we need people in Washington who can construct a unified strategy worthy of them. It is time to send a signal to our nation, our forces and the world that we are uncompromising on our security but are prepared to rethink how we achieve it. It is time for senior military leaders to discard caution in expressing their views and ensure that the President hears them clearly. And that we won???t be fooled again.
In an earlier post I argued that the Iraq war was increasing Islamic terrorism in the world. Two examples I used were the terrorist bombings in London and Madrid. Both were blamed on Al Qaeda, but I argued that they were in fact independent and home grown terrorist groups that might have gotten inspiration from Al Qaeda, but actually carried out their horrible acts because of their countries??? involvement in Iraq. Well both the Spanish and British governments have conducted official probes into the bombings and concluded that both were in fact homegrown and carried out because of the Iraq war.
Spain conducted a two-year probe into the Madrid bombings that was released in March 2006. The report concludes that the terrorists were a homegrown radical group acting on their own rather than part of an Al Qaeda network inside Spain. Spain???s intelligence chief said, ???This was not an al Qaeda operation. It was homegrown.???
In April 2006 it was reported that England???s Home Office had finished its investigation of the July 7 bombings of London???s transportation system. The drafts of the report said that Iraq was a key contributing factor to the actions of the bombers. The report also said that motivating factors were economic deprivation, social exclusion and a disaffection with English society in general. After the bombings Tony Blair tried to deny that England???s involvement in Iraq played a role in the bombing. Blair has also claimed that Britain???s fight in Iraq would make England safer against terrorists.
The report also found that despite the fact that two of the bombers traveled to Pakistan and met with two Al Qaeda operatives, overall the bombers were not an Al Qaeda cell nor major players in any terrorist organizations.
The bombings and following official reports bring up two troubling questions.
1) Is the war in Iraq actually helping the fight against terrorism or making it worse?
2) If homegrown terrorists are being created because of the war, how can governments protect themselves and their people because these two groups were basically undetectable until they blew shit up.
1) The U.S. official overseeing U.S. reconstruction programs in Iraq said that much progress has been made in finishing projects. At the same time his report continues to show that water, sewage treatment, oil, and electricity production are all below pre-war levels, and that overall the $18 billion spent on projects has "been punctuated by pitfalls and shortcomings." On the positive side there has been a 60% decrease in attacks on infrastructure. However the report also said the $147 million spent and 20,000 new guards to protect pipelines and power plants was unsuccessful, basically because the private contractors hired to do the job did little to nothing with their money and training. The report implied that most of this money vanished into people's pockets as corruption. He also found that despite $186 million spent on medical clinics, only 6 have been finished with another 14 to be finished soon, out of a planned 150.
2) There are also reports of spillover of the Iraq conflict into neighborhing Turkey and Iran. One of the two leading Kurdish groups, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) has increased raids and attacks into Iran and Turkey. The PKK is said to have an armed force of about 5000 guerrilla fighters. On several occasions Turkish security forces have crossed into Iraqi territory in pursuit of PKK guerrillas. Iran also unleashed a four hour artillery barrage over the border into Kurdish Iraq after an attack. Turkey has called on the U.S. to pressure its Kurdish allies to crack down on these cross border raids but nothing has really happened because the Kurds are basically one of the only groups that consistently supports the U.S. in Iraq so they've been given a free hand to do what they want whether it be conduct raids into neighboring countries or evicting Arabs from disputed cities such as Kirkuk.
3) A retired U.S. general released a report on Iraq's new army in April 2006 for the U.S. Military Academy. It said that while the Iraqi army is making great strides it basically has little to no equipment. He predicts that the U.S. will need 2-5 more years working with the Iraqi army before they can really operate on their own.
4) The most important development in Iraq however has been the increase in sectarian violence that points towards civil war. Before the terrorist attack on a Shiite mosque in February 2006, most Shiites were following the advice of Ayatollah Sistani and refraining from striking back at Sunnis in revenge. This was despite the determined plan of Zarqawi???s Al-Qaeda in Iraq to attack Shiite targets and foment a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites that would destroy the U.S.???s plans for Iraq. However, since the mosque attack, Shiites have responded in kind. In earlier reports I???ve made I???ve noted that the Interior Ministry was under the control of Shiite religious parties, and was running death squads and secret prisons that were targeting Sunnis. Since then the violence has become much more widespread and systematic. It seems like almost after every attack on Shiites, Sunni bodies have been found, usually tortured and shot execution style in a tit for tat escalation of violence.
In the formation of the new Iraqi government, which is still not complete after 5 months, the U.S. has been trying to rest control of the Interior Ministry from the Shiites but to little success. At the same time the U.S. was increasing its training and cooperation with Iraq???s police force who are controlled by the Ministry. It was hoped with more professional training, equipment and one on one contact with Americans, the police could become more independent. Instead there have been press reports that not only has the Interior Ministry refused to deploy the newest police trained by Americans, but that Shiite militias have systematically gone to new army and police recruits after they???ve finished U.S. training and offered them larger salaries to join the Shiite militias instead. It???s estimated that several hundred new recruits leave the police for the militias each month.
Public statements by Iraqi officials have also claimed that up to 100,000 people have fled because of the violence. This is disputed by the U.S. military however. A study did find that proportionally, as many Iraqis are now dying in sectarian violence as were killed during the Lebanese Civil War during the 1980s.
5) The U.S. military effort is also going up and down in Iraq. On the good side, it appears that the military leadership within Iraq has finally been unified in their approach to conducting a real counterinsurgency effort in Iraq. The emphasis is on winning hearts and minds instead of just brute force, which is a positive change. Of course, it took over 2 years for the U.S. military to accomplish this, no thanks to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon and especially Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who still doesn???t care about nation building or counterinsurgency. It also seemed like attacks on U.S. soldiers took a large dip, while the number of attacks on Iraqi security forces took a huge increase, but the latest numbers showed that April was the deadliest month for U.S. troops in Iraq for 2006.
To summarize, public services are still worse now for the average Iraqi than they were before the war. There are a lot of Iraqis, both Shiites and Sunnis, who believe that the U.S. has done this on purpose for a number of reasons, which just makes work there al the more difficult for America. The Iraqi security forces are still a wreck, and the country looks to be slowly but surely moving towards civil war with the U.S. stuck right in the middle. Donald Rumsfeld summed up everything that???s wrong with the Pentagon???s approach to Iraq when he was asked by reporters what would U.S. troops do if a full fledged civil war did break out. He said, he???d leave it up to the Iraqis to decide. That sounds like a real plan there.
Comments
Dr. Wu,
This is an evasion. Would you agree with the arguments about the nature of the threat had it come from a soldier? More important the chickenhawk line essentially says that only people serving or having served in the military are qualified to have opinions on war and peace. That is a feature of spartan, non-democratic societies.
I'll cosign on this and even though we disagree I respect your right to have your opinion, and unlike some others here, you appear to respect mine as well. I lost a childhood friend at the WTC which probably makes me biased. I don't think Bush and his folks have handled the war well, and I certainly don't agree with him on MANY issues. War sucks...always has, always will. But when your enemy doesn't play by the/any rules, almost any action you take can backfire.
As far as people saying that I'm "good people", I appreciate that but I'll ask you to judge for yourself.
And as far as your hypothetical question I'll answer it this way.....
I have two teen-age children and while I'm not going to encourage them to join the Military, if they make that decision I'll support it 100% and will be proud of their decision.
Fair enough. Now where is Sababaloo with his homework?
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/1136613309304540.xml&coll=7&thispage=1
We talk. They fought.
Sunday, January 08, 2006
HARRY ESTEVE
In the political uproar over the war in Iraq, it's easy to miss the voices of those who served there.
Yet some of the grittiest, most clear-eyed assessments can be heard from the soldiers, Marines and airmen who saw the war as it happened and came home to talk about it.
For that kind of ground-level view, The Oregonian interviewed a Marine who was awarded a Bronze Star after an intense firefight during the 2004 occupation of Fallujah; an Oregon Air National Guard major who left his job as mayor of Monmouth to direct airstrikes against insurgents near the Syrian border; and an Army reservist who interrupted his business management career to walk the streets of Mosul with a backpack full of cash, paying Iraqi contractors to rebuild schools and bridges.
The questions were basic: What did you do in Iraq, and do you think it did any good -- that it helped end terrorism and make the country a more stable, more secure place?
The answers, which lie at the heart of the nation-splitting debate over U.S. policy, are more complex.
The three witnessed violence, up close and from afar, and saw the reaction in the faces of Iraqis and on nightly newscasts beamed around the world. They participated in hands-on humanitarian and rebuilding efforts. They encountered joyful hospitality, open hostility, desperation and hope.
Their conclusions reflect the same range of pride, conflict and anger that grips the nation about the war.
Marine Staff Sgt. Dennis Nash
If Marine Staff Sgt. Dennis Nash has any doubts, they don't crack the rigid, all-business expression on his face.
After two tours of duty in Iraq, both of which involved intense combat, he came home more certain than ever that the war not only is justified but also is making the post-9/11 world safer.
We talk. They fought.
Page 2 of 4
"If we weren't dealing with the terrorists and insurgents and making a stand over there," he says, "it would only be a matter of time before we start seeing the exact same kind of attacks on a regular basis right here in the United States."
Nash, 30, now a recruiter at a Marine center in Beaverton, led a squad of Marines into some of the fiercest battles of the war. He first went to Iraq in April 2003, less than a month after the initial invasion, as a member of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, based at Camp LeJeune, N.C. He went back in June 2004 with Charlie Co., 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment.
"I pretty much begged to go with the next designated unit," Nash says. It was dangerous, thrilling and, he believes, necessary duty.
Nash fits the Marine image impeccably. Most of his sentences end in "sir," a clutch of medals gleams from his freshly pressed uniform, he makes eye contact with a fiery stare.
