Bush Postpones Iraq Speech

Bush Postpones Iraq Speech
The White House planned on President Bush giving a major speech on the Iraq war before Christmas, but ABC News now says the idea has been shelved until next month.

A reason for the switch could be a wave a new polls that show Americans firmly opposed to the Bush administration's approach to handling the war.

* A Washington Post-ABC News poll shows seven in 10 Americans "disapprove of the way the president is handling the situation in Iraq -- the highest percentage since the March 2003 invasion. Six in 10 say the war was not worth fighting."

* A CBS News poll finds Americans think the war in Iraq "is going badly and getting worse, and think it's time for the U.S. either to change its strategy or start getting out. Forty-three percent say the U.S. should keep fighting, but with new tactics, while 50 percent say the U.S. should begin to end its involvement altogether. Only 4 percent say the U.S. should keep fighting as it is doing now."

* A Gallup Poll finds less than half of Americans "are willing to say that they have a great deal or a fair amount of trust in Bush to recommend the right actions for Iraq."

With the war going so badly, it's little wonder Americans give Bush such low approval ratings. He registers just 31% approval in the CBS News poll, 36% in the Washington Post/ABC poll and 38% in the Gallup poll

Video: Loose Change Part 2

Loose Change Part 2

Video: Loose Change part 1

Loose Change Part 1

Evidence that the U.S. Government Planned & Executed 9/11

Another Well done 9/11 conspiracy film.

Middle East | Baghdad robbers grab $1m in cash

Baghdad robbers grab $1m in cash
The wreckage of a car at the site where a roadside bomb exploded near central Baghdad
One person died in a bomb attack near a university in central Baghdad
Iraqi gunmen disguised as soldiers have stolen $1m (£0.51m, 0.76m euro) in cash en route to Baghdad's central bank.

The 10 men, who were wearing Iraqi army uniforms, ambushed the security vehicle and stole bags of cash.

Four private security guards were kidnapped during the robbery, which happened in the Iraqi capital's busy Sadoun Street.

Elsewhere in Iraq, at least 16 people have been killed in violent incidents, including a pregnant woman.

The woman, who died along with three of her children, was shot dead in a village south of Kirkuk.

Police gave no motive for the attack but said that her husband was a Kurd and a member of the old army, according to Agence France Presse.

University attack

In a separate attack near Baghdad's Mustansiriyah university, a bomb killed a student and wounded at least seven others.

The US military said that four US soldiers had been killed by roadside bombs late on Sunday, bringing the number of troop deaths to more than 40 so far this month.

In other incidents:

# In the town of Dujail, north of Baghdad, gunmen kidnapped five primary school teachers on their way to work by minibus

# In southern Baghdad, four people were killed when four mortar rounds hit the Abu Chi neighbourhood

# In the capital's southern Dura district, a suicide bomber exploded his vehicle near a police commando base, killing one policeman and wounding five others

# A roadside bomb blasted the capital's Palestine Street, in the west of the city, killing one and wounding six.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan: Iraq worse than a civil war

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan in a tough candid interview said
Despite what the official US stand is,"The situation in Iraq is much worse than a civil war."




Kofi Annan interview: Text
The BBC's Lyse Doucet interviews Kofi Annan in New York
Kofi Annan was interviewed by the BBC for the last time

The outgoing UN secretary general Kofi Annan gave his last BBC interview to Lyse Doucet. He is due to step down on 31 December when he will be succeeded by South Korea's foreign minister Ban Ki-moon. Below is an excerpt from the interview:

BBC: Was the invasion of Iraq in 2003, without a Security Council resolution, the most difficult point for you in your term?

Kofi Annan: It was extremely difficult, because I really believed that we could have stopped the war and that if we had worked a bit harder - given the inspectors a bit more time - we could have.

I was also concerned that for the US and its coalition to go to war without the consent of the Council in that particular region, which has always been extremely controversial, would be extremely difficult and very divisive and that it would take quite a long time to put the organization back together, and of course it divided the world too.

It is healing but we are not there yet. It hasn't healed yet and we feel the tension still in this organization as a result of that.

BBC: And you watch with mounting alarm, like many people, what's happening. In September, you said Iraq was in danger of sliding towards civil war.

BBC: Is it civil war?

Kofi Annan: It is an extremely dangerous situation and I think we all are interested in getting Iraq right and we would want to get it right, but the Iraqis will have to come together and make it happen. Obviously, they are going to need help, given the killings and the bitterness I'm not sure they can do it alone.

They would need help from the international community and their neighbours, but some of the key things they have to do is the constitutional review, really, looking at issues of revenue sharing, oil and taxation revenues, how do you share it fairly amongst the three groups, or four groups? How do you share power?

I mean, all the struggle is about each group's position in future Iraq, and if you don't deal with those issues, which during the constitution were swept under the rug, they are going to face very serious problems and I think they should be tackled.

BBC: Is it civil war?

Kofi Annan: I think, given the level of violence, the level of killing and bitterness and the way that forces are arranged against each other. A few years ago, when we had the strife in Lebanon and other places, we called that a civil war. This is much worse.

BBC: You must in some way feel sadly vindicated - in 2003, in March, you said that: "A war can lead to unintended consequences, producing new threats and new dangers."

It is sad - it is sad in the sense that it had to come to this.

BBC: Was it a mistake? Some Iraqis say that life is worse than it was under a dictator.

Kofi Annan: I think they are right in the sense of the average Iraqi's life. If I were an average Iraqi obviously I would make the same comparison, that they had a dictator who was brutal but they had their streets, they could go out, their kids could go to school and come back home without a mother or father worrying, "Am I going to see my child again?" And the Iraqi government has not been able to bring the violence under control.

The society needs security and a secure environment for it to get on - without security not much can be done - not recovery or reconstruction.

BBC: Do you believe that the Iraq Study Group led by James Baker and Lee Hamilton which is about to publish its report is a recognition that the US and others have to change course urgently?

Kofi Annan: Yeah, I think it's a recognition that things are not working the way they had hoped and that it is essential to take a critical review - take a critical look at what is going on and, if necessary, change course.

BBC: Because there's no denying the risks at stake here - you met Middle East leaders this summer, they said to you that the whole region had been radicalized and destabilized. In fact, they said it was a disaster.

Kofi Annan: This is the feeling of the leaders in the region and in the streets as well.

The people are worried - they are worried about the future, they are worried about the broader Middle East, they are worried about the tensions with Iran, they are worried about Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and some would even stretch it as far as to Afghanistan.

So we have a very worrisome situation in the broader Middle East and we also need to look at them as a whole, not as individual conflicts. There are linkages between these crises.

BBC: But when you see this unfolding, in the dark of night, do you ever think: "I, as the secretary general, could have done more to stop it, personally"?

Kofi Annan: You mean the war or the situation?

BBC: The war.

Kofi Annan: I think as secretary general I did everything I could. I worked with the member states, and you've read some of the comments I made before the war.

BBC: But you made many comments, for example, you waited until 2004 in a BBC interview to say the war was "illegal".

Kofi Annan: No.

BBC: Why didn't you stand up in the UN Security Council and say in 2003: "This war is illegal without a Security Council resolution"?

Kofi Annan: I think, if you go back to the records, you will discover that before the war I said that for the US and its allies to go to war without Security Council approval would not be in conformity with the Charter.

BBC: Which is a very sort of UN bureaucratic thing, rather than saying "it's illegal" which would have much more impact. And your aides say to me: "This was Kofi Annan, the cautious man, not wanting to confront."

Kofi Annan: It's easy to - what do the Americans call it? - "Saturday morning quarter-backing", or "armchair critic". I mean, it was one of those situations where even before a shot had been fired, you had millions in the street and it didn't make a difference.

BBC: But for you, in that position, a very difficult, devastating time. Your aides say that you lost your voice.

Kofi Annan: Yeah, it was very difficult, very painful, because I really, really felt we should have tried harder to avoid it and I was very worried about the consequences and the results.

BBC: Your biggest regret?

Kofi Annan: My biggest regret - well, it's also linked to Iraq. It was 23 wonderful colleagues and friends I sent to Iraq who got blown away. They went to Iraq to try and help clean up in the aftermath of a war I genuinely did not believe in, and these people, who were wonderful professionals, wonderful friends, were blown up overnight. And of course when that happens, you ask questions, you know: Would they be here if there hadn't been this situation? Would they be here if I hadn't asked them to go?

Bill Clinton's Anti-Terror Efforts

Bill Clinton's Anti-Terror Efforts
02:28
Rather than be ashamed of my voice, I've decided to let it out and talk about things that matter to me. Today I discuss Bill Clinton's efforts against terror during his term. Here is the Transcript of my speech. All of my sources are listed Rather than be ashamed of my voice, I've decided to let it out and talk about things that matter to me. Today I discuss Bill Clinton's efforts against terror during his term. Here is the Transcript of my speech. All of my sources are listed at the bottom. Please visit them. Thank You.

Hello, I am going to talk about Former President Clinton and his anti-terrorism efforts from 1993--2001. Clinton tried to fight the growing presence of Al-Queda and Osama Bin Laden, almost to the point of obsession.

However, he received great opposition from Republicans in Congress and The Pro-Republican Media. Because of the scandle he endured with Monica Lewinsky, many people forget that he did quite a bit of good during his Administration.