On Nov. 9, 2004, his platoon swarmed into Fallujah, a stronghold for the insurgency. What happened next earned Nash the Bronze Star for heroism.
Nash's squad "came under withering insurgent machine gun fire, cutting them off from the rest of the platoon," according to the medal citation. Nash led his men to safety in an empty building. "From the roof of the building, he spotted an enemy sniper, engaged him with accurate fire and eliminated him."
Taking Fallujah, Nash says, was a huge move forward in the war. Insurgents lost a base of operations, and, once rebuilding got under way, local residents regained confidence that their lives would improve, he says.
"It saved a lot of lives, both Iraqi civilian and American."
Apart from the combat missions, one of Nash's most vivid memories is seeing a young girl, barefoot, crossing frozen ground to find drinking water for her family. Nash, who has four daughters, ordered his troops to bring supplies to her family, who were huddled in a two-room apartment.
"They tried to invite us all in for tea," he says, emphasizing that it was common reaction among Iraqi people. "I wish the press would show more about the positive side."
Air Force Maj. Paul Evans
The war should never have been fought and has gone badly from Day One, says Air Force Maj. Paul Evans, a disarmingly candid expert in aircraft tracking systems.
Yet, Evans, part of the Oregon Air Guard's 728th Air Control Squadron, served voluntarily and without complaint when asked -- twice. His unit tracked tactical aircraft in Iraq and directed airstrikes from an outpost in Baghdad.
"My job as air battle manager is to break things and kill people," he says. He says his unit did both with all the efficiency modern weaponry offers.
The effect? Not much good that Evans can discern, making clear that he keeps his opinions separate from the National Guard. What he saw was a further descent into chaos and unchecked violence, and a nation that poses more of a threat now than it did before the war.
Evans, 35, views the war from two perspectives -- as a civic leader, based on his two terms as mayor of Monmouth, a small college town west of Salem, and as a warrior, with 13 years in the military.
He saw missed opportunities daily, whether it was the failure to protect key power and water sources or treating locals with suspicion or derision rather than respect.
Evans knows the Persian Gulf well. Shortly before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he was stationed in Kuwait, monitoring air traffic over the Iraq border, where U.S. jets patrolled the "no-fly zone."
"I can tell you without a doubt, Iraq was contained," Evans says, despite President Bush's assertion that it had become the new frontline of the war on terror. "I'm actually offended by that because I spent a good part of my life working to make sure that wasn't the case."
Invading was the first major error, Evans says. The next came when the Pentagon set troop levels at about half the early recommendations of 300,000 or so.
The smaller force was enough to rout Saddam Hussein and his Republican Guard, but not nearly enough to provide the broad-based security that would have stifled the insurgency, restored power, water and other basics and kept Iraq from tumbling into the violent nightmare it has become.
"You can't have democracy without security. But security doesn't mean Abrams tanks in the streets," Evans says. "It means Mom and Dad being able to go to the grocery store without being bombed."
To understand how we got to where we are in Iraq you need to look at the planning put into the war and what the Administration did and expected to happen in the immediate postwar/reconstruction period. When you look into the matter the findings are shocking.
1st the President was absent from almost all of the planning. Bush thought Saddam was bad and wanted him out, other than that he really took no part in the war plans and didn???t even know anything about Iraq itself. His National Security Advisor Rice, whose job it is to manage the National Security Council, was completely ineffective as a manager. The Bush administration was split in two between the pro-war faction of Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and the neoconservatives versus Powell???s State Department. Cheney, Rumsfeld and the neoconservatives were able to make an end-run around Rice and Powell through their various positions throughout the administration bureaucracy that skipped the normal chain of command and communication networks. Rather than stop this, Rice let it happen for the most part.
When you look into the actual plans for Iraq it gets even worse. The general position of Cheney and the neoconservatives was that this was going to be a quick war. Americans would be welcomed as liberators and Iraqi exiles, especially Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress (INC), would take over the governing of Iraq. Rumsfeld didn???t even want to plan for after the war. Even when the Pentagon set up its own organization to take care of postwar Iraq it was given no money and attention. Basically, Iraq was suppose to take care of itself after Saddam was overthrown.
When looting broke out after hostilities the leaders back in Washington were congratulating themselves over a quick victory rather than paying attention to what was happening on the ground. It took the administration a month to figure out that things in Iraq weren???t going as well as they had thought. By then, most of Iraq???s infrastructure had been stripped by looting, there was widespread crime and murder, and the insurgency had started against the U.S. This is the story of how the U.S. lost the peace they had just won.
A Divided Administration[/b]
From the beginning of the Bush presidency, his national security staff had been divided in two between Colin Powell and the State Department on one side and Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and the neoconservatives on the other. It was the job of National Security Advisor Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley, who was himself a neoconservative, to manage these opposing views and personalities. Instead, Rice was only interested in her relationship with the president and was never able to stop the bickering and in fighting in the administration. Powell, his deputy Richard Armitage and Paul O???Neill, Bush???s first Secretary of the Treasure all called Rice???s management ???dysfunctional.??? Right from the beginning then, the Bush administration had no coordinated plan for Iraq as the Pentagon, Cheney???s office, and the State Department all did their own thing. Bush himself was completely out of the loop. He wanted Saddam removed and left the details to his divided staff.
The neoconservatives had a decided advantage in this internal battle since they occupied key positions throughout the national security staff and would often communicate directly with each other rather than go to their superiors or follow the normal channels of command and communication between agencies. In the Pentagon there was Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone, Undersecretary of Defense for Near East and South Asia William Luti, and Abraham Shulsky and David Wurmser in the Pentagon???s Office of Net Assessment. Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman and James Woolsey were also on the Defense Policy Board, which advised the Pentagon. In Cheney???s office there was the Chief of Staff was I. Lewis Libby and Cheney???s Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs John Hannah. In the National Security Council there was Rice???s deputy Hadley, Middle East director Elliot Abrams, and Zalmay Khalilzad who would become the president???s liaison with Iraqi exiles and later Ambassador to Afghanistan and the current Ambassador to Iraq.
How Not To Plan For A War[/b]
Since the Pentagon was out front in pushing for war it felt that the Iraq operation was its baby. Thomas White, Secretary of the Army until after the invasion said, ???With DOD [Department of Defense] the first issue was, we???ve got to control this thing ??? so everyone else is suspect. And the second thing was, we had the mind-set this would be a relatively straight-forward manageable task, because this would be a war of liberation and therefore the reconstruction would be short-lived.??? White continued, ???Their view was almost theological in nature ??? that it was going to go the way they said it was going to go.???
The main goal of the Pentagon staff was starting and planning a war. Nothing else mattered. Rumsfeld refused to consider the postwar situation. To him, what happened after the war was someone else???s responsibility. To Wolfowitz and the neoconservatives, they believed that Iraqis, especially the exiles they were close to such as Ahmad Chalabis??? Iraqi National Congress, would take over Iraq after the war. Either way, postwar planning was not important and even considered a detriment to the more important war phase.
People who spoke up or questioned the leadership were reprimanded and eventually forced out of office. The examples of these casualties are well known. First there was the issue of the cost of the war. Because the war planners thought conquering Iraq would be so easy the Office Of Management and Budget only asked Congress for $2.5 billion in reconstruction funds in April 2002. In September 2002 however, Bush???s economic advisor Lawrence Lindsay told the Wall Street Journal that the war and occupation of Iraq could cost up to $200 billion. He was fired at the end of the month.
Another issue was how many troops would be needed to occupy Iraq. On 2/25/03 General Shinseki, Army Chief of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that several hundred thousand soldiers would be needed to do the job. Immediately after the hearing Wolfowitz called up Secretary White to complain. Wolfowitz later told the House Budget Committee that Shinseki was ???way off the mark.??? Wolfowitz would later confront Shinseki over his testimony. Afterwards an Air Force officer said, ???After seeing Wolfowitz chew down a four-star, I don???t think anyone was going to raise their head up and make a stink about it [the war plans].??? Like Lindsay, Shinseki was later forced out. People in the bureaucracy and military got the message that if they spoke up it would be professional suicide.
Later Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz forbade the Pentagon from making estimates about the cost of the war. They repeatedly said that since wars were uncertain, they couldn???t make predictions about their costs. Wolfowitz told the House Budget Committee on 2/27/03, ???Fundamentally, we have no idea what is needed unless and until we get there on the ground.??? Eight days into the war, Wolfowitz told the House Appropriations Committee that Iraqi oil would pay for reconstruction of the country. Various oil experts said this was not possible, but the Pentagon wasn???t listening to anyone outside of their own circle.
Rumsfeld also expressed his disdain for postwar operations in mid-February 2003 in a speech in New York entitled ???Beyond Nation Building.??? In that speech he said that Iraq would be like Afghanistan with few troops and little commitment afterwards. Like Bush claimed in his run for the presidency, this administration would be against nation building and untidy peacekeeping operations. Rums feld would have none of that in Iraq. To make his point clear the Office of Stability and Peace Operations in the Pentagon that was in charge of peacekeeping was not included in the Iraq war plans and their memos were ignored.
In September 2002 the Pentagon created the Office of Special Plans (OSP) under Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of Defense of Policy and William Luti, Undersecretary of Defense of Near East and South Asia. Abram Shulsky from the Pentagon???s Office of Net Assessment was put in charge of running the Office. All three were neoconservatives who had been pushing for war with Iraq since the end of the first Gulf War. OSP was supposed to manage information about Iraq and control policy out of the Pentagon. The OSP brought in Middle East experts to plan for postwar Iraq. All of them were neoconservatives who shared the same view that Iraqis would greet the Americans as liberators and that the war would be the beginning of bringing democracy to the entire Middle East.