Of course, almost all of his efforts were destroyed by Right-Wing Politicians.

During his term, Clinton sent legislation to Congress to TIGHTEN AIRPORT SECURITY. The legislation was defeated by the Republicans because of opposition from the airlines.

Clinton sent legislation to Congress to allow for BETTER TRACKING OF TERRORIST FUNDING. It was defeated by Republicans in the Senate because of opposition from banking interests.

Clinton sent legislation to Congress to add tagents to explosives, to allow for BETTER TRACKING OF EXPLOSIVES. It was defeated by the Republicans because of opposition from the NRA.

Here are some things, however, that DID occur during Clinton's term.

He developed the nation's first anti-terrorism policy

He brought perpetrators of the first World Trade Center bombing and CIA killings to justice.

He attempted to kill Osama bin Laden and disrupt Al Qaeda through preemptive strikes

He tripled the budget of the FBI for counterterrorism and doubled overall funding for counterterrorism.

He also intercepted several planned attacks on the U.S. and stopped cold several acts of possible terrorism including;

The planned attack to blow up 12 U.S. jetliners simultaneously.

The planned attack to blow up UN Headquarters.

The planned attack to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Washington.

The planned attack to blow up Boston airport.

The planned attack to blow up the US Embassy in Albania.

All of these plans were defeated by The Clinton Admininstration, and several more.


In August 1998, President Clinton ordered missile strikes against targets in Afghanistan in an effort to hit Osama bin Laden, who had been linked to the embassy bombings in Africa (and was later connected to the attack on the USS Cole and 9/11). However, The missiles reportedly missed bin Laden by a few hours

Bill Clinton was aggresive in his campaign against Terrorism, and tried his best to protect America by tracking and investigating Al-Queada threats.

In Congress, however, Clinton was rejected by the Conservative Right, and his 1996 Omnibus Terror Bill, which included many of the Anti-Terror measures we now take for granted after 9/11, was defeated to the point of uselessness from attacks from the Right.

In conclusion, take a moment to look at the links I have provided, and think about the many good efforts put forth by Former President Bill Clinton. Good-Bye.


Read About Bill Clinton's Anti-Terrorism Policy Here (Pre 9/11)
http://www.fff.org/freedom/1196b.asp

Information about Clinton's Omnibus Policy
http://www.neusysinc.com/columnarchive/colm0018.html
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/McCarthyism/BringingBack_M cCarthyism.html

Information about the fictional ABC Documentary "Path to 9/11"

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Fridays%20Child/77

My Other Sources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/083006J.shtml
http://www.mikehersh.com/Clinton_vs_Terror_Republicans_vs_Cl inton.shtml

ELIOT COHEN blast Iraq Study Group

No Way to Win a War
Iraq Study Group: A fatuous process yielded fatuous results.

BY ELIOT A. COHEN
Sunday, December 10, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
Published in Wall Street Journal
Link: http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009364

The theory of the thing is very peculiar indeed. You are in the middle of a war--a hard war, a war that is going badly. If the government has bogged down, if the people inside have gone stale, you would say that the sound thing, the Churchillian or Lincolnian or Rooseveltian thing, would be, first, to fire a bunch of officials (generals as well as top civilians), promote or bring in fresh talent, and put together a small group of people to take a new and unillusioned look. Those people would report back in secrecy to the president and his most senior advisers and aides.

They would consist of experienced soldiers and civilians in whom the president (who, after all, has to make the strategic decisions, and is the accountable executive) has trust. There would not be many of them, a half dozen or so, and they would have to be hardy enough to visit the war zone for several weeks, talking not just to politicians and generals but to captains and sergeants. They would go see things for themselves. They would visit a forward operating base near Tikrit; they would spend some time with Iraqi soldiers in Taji; they would take their chances in a convoy to al Asad, or even a patrol in Tal Afar.

They--not their staff of a few soldiers and secretaries--would do the probing, digging, thinking, discussing and, above all, the writing. The chairman of the group would insist that they air their disagreements candidly and thoroughly in front of the president, engaging in a debate that might last a day, perhaps longer. The rest of us would not find out about the panel until months, or even years, after it reported back; maybe not until the war was over.

The administration's congressional critics (including those of its own party) came up with a different solution: the Iraq Study Group (ISG), which has now produced a document that consists of 50 pages of recommendations, preceded by a 40-page thumbnail sketch of the current situation in Iraq and 50 pages of maps, lists of people, and full-length biographies of the commissioners. This is a group composed, for the most part, of retired eminent public officials, most with limited or no expertise in the waging or study of war. It consists of individuals carefully selected with an eye to diverse partisan and other irrelevant personal characteristics. These worthies, with not one chairman but two (for balance, of course), turned to several score experts known to disagree vehemently with one another about the best course of action to be pursued in Iraq.