The actual planning for the war was the responsibility of General Franks and the Pentagon???s Central Command (CENTCOM). The initial plans were based upon the first Gulf War and called for a fighting force of up to 400,000+ soldiers. Rumsfeld felt that this was the ???old thinking??? of the U.S. military that he was trying to change with his military modernization program. Rumsfeld was about military transformation using high-tech internet connections, precision guided bombs, etc. This was going to be a ???Shock and Awe??? campaign, therefore Rumsfeld only wanted to send in 75,000 troops. Beginning in November 2002 he began cutting units one by one from the deployment orders. Eventually Rumsfeld and General Franks agreed upon a force of 160,000 to enter Iraq after many objections over the cuts.
Franks himself only had one plan for the war. The Iraqi government would be quickly overthrown, security would be turned over to the Iraqi police and army, international peacekeepers would arrive, and U.S. soldiers would be home in a few months. Rumsfeld and Franks both agreed that there was no need to plan for after the actual fighting. It was part of U.S. military doctrine that when the enemy was defeated, the only thing that needed to be done was go home. By March 203 as the invasion was about to begin CENTCOM and the Pentagon had no postwar plans for the troops.
Retired Genearl Zinni, who had been in charge of CENTCOM before Franks had drawn up plans for Iraqi reconstruction in 1998 called ???Desert Crossing.??? He called up the Pentagon and told them they ought to look into it, but he was told that it was discredited because it had been drawn up during the Clinton administration. The Bush administration would have nothing to do with it. Franks actually tried to contact Zinni once before the war about Iraq but was stopped by Rumsfeld???s office.
The civilian leadership at the Pentagon even stopped active duty generals from participated in their Iraq plans. A few months before the war started there was a planning session at the Pentagon. General Abizaid, director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was waiting outside when he was told he couldn???t take part.
On 1/10/03 3 Iraqi exiles including Kanan Makiya who had written a famous book Republic of Fear about Saddam???s dictatorship, met with Bush, Cheney, Rice and Zhalmay Khalilzad, the president???s liaison with Iraqi exiles. Bush didn???t seem to know anything about Iraq, and while one exile warned of possible problems after the war like civil disorder, Makiya assured Bush, ???People will greet [American] troops with sweets and flowers.??? Cheney and others would use this idea as they told the U.S. public and press that the Americans would be welcomed in the streets of Iraq as liberators not occupiers.
Counter Ideas About Postwar Iraq[/b]
The main opponent of the Pentagon???s plans, or lack thereof for Iraq, was the State Department. Beginning as early as October 2001 State had begun planning for postwar Iraq. In March 2002 they announced the creation of the Future of Iraq Project led by Tom Warrick. Working with Iraqi exiles, the Project produced 1000s of pages compiled into 13 volumes on major issues that could fact Iraq after a war. Specifically, two reports warned of the problems following a conflict. One said, ???The removal of Saddam???s regime will provide a power vacuum and create popular anxieties about the viability of all Iraqi institutions.??? The U.S. needed to quickly fill this power void. Another report warned, ???The period immediately after regime change might offer these criminals the opportunity to engage in acts of killing, plunder and looting.??? Security and law and order were therefore of first priority. Because the Pentagon was in charge of the war effort however and were opposed to Powell and the State Department all of these reports were shelved until Congress asked to see them when things had gone wrong after the invasion.
The CIA also became involved in postwar Iraq planning in late May 2002. They carried out a series of gaming situations to look into possible scenarios that might occur after the war. One recurring theme was the threat of civil disorder. They also didn???t think a quick turnover of political sovereignty to Iraqis was possible because of the deep seated rivalries within the Iraqi populace and the lack of political culture after years of dictatorship. The Pentagon initially joined in on these planning sessions, but when Rumsfeld found out in the Summer of 2002 he forbid Pentagon personnel from participating. Iraq was suppose to be the Pentagon???s show and no one else???s.
Beginning on 7/31/02 the Senate Foreign relations Committee began its own investigations into what Iraq would be like after a war. They were told that an occupation would be a longterm commitment for U.S. forces and that they needed to ensure public safety immediately after the fighting was over. An Iraqi exile warned, ???The system of public security will break down, because there will be no functioning police force, no civil service, and no justice.??? On the first day after fighting, ???There will be a vacuum of political authority and administrative authority. The infrastructure of vital sectors will have to be restored. An adequate police force must be trained and equipped as quickly as possible. And the economy will have to be jump-started.???
In September 2002 the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) began its planning sessions. They contacted various Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and relief groups and held weekly meetings. On October 12, 2002 this was named the Iraq Working Group. An odd thing happened at these meetings however. The NGO???s kept on coming up with ideas about refugees and looting and comparing postwar Iraq to Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo and other countries, and the USAID officials would just look at them and not respond. ???We would tell them stuff, and they would nod and say, Everything???s under control. ??? They were there just to dribble out the clock but be able to say they???d consulted with us,??? said Joel Charny of Refugees International. The NGOs never heard anything back from USAID about their plans, couldn???t meet with higher officials, but were told that Iraq would be different than those other countries because the Americans would be greeted as liberators. It seemed that USAID had gotten the memo from the Pentagon about staying on message. By January 2003 the NGOs who had been meeting with USAID got fed up with the lack of action and began making public warnings about the breakdown of law and order in Iraq after the war. USAID still kept to the rosy forecast when on 4/23/03 while Iraq was being looted and sporadic attacks had already started against U.S. troops, a spokesman went on Nightline and told Ted Koppel rebuilding Iraq would only cost $1.7 billion. When questioned about this figure USAID said that the rest would be paid for by other countries.
In that same month of September, Rice tried to manage the interagency squabbling over Iraq by forming 4 working groups. The group responsible for postwar planning said that reconstructing Iraq would only cost $50-$60 million. The low figure was based upon the assumption that Iraqi oil would pay for reconstruction and that Iraq???s infrastructure would be in tact and working after the war.
In October 2002, Rice was offered some outside help with planning. The Council on Foreign Relations contacted her and her deputy Stephen Hadley about forming a consortium with the Heritage Foundation and the Center for Strategic and International Studies that could provide expert advise and reports to the administration on Iraq. Rice agreed to the idea, but said that the Heritage foundation couldn???t take part because it had questioned the need for war. Instead she suggested using the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank dominated by neoconservatives. On 11/15/02 representatives from the three think tanks met with Rice and Hadley at the White House. When the topic of helping with postwar plans was brought up however, the American Enterprise Institute objected. ???This is nation building, and you said you were against that. In the campaign you said it, the president has said it. Does he know you???re doing this? Does Karl Rove know???? That was the end of that idea. Two weeks later Hadley called up the Council on Foreign Relations and said thanks but no thanks for the help.
The Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the RAND Corporation, the Army War College, and others all ended up writing their own reports on the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. All said that a large peacekeeping force and ensuring security were essential. None of these reports effected the administration. Rice couldn???t even manage the National Security Council as her four working groups failed due to rivalries within the administration.
Control of Postwar Iraq[/b]
On 1/20/03 President Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive No. 24 giving the Pentagon, instead of the traditional State Department, control of postwar Iraq. The directive also created the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA). Rumsfeld picked former general Jay Garner to head the new office.
In early February ORHA opened offices in the Pentagon right below the Office of Special Plans (OSP), which was in charge of Iraq planning within the Defense Department. However there was hardly any communication between the two. ???OSP had as little do with us as possible,??? said Army Colonel Paul Hughes, ORHA???s chief of planning. ???It was a pain in the ass just to get them to open the door up there,??? he continued. OSP gave one PowerPoint slide show to ORHA and that was the end of their interaction. OSP didn???t mind policing ORHA though. When Hughes suggested drawing up a political-military plan for Iraq, Douglas Feith who was in charge of OSP stopped it.
As part of the early planning Garner broke down the postwar operations into 3 categories: humanitarian assistance, reconstruction and civil administration. Humanitarian planning was the only part that was given serious consideration. Garner said this was because he was never given much money to work with and the Pentagon didn???t seem to care about the other 2. For example, during a planning session with CENTCOM postwar looting was brought up, but the CENTCOM officers said they couldn???t talk about that. Not only that, OHRA had little information about the internal working of Iraq anyways such as what Iraq???s ministries did so they didn???t plan for how to make them work after the war.
A decisive decision OHRA did make was the awarding of Halliburton a secret $7 billion no-bid contract to rebuild Iraq???s oil fields. Michael Mobbs Chief of Civil Administration made this decision. Mobbs only other notable action was a rambling presentation on Iraqi oil to the National Security Council. After that he flew to Iraqi Kurdistan to meet with Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress and wasn???t heard of again by his staff.
In March 2003 Garner tried to hire Tom Warrick who had headed the State Department???s Future of Iraq Project. Rumsfeld told Garner he couldn???t hire Warrick because Cheney hated him since Warrick was skeptical of the war. This would set a pattern where the Pentagon would block State Department officials from joining OHRA, often by denying them the necessary clearance.
One State Department official that did get a job with OHRA was career diplomat Barbara Bodine who was appointed administrator of Central Iraq. The first time she met with Wolfowitz to talk about her job, he asked whether the U.S. shouldn???t redraw all of Iraq???s provinces as if the country was new territory. She later met with Rumsfeld and told him that paying Iraq???s civil servants immediately after the war would help stop resistance to the U.S. Rumsfeld said that it was not important and that they could get paid in a couple weeks if not months after the invasion. When Bodine brought up the possibility of disorder in Iraq???s cities, Rumsfeld said Europe could be persuaded to send in peacekeepers and deal with it. It was not the U.S.???s problem.
In February 2003 the Pentagon formed its own group of Iraqi exiles. They met with Wolfowitz in Michigan and were called the Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council. Already, in 2002 the Pentagon had begun interviewing Iraqi exiles. If they didn???t support the Iraqi National Congress (INC) the Pentagon cut off their support. The new Council were given offices in Virginia just outside of Washington where they broke up into groups to handle the different ministries for a transitional Iraqi government. This project was not coordinated with OHRA. Eventually, Wolfowitz would have these officials flown into Iraq after the invasion to help out with the administration of the country.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP) at the Pentagon had also come up with the idea of sending in Ahmad Chalabi with 6000 INC fighters with the U.S. forces as they invaded Iraq. Camps were set up in Hungary to train the troops but only 70 showed up. Long after the war, Chalabi and various neoconservatives would blame the looting in Iraq on the State Department for not creating this force of Iraqi exiles. They forgot to mention that this was a Pentagon plan that never materialized.
In early March Rice tried to reassert her authority over Iraq planning. She was tired of the OSP who were good at infighting but never came up with any plans for Iraq. Rice pushed aside the OSP and created her own agency under Frank Miller. This was only days before the invasion. Miller briefed the National Security Council and Bush on postwar plans. He said that de-Baathificatin would get rid of the top 1% of party members from government jobs, the Iraqi army would be cut and used for public works, and an interim government would be set up. The White House approved these plans, but no one in the Pentagon, OSP, OHRA, or the military in Kuwait waiting to go into Iraq were told of the plans.
Garner didn???t want instructions from the White House anyways. He had his own ideas. Garner said of the White House that it was, ???At best disruptive. They were a pain in the ass. Whatever we were doing, they were trying to achieve the opposite. From my side of it, they were determined to make sure it [postwar planning for Iraq] failed. That???s a strong statement, but they did everything they could to cause us [OHRA] problems.???
Garner would run into his own problems when he gave his one and only press conference before flying to Kuwait. He was asked whether the U.S. would hand over power to Ahmad Chalabi and the INC. He said no. Immediately afterwards he was called several times by Douglas Feith and told that his comments had damaged the INC and embarrassed Chalabi. Garner told Feith why didn???t he call his own press conference and say that the U.S. was going to put Chalabi in power. Feith said he couldn???t do that. Garner told him, ???Then get off my ass.??? Garner wasn???t allowed another press conference by the Pentagon on orders of the White House, probably meaning Cheney???s office.
After that Garner and OHRA were on a tight leash. Feith sent 2 Pentagon officials to oversee OHRA and help Chalabi in Iraq. Rumsfeld???s own spokesman Larry Di Rita was assigned to follow Garner everywhere. OHRA officials felt like the Pentagon was spying on them so they stayed in line with the administration???s message about Iraq.
Off To Kuwait[/b]
On 3/16/03 the OHRA staff flew to Kuwait. There Garner and his inner circle of advisors disappeared into their hotel rooms where no one saw them for 2 days. Garner had almost no contact with his staff even after that. OHRA couldn???t even get phones and Pentagon officials usually shut out the State Department at meetings leading to little serious work. During its short existence, OHRA had only come up with one document, ???A Unified Mission Plan for Post-Hostilities Iraq.??? The document was never sent back to Washington for approval so it wasn???t even official. It said that the plan was for the U.S. to be out of Iraq by August 2003. Iraq???s utilities would be rebuilt, ministries would be reformed, an interim government would be appointed, a constitution would be written, elections held, and then Iraq would govern itself. Garner also got the approval of Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith that the Iraqi army would be kept in place to help with reconstruction. Garner said he was going to work for 90 days and then go home. There was one little problem with this plan. It was never communicated to the general staff of OHRA or listened to by others. Rice wasn???t the only one standing atop a dysfunctional bureaucracy.
Whether Garner was really in control anyways, was beginning to be questioned by his staff because of the presence of Rumsfeld???s spokesperson Di Rita. In early April 2003 a USAID member said that the U.S. needed to show early success to win over the Iraqis to which Di Rita replied, ???We don???t owe the people of Iraq anything. We???re giving them their freedom. That???s enough.??? A few days later Di Rita got up during a staff meeting and said the State Department had screwed up Bosnia and Kosovo and the Pentagon wasn???t going to the same thing in Iraq, ???We???re going to stand up an interim Iraqi government, hand power over to them, and get out of there in three to four months. All but twenty-five thousand soldiers will be out by the beginning of September.??? These ideas of course, came from Rumsfeld, but this was the first time OHRA heard them.
As if this wasn???t enough, officials from the Office of Special Plans (OSP) showed up in Kuwait. OHRA felt like they were further spies from the Pentagon to keep tabs on them. The OSP hardly told anyone what they were doing anyways, although some stayed with the INC and pushed for an interim government led by Chalabi.
The War Begins and Chaos Follows[/b]
On the 2nd day of the war, a USAID contractor for ORHA asked some military officers in Kuwait what the plan was for policing Iraq. He found out there was no plan. ORHA was suppose to take care of that but no one told them.
The war progressed quickly and by 4/9/03 the U.S. took Baghdad, and on 4/14/03 the Pentagon announced that the fighting was over. On 5/1/03 Bush made his famous speech that the mission was accomplished in Iraq. As soon as the war ended however, looting broke out throughout Iraq. Rumsfeld famously told a press conference, ???Stuff happens and it???s untidy, and freedom???s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes, and commit crimes and do bad things.??? It seemed like Rumsfeld thought that robbing and stealing were ok after living under Saddam. This was an expression of freedom to him. U.S. soldiers in Iraq were never given orders after fighting ceased so they just stood around and watched. The Ministry of Oil was the only location protected by U.S. forces.
Later, Garner would tell PBS??? Frontline that they expected the Iraqi police to fall apart after the war. OHRA had signed contracts with the State and Justice Departments to train new policy forces, but that would take time. When asked why the U.S. just didn???t send in more military or foreign police, Garner said he???d never thought of it. The police weren???t a priority anyway and it was never given money. Not only that, but the contracts for rebuilding the police weren???t even signed until a month after the war ended. In fact, 10 out of 13 major reconstruction projects were not signed until May 2003.
The looting quickly turned violent as organized gangs joined in. Carjackings, kidnappings, rapes, murders, revenge killings of Baathists, and sporadic attacks on Americans all began. Later, the U.S. would estimate that the looting cost $12 billion, the entire projected revenue of Iraq for the 1st year after the war. The looting caused more actual damage to Iraq than the U.S. bombing during the war did.
As things were going to hell in Iraq, Garner couldn???t??? even go there because General Franks wouldn???t give him permission. On 4/21/03 Garner finally flew into Baghdad. He was stunned by the looting. The next day he flew to Iraqi Kurdistan to meet for a few days with Iraqi exiles about forming an interim government. The plan was for the Pentagon organized exiles plus some Iraqis from within the country to form the government. Chalabi and Shiite leader al-Hakim of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution of Iraq however objected and killed the plan. They didn???t want anyone new to join because that would challenge their leadership.
Already, Chalabi was getting a head start on his rivals. Without telling the White House, the Pentagon flew Chalabi and 700 fighters with U.S. uniforms and weapons into Iraq. The idea was for them to get to Baghdad where they could set up shop and take over. Instead, the INC began seizing documents, snatching up prime property, and joined in on the looting.
The CIA were opposed to the Pentagon???s plans and the INC. They put together a meeting with OHRA, the U.S. general in charge of ground forces in Iraq General McKiernan, and 15-20 leading Iraqis from Baghdad. The Iraqis asked for martial law to restore order. McKiernan said he couldn???t do that. While the meeting was going on, some INC gunmen stole the host of the meeting???s car.
McKiernan, like Franks, had no place for postwar ideas. He had told his officers not to think about what would happen after the conflict because it would only distract from the actual war plans. Faced with the chaos in the country, McKiernan declared the U.S. the military authority in Iraq to stop the looting on 4/19/03. When the order was relayed to the State Department, they were surprised to find out that this was the first legal responsibility of an occupying power under the Geneva Conventions. No one had checked before hand. Rumsfeld and Franks didn???t support the order because they didn???t want the U.S. to be responsible for Iraq. Rumsfeld had already cancelled deployment of an additional division to Iraq and gave orders for the beginning of U.S. withdrawal by mid-April. OHRA, not the military was supposed to take care of these matters.
OHRA was having its own problems at the time. Because of the looting and violence, OHRA officials couldn???t leave their offices in Baghdad without military escort, but because there were so few troops they could hardly be accommodated. That meant they stayed in their offices isolated from the rest of Iraq for most of the time. They didn???t have enough translators anyways and didn???t know much about how Iraq worked.
The Office of Management and Budget was determined to keep OHRA???s budget to a minimum as well because the White House had said that Iraqi reconstruction would be cheap. As a result, OHRA was only given $25,000 to rebuild Iraq???s administration. This wasn???t even in cash, but rather a grant that took weeks to be approved.
Meanwhile Garner had returned from Kurdistan and held a meeting with 350 Iraqis in Baghdad. The meeting had no agenda. An Iraqi exile gave a speech about the need for a constitutional democracy, but all the questions were about the chaos in Iraq. A tribal sheikh said, ???I have no running water, no electricity, no security ??? and you are talking about a constitution???? Another asked, ???Who???s in charge of our politics???? Garner told him, ???You???re in charge.??? There was a gasp in the audience. An American present said, ???They were losing faith in us by the second.??? The Iraqis expected the U.S. to be running things after the invasion and here they were told they were suppose to do it themselves. Garner later claimed that this meeting was a success and the beginning of Iraqi democracy.
Chaos was spreading in Iraq as Baathists joined in on the looting to undermine the U.S. and attacks on Americans increased. Officials in OHRA were sending warnings back to Washington that things were not going well, but no one seemed to get the message. The main supporters of the war were having parties and congratulating themselves over the easy victory over Saddam. Suddenly, on 5/6/03 Bush announced that Paul Bremer would take over from Garner. A State Department official believed that it was Tony Blair who told Bush that something needed to be done in Iraq and that a change was necessary.
On 5/9/03 the U.S. and England formally presented a draft resolution to the U.N. Security Council to be the occupying powers of Iraq. Rumsfeld changed his tune and said that U.S. troops would stay in Iraq as long as it took to secure the country. At the same time Pentagon officials began discussing permanent military bases in Iraq.
On 5/12/03 Rumsfeld took Garner to the White House to meet Bush. Garner read a memo saying that Iraq was rebuilding and was just a few weeks away from full recovery. Cheney and Rice came in half way through the meeting. Bush thanked Garner for all his work and at the end joked, ???You want to do Iran for the next one???? No one asked a single question about what was going on Iraq the whole time.
OHRA was quickly merged into the new Coalition Provisional Authority and Bremer disbanded the Iraq army, fired the top four levels of Baath party officials from government, disarmed the INC, and ended the formation of an Iraqi interim government. When U.S. Army commanders realized that they would have to stay in Iraq for occupation duties they asked for postwar plans of operation. They were told there were none. By May 2003 there were already 20 attacks on U.S. forces a day. Without any counterinsurgency program, U.S. forces would set up roadblocks and go on patrol. When attacked they responded. They also had sporadic and uncoordinated rebuilding programs by individual units and commanders. That was the plan to fight the burgeoning insurgency, which at this time the administration denied existed. At the time, a senior administration official told Time, ???We have a month to [turn things around]??? before Iraq exploded. The U.S. never did gain control and we???re paying the price to this day.
haha. so not funny. havent been keeping up with the thread, so i dont know if yall touched on ran, but the situation is ugly. we can do nothing about it either. and our little iraq escapade undoubtedly influenced the election of the new nutball they got leading things.
sanctions arent going to be agreed to by russia, china or most of europe.
we dont know where their nuclear spots are.
they got a much bigger army than iraw ever did
not pretty
By Peter W. Galbraith
My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope
by L. Paul Bremer III with Malcolm McConnell
Simon and Schuster, 417 pp., $27.00
The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq
by George Packer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 467 pp., $26.00
1.
Late last month Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite leader in Baghdad, traveled to Tehran to confer with his Iranian sponsors, who help pay for his ten-thousand-man private militia, the Mahdi Army. Commenting on the impending crisis between the United States and Iran over Iran's nuclear program, al-Sadr said, "If neighboring Islamic countries, including Iran, become the target of attacks, we will support them. The Mahdi Army is beyond the Iraqi Army. It was established to defend Islam."
Moqtada al-Sadr is the son of a revered Iraqi Shiite ayatollah. Still in his early thirties, he commands the loyalty of millions of impoverished Iraqi Shiites. On April 10, 2003, his followers seized Majid al-Khoie, a senior Shiite cleric with strong liberal convictions, in the Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf. The crowd dragged al-Khoie to al-Sadr, who allegedly ordered him killed. The American occupation government in Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), issued a warrant for al-Sadr's arrest, but the US military refused to enforce it.
From a band of some six hundred in the summer of 2003, the Mahdi Army grew to six thousand in April 2004. At the end of March 2004, the CPA's chief, L. Paul Bremer III, decided to take action against al-Sadr. He closed his newspaper for sixty days. This measure was compared to attacking a tiger with a flyswatter. The Mahdi Army rapidly seized much of Shiite southern Iraq, overrunning CPA offices that Bremer left undefended. The new Iraqi army and police???recruited and trained at a cost of billions of dollars???collapsed. Many Iraqis defected to al-Sadr.
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For two months, the Coalition and the Mahdi Army fought pitched battles around Shiite Islam's holiest shrines. Iraq's senior Shiite clerics and politicians, all of whom saw al-Sadr as a threat, assured Bremer of their support and did nothing to help him. Iraq's Shiites were the prime beneficiary of Saddam Hussein's overthrow, but America's stock in Iraq had fallen so low that only Iraq's Kurds were prepared to stand with the United States against al-Sadr. By May 2004, al-Sadr's insurgency so disrupted US supply lines in Iraq that Bremer considered ordering food rationing for the thousands of Americans working in Baghdad's highly fortified Green Zone. A year after liberating Iraq, the world's only superpower was finding it difficult to feed the Americans in charge of the occupation.
Today, Moqtada al-Sadr controls one of the largest factions within the victorious United Iraq Alliance (UIA), the coalition of Shiite religious parties that won the December 2005 national elections. Nor is he the only member of the Alliance likely to side with Iran if war comes. SCIRI???the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq???is Iraq's largest political party. It was founded in Tehran in 1982, and its name gives an accurate idea of its politics. The Iranians also created, trained, and apparently still fund SCIRI's military wing, the Badr Corps, which has over 12,000 troops. Iraq's interior minister, Bayan Jabr, is the former head of the Badr Corps, whose members he has helped place throughout Iraq's national police. Dawa, the third major element in the UIA, also has close relations with Iran.
With the US Army vastly overextended in Iraq and Iran's friends in power in Baghdad, the Iranians apparently feel confident that the United States will take no action to stop them if they try to make a nuclear weapon. This is only one little-noticed consequence of America's failure in Iraq. We invaded Iraq to protect ourselves against nonexistent WMDs and to promote democracy. Democracy in Iraq brought to power Iran's allies, who are in a position to ignite an uprising against American troops that would make the current problems with the Sunni insurgency seem insignificant. Iran, in effect, holds the US hostage in Iraq, and as a consequence we have no good military or nonmilitary options in dealing with the problem of Iran's nuclear facilities. Unlike the 1979 hostage crisis, we did this to ourselves.
In his State of the Union address, President Bush told his Iraq critics, "Hindsight is not wisdom and second-guessing is not a strategy." His comments are understandable. Much of the Iraq fiasco can be directly attributed to Bush's shortcomings as a leader. Having decided to invade Iraq, he failed to make sure there was adequate planning for the postwar period. He never settled bitter policy disputes among his principal aides over how postwar Iraq would be governed; and he allowed competing elements of his administration to pursue diametrically opposed policies at nearly the same time. He used jobs in the Coalition Provisional Authority to reward political loyalists who lacked professional competence, regional expertise, language skills, and, in some cases, common sense. Most serious of all, he conducted his Iraq policy with an arrogance not matched by political will or military power.
These shortcomings have led directly to the current dilemmas of the US both in Iraq and with Iran. Unless the President and his team???abetted by some oversight from Congress??? are capable of examining the causes of failure in Iraq, it is hard to believe he will be able to manage the far more serious problem with Iran.
Two books, George Packer's The Assassins' Gate and L. Paul Bremer's My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope, written with Malcolm McConnell, are essential for those who want to understand what went wrong. Packer's book is written with great clarity and draws on his experience as one of The New Yorker's more perceptive reporters. He is clearly a thorough and careful notetaker. As a result, the people he writes about???Washington neoconservatives, CPA bureaucrats, and ordinary Iraqis whose lives were turned upside down by decisions made elsewhere???speak to the reader in their own voices. In analyzing the war, Packer begins with the ideologies that shaped its architects' thinking and then brilliantly describes the unrealistic assumptions and bureaucratic maneuvering that resulted in the US taking over Iraq with no plan for its postwar administration. Bremer, as his title suggests, does not believe that the occupation was a complete disaster. He provides a briskly written account of an eventful year, assigning most of the blame to others, notably Donald Rumsfeld, General Ricardo Sanchez, and the members of the Iraqi Governing Council whom he appointed. The value of his book lies in his often inadvertent revelations of failure.
2.
In late April 2003, Donald Rumsfeld contacted L. Paul Bremer III, known as Jerry, to ask if he would be interested in becoming Iraq's postwar administrator. Bremer, a former career diplomat, had been Henry Kissinger's special assistant, ambassador at large for counterterrorism in the Reagan administration, and ambassador to the Netherlands before leaving government in 1989 to become managing director for Kissinger Associates. Although he did not know Bush before, the two men immediately got on well, partly thanks to their shared interest in physical exercise. Even while representing an international coalition in Baghdad, Bremer was careful to emphasize his partisan credentials; he told George Packer in his Green Zone office that he was "a bedrock Republican." (This struck me as odd to tell a reporter, since in my view a US ambassador represents the entire US, not one political party.) Bremer had a reputation as a good manager, and many thought that if he had a successful record in Baghdad, he had a chance to be secretary of state in a second Bush administration.
Bremer knew nothing about Iraq. He had never been there, did not speak Ara bic, had no experience in dealing with a country emerging from war, and had never been involved in "nation-building." During the two weeks he was given to get ready, he recruited a senior staff including several retired ambassadors, a former assistant secretary of state for administration, and a high-powered Republican Washington lobbyist. Only one of his recruits had any background in the region.
Bremer flew into Baghdad on May 12. While it was not literally true that "Baghdad was burning" on that day, as the first sentence of his book suggests, the previous month had been catastrophic. US forces took Baghdad on April 9. Contrary to the optimistic expectations of the war's planners, the Iraqi police and government did not remain on duty, ready to report to the Americans. They vanished.
This left the way open to looters, who stripped every significant public institution in Baghdad???with the exception of the US-protected Oil Ministry???of whatever they could carry away and set many on fire. Without orders or plans, the US occupation forces simply watched. The looting probably doomed the occupation before it started. With the ministries destroyed, the government could not function. The looting so much damaged the electrical system and other infrastructure that essential government services were not restored for most of the occupation period. This in turn provoked anger at Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority and helped foster the growth of the insurgency. As Iraqis watched their capital being destroyed, many concluded either that the United States was too weak to prevent the looting or that it was so evil as to want Iraq destroyed, or both. If the US was weak, then resistance could succeed. If it was evil, resistance was imperative.
The chaos on the ground in Iraq was matched by chaos within the Bush administration in Washington. President Bush decided on war with Iraq shortly after September 11, and from late 2001 planning for the war was underway. But the President never addressed the big issues of how postwar Iraq would be governed. Would the United States run a prolonged occupation as it had done with Germany and Japan? Would it hand over power to a provisional Iraqi government? If so, who would be in that government? What would be done about the Iraqi military and the Baath Party?
In the absence of leadership from the President, as Packer shows, factions within the administration pursued their own policies. Within the Pentagon, Rumsfeld assigned postwar planning to the Office of Special Plans, which reported to Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith. Packer nicely captures the strangeness of some of the people involved: Feith, whom General Tommy Franks famously called "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth"; Feith's deputy Bill Luti, who once called Franks's predecessor General Anthony Zinni a traitor for doubting the wisdom of the Iraq war; and F. Michael Maloof, who set out to confirm his predetermined belief in a connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda, and eventually had his security clearance revoked. Packer writes that General Franks, the overall commander for the Iraq war, was prohibited from seeking Zinni's advice. Zinni's plan for a comprehensive occupation of Iraq???including providing security with US forces???was put aside as too pessimistic. Presumably this meant his plan would require too many troops to do too much. Packer is devastating about Franks, a tyrant toward his own staff who failed to challenge Rumsfeld's optimistic assumptions that postwar security would not be an issue. Nor did Franks initiate planning for postwar operations, Phase IV, which was a political hot potato. Packer writes: "When an officer at a Centcom meeting raised the question of Phase IV planning, Franks said, 'Mr. Wolfowitz is taking care of that.'" Packer gives a particularly incisive picture of Wolfowitz, who bears a heavy responsibility???precisely because he was by far the brightest of the war's architects ???for the failure to prepare for the postwar chaos. As Packer demonstrates, Wolfowitz promoted the invasion of an Iraq that existed only in his imagination:
Paul Wolfowitz was the intellectual architect of the war. He made the case for war with more passion and eloquence than anyone else in the administration, often speaking publicly about the nature of Baathist tyranny and the stifled talents of the Iraqi people that were just waiting to be set free. Listening to him, you sometimes felt that he had dozens of close Iraqi friends and perhaps even a few distant cousins in Baghdad and Basra. He once told an interviewer who asked whether democracy in Iraq might lead to Islamist rule, "Look, fifty percent of the Arab world are women. Most of those women do not want to live in a theocratic state. The other fifty percent are men. I know a lot of them. I don't think they want to live in a theocratic state."...
For him Iraq was personal. He didn't seem driven by other agendas: Military transformation and shoring up the Likud Party and screwing the Democrats were not his obsessions. He wasn't a religious ideologue possessed by eschatological visions of remaking biblical lands. He was the closest thing to a liberal in the group. He had been pursuing this white whale for years, and he had everything to lose if Iraq went wrong. Why, then, did he find it all [i.e., the realities of Iraq] so hard to imagine?
Whether he agreed with the war plan or not, Wolfowitz was not about to go up against his hugely powerful boss on the subject Rumsfeld jealously owned. Wolfowitz was a true believer, but he was also a bureaucratic survivor of many administrations, and when it mattered he was more than capable of bowing to political reality. In the late 1990s, when regime change in Iraq became his signature issue, Wolfowitz lined up behind the flimsy idea of overthrowing Saddam with a few thousand followers of Ahmad Chalabi, because he understood that the public had no interest in committing large numbers of American troops to the cause. And now that America was about to go to war and finish the job that Wolfowitz had long felt had been left incomplete in 1991, he accepted the terms: light force, little commitment in the postwar. He told the public again and again that the reconstruction would be cheap, that it could be paid for by Iraqi oil revenues. He said this in the face of expert advice from oil company executives who knew the state of Iraq's neglected oil facilities.... The administration systematically kept forecasts of the war's true cost from the public and, by the insidious effects of airtight groupthink, from itself. This would be historic transformation on the cheap. Wolfowitz as much as anyone else was responsible.
In January 2003, Rumsfeld appointed retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner to administer Iraq. Garner understood that his mission was to arrange the fastest possible transfer to an Iraqi government and, in early May, he announced his intention to appoint such a government by May 15. Garner's team established working relations with senior leaders of the Iraqi army with a view to recalling disbanded units to handle security and to become reconstruction brigades. Garner's top civilians were trying to revive Iraq's looted ministries, working with the senior civil servants who remained after the ministers fled. Almost all of them were also high-level Baathists, this having been a prerequisite to advancement in Iraq's public service.
Within a few days of his arrival, Bremer dissolved Iraq's military forces, barred the top four levels of the Baath Party from public service, and told the Iraqi leaders that there would be no handover of power. Packer quotes Garner as saying he woke up the morning of May 17 to find "three or four hundred thousand enemies and no Iraqi face on the government." I think Bremer was right about not reconstituting the armed forces and partially right about de-Baathification. Still, whether he was right or wrong, it was absurd to have had Garner pursuing the exact opposite course of action. Either the Bremer approach or the Garner approach could have been feasible strategy. Following both was a disaster. The President should have decided on a clear policy before US troops arrived in Baghdad and his failure to do so proved very costly.
Bremer says that Bush "was as vigorous and decisive in person as he appeared on television." But in fact he gives an account of a superficial and weak leader. He had lunch with the President before leaving for Baghdad ???a meeting joined by the Vice President and the national security team???but no decision seems to have been made on any of the major issues concerning Iraq's future. Instead, Bremer got a blanket grant of authority that he clearly enjoyed exercising. The President's directions seem to have been limited to such slogans as "we're not going to fail" and "pace yourself, Jerry." In Bremer's account, the President was seriously interested in one issue: whether the leaders of the government that followed the CPA would publicly thank the United States. But there is no evidence that he cared about the specific questions that counted: Would the new prime minister have a broad base of support? Would he be able to bridge Iraq's ethnic divisions? What political values should he have? Instead, Bush had only one demand: "It's important to have someone who's willing to stand up and thank the American people for their sacrifice in liberating Iraq." According to Bremer, he came back to this single point three times in the same meeting. Similarly, Ghazi al-Yawar, an obscure Sunni Arab businessman, became Bush's candidate for president of Iraq's interim government because, as Bremer reports, Bush had "been favorably impressed with his open thanks to the Coalition."
3.
The day after his arrival, Bremer met with the CPA senior staff. He told them, "We all have to avoid arrogance." Like the President he represented, Bremer spoke of the need for humility and acted the opposite. Three days after arriving, he informed Garner's staff members that the very Iraqis that they had been working with were now banned from official jobs under the de-Baathification decree. For three weeks, the staff had been operating under instructions to work with the high-level civil servants who were now being banned. But Bremer showed no sympathy for their complaints. To his wife he sent a smug-sounding e-mail: "There was a sea of bitching and moaning.... An ungood time was had by all." The US employees responded as bureaucrats do: with unflattering leaks to the press that did much to undermine Bremer's administration.
Not only had Garner publicly committed the United States to establishing an Iraqi interim government by mid-May 2003, but a presidential envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad (now the US ambassador to Iraq), visited the new Iraqi leaders in April carrying the same message. Normally, a presidential envoy speaks for the President. But in the undisciplined Bush administration, it appeared the envoys said whatever they wanted. Bremer clearly had the authority to decide whether or not to form a new government and he decided not to. Bush made no decision one way or another.
On May 16, Bremer summoned the seven members of the Iraqi Leadership Council (ILC) that had been appointed by the US at the end of the war and told them he was now in charge. Again, his memoir conveys his satisfaction: "I was exerting the authority President Bush had granted me, 'putting down the hammer.' ...I did not have to articulate the fact that, with the exception of Chaderchi [a Sunni Arab lawyer], they were all exiles, recently returned to Iraq. 'Surely [Bremer told them] a representative government will have to include many Iraqis who lived here and suffered under Saddam for decades.'"
In fact, the ILC was reasonably representative. It included the leaders of the two Kurdish nationalist parties, the two main Shiite religious parties, two prominent secular Iraqi leaders (Ahmad Chalabi and Ayad Allawi), and Naseer Chaderchi. Contrary to what Bremer writes, the Kurds were not exiles; they had been running a nearly independent state in northern Iraq for twelve years. And in the January 2005 elections, five of the seven ILC members led parties that won 90 percent of the vote. (Chalabi was an exception. In January, he was elected to Parliament on the Shiite slate, but in the December 2005 elections headed a party that got no seats.) To make the ILC more representative, Bremer added eighteen new members, and renamed it the Iraqi Governing Council (GC). Collectively, Bremer's new members won about 3 percent of the vote in 2005. He evidently had no idea of who was representative and who was not.
Bremer treated the Iraqi Governing Council more or less like a student council. In July 2003, he came up with the brilliant idea that the members of the Governing Council should "demand" that the Coalition Provisional Authority do things it was already planning to do, arguing that this would enhance the GC's credibility. When they did not take up his suggestion, Bremer told the astonished members of the Governing Council: "Look, you can't very well hope to run a country of 25 million without working hard. The Governing Council works fewer hours in a week than the CPA works every day."
It seems never to have occurred to Bremer that the leading Iraqi politicians had no real interest in enhancing the credibility of the American-installed Governing Council. And they certainly had better things to do than to demand that the CPA do what it was already doing. Bremer seems surprised that the Governing Council members stopped attending meetings, sending lower-level substitutes. He had no ability to see himself from their perspective.
Two realities developed in Iraq. Inside the Green Zone, Bremer and his staff produced one hundred new laws that were intended to transform Iraq into what America wanted it to be. Some were pet conservative projects like Bremer's decree imposing a flat 15 percent income tax in a country with no taxes; while others dealt with matters like copyrights, patents, telecommunications, and border controls. Meanwhile, outside the Green Zone, the Shiite leaders were building their new Islamic state; insurgents took over Sunni Arab lands; and the Kurds successfully resisted any effort to reduce their independence.
Bremer originally wanted to ap-point Iraqis to write a new constitu-tion with the help of right-wing Americans; it was to be a model for the Middle East, as well as a cause for celebration among Washington's neoconservatives. The Bush administration's bold ambitions were blocked by Ali al-Sistani, the elderly Shiite cleric living in a modest house in Najaf. Sistani insisted that elected Iraqis should both write the constitution and choose the post-occupation government. In the struggle of wills between the two, Sistani, who refused to meet Bremer, emerged as the democrat and the winner, confirming his status as the more important arbiter of Iraq's future, although he was in fact an Iranian citizen.
The CPA's performance on economic matters was abysmal. It never came close to restoring electricity to pre-war levels. In spite of billions spent on Iraq's oil industry, the CPA's ambitious plans to boost Iraq's oil production failed, and in December 2005, exports fell to half the pre-war level. The CPA was never able to spend the billions Congress appropriated for reconstruction; nor could it properly account for $8.8 billion in Iraqi funds entrusted to its care. In his book, Bremer blames Washington red tape for delays in spending reconstruction funds. This is only part of the story. The White House and Pentagon wanted ideologically reliable Americans to take power in Iraq, not career bureaucrats they could not control. To carry out the CPA's work, Washington sent to Baghdad a steady stream of American conservatives, mainly young people with no relevant expertise, no previous experience in the Middle East, and no knowledge of the region. Some were assigned to the budget office, but knew nothing about budgeting or federal procurement procedures; th ey spent money slowly and without proper accounting. While Bremer is generous in sharing credit with his personal staff, he says nothing about these recruits. Nor does he mention staff members who have written critically about the CPA, like the senior governance specialist Larry Diamond or the constitutional adviser Noah Feldman.[*]
With regard to the CPA's accounting lapses, Bremer asserts that it is unfair to expect normal recordkeeping in a war zone. The CPA's inspector general, in a shocking recent report, describes a situation that went beyond the occasional lapse. Millions of dollars were kept in shrink-wrapped "bricks" of hundred-dollar bills scattered about the CPA offices, often neither guarded nor locked up. Records were not kept. A soldier assigned to assist the Iraqi boxing team gambled away the funds he was given. No one could tell whether he had lost $20,000 or $60,000, since no one kept a record of how much money he had received.
The CPA's other great failure was in maintaining security. Bremer has been harshly criticized for disbanding the Iraqi army. He argues that they had already demobilized themselves, and on this point he is largely right. I traveled around much of Iraq in April 2003, and I saw almost no one in uniform, and certainly no organized units. But, more importantly, the old Iraqi army was a Sunni Arab army. To reconstitute it would, as Bremer rightly points out, have provoked strong reactions from Iraq's Shiites and Kurds; and it was in any case unlikely to have been loyal to Iraq's new Shiite-dominated political order. But since the Baathist army had already dispersed, Bremer's decree dissolving it was quite unnecessary; it was really a way to assert his own authority. To Sunni Arabs???including former officers who had no intention of returning to military service???it was an added, and gratuitous, humiliation.
Bremer argued for more American troops and he was deeply skeptical about the claims of the US military that they were building up a new Iraqi army. His skepticism proved justified when the Iraqi army created by the US largely disappeared in April 2004. Rumsfeld and Bush, he writes, never responded to his request for more US troops.
The Bush administration often cites Iraq's interim constitution, the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), as its crowning achievement. Although the administration proclaimed that the TAL was written by Iraqis and that it was a major document in establishing Iraqi democracy, it was in fact written by US government lawyers, as is obvious from its prose. Bremer's book reveals just how American it was. Not only did he and his staff drive it through the Governing Council, but he personally cleared important clauses with Condoleezza Rice at the National Security Council. Not surprisingly, the American-written TAL never was accepted as legitimate by the people of Iraq. It was convenient for Iraqis to follow the TAL's schedule for elections, but its principal requirements??? including its excellent bill of rights and its provisions for strong central government???have never been applied outside the Green Zone.
Although some commentators have suggested that the Kurds were the big winners in the TAL, the Kurdish leaders felt Bremer bullied them into accepting less than the autonomy they had previously enjoyed. Bremer simply ignored Kurdistan's proposals for the TAL, including the right to have its own military forces, and warned the two Kurdish leaders, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, that they would lose US support if they persisted in their demands. He got his way???but only on paper. The Kurdistan government never implemented the TAL provisions calling for a single national military force or those giving Baghdad control over Kurdistan's oil and border crossings. Resentment of the TAL led the Kurds to organize a referendum in Kurdistan simultaneous with the January elections, in which 98 percent of Iraq's Kurds expressed a preference for independence. And in the permanent constitution approved on October 15, 2005, the Kurds won every point that Bremer had refused. But there were no hard feelings. As one Kurdish leader tells me almost every time I see him, "We will erect a statue of Bremer here in Kurdistan. He did more than anyone else to break up Iraq."
Bremer's book is admirably free of self-pity and at times it is hard not to feel sorry for him. He had to live with the consequences of the administration's failure to plan for Iraq's future, as well as Bush's weak leadership and his desire to win the war on the cheap. But Bremer also compounded White House errors, notably by not insisting that the CPA be staffed with competent professionals. His biggest error, however, was to think he knew best. He was in charge of Iraq, but could not accept the obvious: that Iraqis knew much more about their country than he would ever know. They were not, as he complains in his book, lazy or disorganized. They simply didn't share his goal of a unified, democratic, and Western-oriented Iraq. The more Bremer tried to dictate, the less relevant he and the United States became. Bremer should have started by letting Iraqis run Iraq, not the ones he picked but the seven selected by the Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein. It is possible that Ahmad Chalabi would have emerged as Iraq's prime minister, but only as the agent of the Kurds and the Shiite religious parties who were, and are, Iraq's real power brokers. As deputy prime minister in the current Iraqi government, Chalabi has demonstrated both administrative skills and an ability to build alliances without having any electoral base at all. With all his flaws, an Ahmad Chalabi??? led Iraqi government could not have done worse than Jerry Bremer and the CPA.
4.
On June 28, 2004, Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh escorted Bremer to a West Virginia Air National Guard C-130 plane on the tarmac of the Baghdad International Airport. As photographers snapped the picture that would appear in the next day's newspapers, Bremer stood in the aircraft door and waved goodbye. The door closed, the farewell party left, and nothing happened. When the coast was clear, Bremer and his bodyguard left the C-130, ran to a nearby helicopter, flew to a different part of the airport, and then boarded a waiting jet to Jordan. If insurgents were planning to attack the C-130, he had outfoxed them.
June 30 was the scheduled date for the handover, but the White House decided to advance it by two days to outwit possible terrorists. At 10 AM on June 28, the CPA scheduled a joint press conference with Bremer and Iraq's new prime minister, Ayad Allawi. When they arrived, the reporters were ushered into Allawi's office to watch as Bremer handed a letter to Iraq's Chief Justice formally transferring sovereignty. "I admitted," he writes, "disappointment that we had not been able to establish a secure environment. 'The insurgents have proven better organized and more difficult to penetrate than we had expected.'" There was an open line to President Bush and his team, who were then in Ankara for a NATO summit, but as Bremer, the best-protected man in Iraq, writes,
when the correspondents arrived at the former Governing Council building, our staff collected everybody's cell phones, so that they could not report the event [in] real time, or immediately after, to allow me to leave Iraq first.
What started with neoconservative fantasies of cheering Iraqis greeting American liberators with flowers and sweets ended with a secret ceremony and a decoy plane.
Lieut. General Greg Newbold (Ret.)
A military insider sounds off against the war and the ???zealots??? who pushed it
Time, Magazine April 17, 2006
Two senior military officers are known to have challenged Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the planning of the Iraq war. Army General Eric Shinseki publicly dissented and found himself marginalized. Marine Lieut. General Greg Newbold, the Pentagon???s top operations officer, voiced his objections internally and then retired, in part out of opposition to the war. Here, for the first time, Newbold goes public with a full-throated critique:
In 1971, the rock group The Who released the antiwar anthem Won???t Get Fooled Again. To most in my generation the song conveyed a sense of betrayal by the nation???s leaders, who had led our country into a costly and unnecessary war in Vietnam. To those of us who were truly counterculture ??? who became career members of the military during those rough times ??? the song conveyed a very different message. To us, its lyrics evoked a feeling that we must neer again stand by quietly while those ignorant of and casual about war lead us into another one and then mismanage the conduct of it. Never again, we thought, would our military???s senior leaders remain silent as American troops were marched off to an ill-considered engagement. It???s 35 years later, and the judgment is in: the Who had it wrong. We have been fooled again.
From 2000 until October 2002, I was a Marine Corps lieutenant general and director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. After 9/11, I was a witness and therefore a party to the actions that led us to the invasion of Iraq ??? an unnecessary war. Inside the military family, I made no secret of my view that the zealots??? rationale for war made no sense. And I think I was outspoken enough to make those senior to me uncomfortable. But I now regret that I did not more openly challenge those who were determined to invade a country whose actions were peripheral to the real threat ??? al-Qaeda. I retired from the military four months before the invasion, in part because of my opposition to those who had used 9/11???s tragedy to hijack our security policy. Until now, I have resisted speaking out in public. I???ve been silent long enough.
I am driven to action now by the missteps and misjudgments of the White House and the Pentagon, and by my many painful visits to our military hospitals. In those places, I have been both inspired and shaken by the broken bodies but unbroken spirits of soldiers, Marines and corpsmen returning from the war. The cost of flawed leadership continues to be paid in blood. The willingness of our forces to shoulder such a load should make it a sacred obligation for civilian and military leaders to get our defense policy right. They must be absolutely sure that the commitment is for a cause as honorable as the sacrifice.
With the encouragement of some still in positions of military leadership, I offer a challenge to those still in uniform: a leader???s responsibility is to give voice to those who can???t ??? or don???t have the opportunity to ??? speak. Enlisted members of the armed forces swear their oath to those appointed over them; an officer swears an oath not to a person but to the Constitution. The distinction is important.
Before the antiwar banners start to unfurl, however, let me make clear ??? I am not opposed to war. I would gladly have traded my general???s stars for a captain???s bars to lead our troops into Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban and al-Qaeda. And while I don???t accept the stated rationale for invading Iraq, my view ??? at the moment ??? is that a precipitous withdrawal would be a mistake. It would send a signal, heard around the world, that would reinforce the jihadists message that America can be defeated, and thus increase the chances of future conflicts. If, however, the Iraqis prove unable to govern, and there is open civil war, then I am prepared to change my position.
I will admit my own prejudice: my deep affection and respect are for those who volunteer to serve our nation and therefore shoulder, in those thin ranks, the nation???s most sacred obligation of citizenship. To those of you who don???t know, our country has never been served by a more competent and professional military. For that reason, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice???s recent statement that ???we??? made the ???right strategic decisions??? but made thousands of ???tactical errors??? is an outrage. It reflects an effort to obscure gross errors in strategy by shifting blame for failure to those who have been resolute in fighting. The truth is, our forces are successful in spite of the strategic guidance they receive, not because of it.
What we are living with now is the consequence of successive policy failures. Some of the missteps include: the distortion of intelligence in the buildup to the war, McNamara-like micromanagement that kept our forces from having enough resources to do the job, the failure to retain and reconstitute the Iraqi military in time to help quell civil disorder, the initial denial that an insurgency was the heart of the opposition to the occupation, alienation of allies who could have helped in a more robust way to rebuild Iraq, and the continuing failure of the other agencies of our government to commit assets to the same degree as the Defense Department. My sincere view is that the commitment of our forces to this fight was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions ??? or bury the results.
Flaws in our civilians are one thing: the failure of the Pentagon???s military leaders is quite another. Those are men who know the hard consequences of war but, with few exceptions, acted timidly when their voices urgently needed to be heard. When they knew the plan was flawed, saw intelligence distorted to justify a rationale for war, or witnessed arrogant micromanagement that at times crippled the military???s effectiveness, many leaders who wore the uniform chose inaction. A few of the most senior officers actually supported the logic for war. Others were simply intimidated, while still others must have believed that the principle of obedience does not allow for respectful dissent. The consequence of the military???s quiescence was that a fundamentally flawed plan was executed for an invented war, while pursuing the real enemy, al-Qaeda, became a secondary effort.
There have been exceptions, albeit uncommon, to the rule of silence among military leaders. Former Army Chief of Staff General Shinseki, when challenged to offer his professional opinion during prewar congressional testimony, suggested that more troops might be needed for the invasion???s aftermath. The Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Defense castigated him in public and marginalized him in his remaining months in his post. Army General John Abizaid, head of Central Command, has been forceful in his views with appointed officials on strategy and micromanagement of the fight in Iraq ??? often with success. Marine Commandant General Mike Hagee steadfastly challenged plans to underfund, understaff and underequip his service as the Corps has struggled to sustain its fighting capability.
To be sure, the Bush administration and senior military officials are not alone in their culpability. Members of Congress ??? from both parties ??? defaulted in fulfilling their constitutional responsibility for oversight. Many in the media saw the warning signs and heard cautionary tales before the invasion from wise observers like former Central Command chiefs Joe Hoar and Tony Zinni but ave insufficient weight to their views. These are the same news organizations that now downplay both the heroic and the constructive in Iraq.
So what is to be done? We need fresh ideas and fresh faces. That means, as a first step, replacing Rumsfeld and many others unwilling to funda mentally change their approach. The troops in the Middle East have performed their duty. Now we need people in Washington who can construct a unified strategy worthy of them. It is time to send a signal to our nation, our forces and the world that we are uncompromising on our security but are prepared to rethink how we achieve it. It is time for senior military leaders to discard caution in expressing their views and ensure that the President hears them clearly. And that we won???t be fooled again.
Spain conducted a two-year probe into the Madrid bombings that was released in March 2006. The report concludes that the terrorists were a homegrown radical group acting on their own rather than part of an Al Qaeda network inside Spain. Spain???s intelligence chief said, ???This was not an al Qaeda operation. It was homegrown.???
In April 2006 it was reported that England???s Home Office had finished its investigation of the July 7 bombings of London???s transportation system. The drafts of the report said that Iraq was a key contributing factor to the actions of the bombers. The report also said that motivating factors were economic deprivation, social exclusion and a disaffection with English society in general. After the bombings Tony Blair tried to deny that England???s involvement in Iraq played a role in the bombing. Blair has also claimed that Britain???s fight in Iraq would make England safer against terrorists.
The report also found that despite the fact that two of the bombers traveled to Pakistan and met with two Al Qaeda operatives, overall the bombers were not an Al Qaeda cell nor major players in any terrorist organizations.
The bombings and following official reports bring up two troubling questions.
1) Is the war in Iraq actually helping the fight against terrorism or making it worse?
2) If homegrown terrorists are being created because of the war, how can governments protect themselves and their people because these two groups were basically undetectable until they blew shit up.
1) The U.S. official overseeing U.S. reconstruction programs in Iraq said that much progress has been made in finishing projects. At the same time his report continues to show that water, sewage treatment, oil, and electricity production are all below pre-war levels, and that overall the $18 billion spent on projects has "been punctuated by pitfalls and shortcomings." On the positive side there has been a 60% decrease in attacks on infrastructure. However the report also said the $147 million spent and 20,000 new guards to protect pipelines and power plants was unsuccessful, basically because the private contractors hired to do the job did little to nothing with their money and training. The report implied that most of this money vanished into people's pockets as corruption. He also found that despite $186 million spent on medical clinics, only 6 have been finished with another 14 to be finished soon, out of a planned 150.
2) There are also reports of spillover of the Iraq conflict into neighborhing Turkey and Iran. One of the two leading Kurdish groups, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) has increased raids and attacks into Iran and Turkey. The PKK is said to have an armed force of about 5000 guerrilla fighters. On several occasions Turkish security forces have crossed into Iraqi territory in pursuit of PKK guerrillas. Iran also unleashed a four hour artillery barrage over the border into Kurdish Iraq after an attack. Turkey has called on the U.S. to pressure its Kurdish allies to crack down on these cross border raids but nothing has really happened because the Kurds are basically one of the only groups that consistently supports the U.S. in Iraq so they've been given a free hand to do what they want whether it be conduct raids into neighboring countries or evicting Arabs from disputed cities such as Kirkuk.
3) A retired U.S. general released a report on Iraq's new army in April 2006 for the U.S. Military Academy. It said that while the Iraqi army is making great strides it basically has little to no equipment. He predicts that the U.S. will need 2-5 more years working with the Iraqi army before they can really operate on their own.
4) The most important development in Iraq however has been the increase in sectarian violence that points towards civil war. Before the terrorist attack on a Shiite mosque in February 2006, most Shiites were following the advice of Ayatollah Sistani and refraining from striking back at Sunnis in revenge. This was despite the determined plan of Zarqawi???s Al-Qaeda in Iraq to attack Shiite targets and foment a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites that would destroy the U.S.???s plans for Iraq. However, since the mosque attack, Shiites have responded in kind. In earlier reports I???ve made I???ve noted that the Interior Ministry was under the control of Shiite religious parties, and was running death squads and secret prisons that were targeting Sunnis. Since then the violence has become much more widespread and systematic. It seems like almost after every attack on Shiites, Sunni bodies have been found, usually tortured and shot execution style in a tit for tat escalation of violence.
In the formation of the new Iraqi government, which is still not complete after 5 months, the U.S. has been trying to rest control of the Interior Ministry from the Shiites but to little success. At the same time the U.S. was increasing its training and cooperation with Iraq???s police force who are controlled by the Ministry. It was hoped with more professional training, equipment and one on one contact with Americans, the police could become more independent. Instead there have been press reports that not only has the Interior Ministry refused to deploy the newest police trained by Americans, but that Shiite militias have systematically gone to new army and police recruits after they???ve finished U.S. training and offered them larger salaries to join the Shiite militias instead. It???s estimated that several hundred new recruits leave the police for the militias each month.
Public statements by Iraqi officials have also claimed that up to 100,000 people have fled because of the violence. This is disputed by the U.S. military however. A study did find that proportionally, as many Iraqis are now dying in sectarian violence as were killed during the Lebanese Civil War during the 1980s.
5) The U.S. military effort is also going up and down in Iraq. On the good side, it appears that the military leadership within Iraq has finally been unified in their approach to conducting a real counterinsurgency effort in Iraq. The emphasis is on winning hearts and minds instead of just brute force, which is a positive change. Of course, it took over 2 years for the U.S. military to accomplish this, no thanks to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon and especially Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who still doesn???t care about nation building or counterinsurgency. It also seemed like attacks on U.S. soldiers took a large dip, while the number of attacks on Iraqi security forces took a huge increase, but the latest numbers showed that April was the deadliest month for U.S. troops in Iraq for 2006.
To summarize, public services are still worse now for the average Iraqi than they were before the war. There are a lot of Iraqis, both Shiites and Sunnis, who believe that the U.S. has done this on purpose for a number of reasons, which just makes work there al the more difficult for America. The Iraqi security forces are still a wreck, and the country looks to be slowly but surely moving towards civil war with the U.S. stuck right in the middle. Donald Rumsfeld summed up everything that???s wrong with the Pentagon???s approach to Iraq when he was asked by reporters what would U.S. troops do if a full fledged civil war did break out. He said, he???d leave it up to the Iraqis to decide. That sounds like a real plan there.