Some of the commission members and their advisers cordially detest the president and his administration and opposed him and his war from the outset; others were equally passionate in their defense of both the man and the conflict. And yet this diverse group had an overwhelming mandate, from the beginning, to produce a consensus document. The commission members spent four days in Iraq, and with the exception of a one-day foray by former Marine Chuck Robb, they stayed in the Green Zone, that bubble of palaces and residences that has little to do with the real Iraq of Basra, Kirkuk, Ramadi, Baquba and Mosul. At the end, they had breakfast with the president and a few hours later posted their conclusions on the Internet for all the world to ponder. There is something of farce in all this, an invocation of wisdom from a cohesive Washington elite that does not exist, a desperate wish to believe in the gravitas and the statecraft of grave men (and women) who can sort out the mess in which the country finds itself.

A fatuous process yields, necessarily, fatuous results. "Iraq's neighbors are not doing enough to help Iraq achieve stability"--a statement only somewhat ameliorated by the admission that some are even "undercutting stability," which sounds as though Syria and Iran were being downright rude, rather than providing indispensable assistance to those who have filled the burn wards of Walter Reed, the morgue in Baghdad, and the cemetery at Arlington. The selected remedy is, first and foremost, rather like the ISG's credo for its own functioning, consensus. "The United States should immediately launch a new diplomatic offensive to build an international consensus for stability in Iraq and the region," as if our chief failure with Bashar Assad or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lies with the hitherto unnoticed laziness or rhetorical ineptitude of our diplomats, or as though Europe, Saudi Arabia and Israel have not yet figured out that stability in Iraq is a good thing. "Syria should control its border" and "Iran should respect Iraq's sovereignty."

No kidding--but who is going to make them? That perennial solution, "resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict," makes its appearance, including direct negotiations between Israel and Palestinians, but only with "those who accept Israel's right to exist." The report conveniently forgets that the elected leaders of Palestine do not, in fact, accept Israel's right to exist. And it also neglects the grim reality that one of the most terrible things about Gaza, and possibly the West Bank as well, is that no one, not even Hamas, is really in charge.

Part of Iran's price for easing up on us in Iraq is pretty clearly taking the heat off its nuclear program; the ISG recommends that that issue "should continue to be dealt with by the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany." Well, what deal should the U.S. be willing to cut on Iranian nuclear weapons? Do we think the Iranians would deliver? And what are the long-term consequences?

War, and warlike statecraft, is a hard business, and though this is supposed to be a report dominated by "realists," there is nothing realistic in failing to spell out the bloody deeds, grim probabilities and dismal consequences associated with even the best course of action. Indeed, some parts of the report read as sheer fantasy--Recommendation 15, for example, which provides that part of the American deal with Syria should include the latter's full cooperation in investigating the Hariri assassination, verifiable cessation of Syrian aid to Hezbollah, and its support for persuading Hamas to recognize Israel.

The prescriptions for internal processes in Iraq are only somewhat better. The ISG argues that American forces should shift to developing Iraqi security forces and backing them up, which is more or less the course we are on now. It talks of milestones for Iraqi performance, as if Iraqi benchmarking were more a problem than Iraqi will, and Iraqi will more the problem than Iraqi capability. It suggests announcing our own planned redeployments without considering the most obvious consequence, which is that Iraqis of many political hues will decide that the Americans are leaving, and the time has come to cut deals with Jaish al Mahdi, or the Badr organization, or al Qaeda in Iraq, or any of the other cutthroat outfits infesting that bleeding country.

Quite apart from the psychological impact of our actions, there is the sober fact that the Iraqi army is small, 138,000-strong (and that number probably overstated), and that building effective security forces takes time. The 188,000-man police forces are corrupt, riddled with militia influence, and in need of a thorough overhaul. We cannot build the Iraqi security forces without a substantial combat presence. Nor is the problem merely one of training, as Iraqi corporals driving around in pickup trucks without functional radios might have sourly pointed out, had they had the chance to talk to a Study Group member.

At least the ISG has given considerable thought to preparing us for future conflict. Consider Recommendations 47 and 48. Congress, they declare, should allocate money to repair the clapped-out equipment the Army and Marines will bring back from Iraq. This is no doubt better than, say, heaving Bradley infantry fighting vehicles overboard on the way back to American ports in order to provide a home for new coral reefs. "As [American] redeployment proceeds, military leaders should emphasize training and education of forces that have returned to the United States in order to restore the force to full combat capability." Pentagon planners would do well to pursue this plan rather than give the troops six months of leave and then having them paint the sorely neglected rocks outside the sergeant major's office.

The great war leaders, in their private deliberations, shied away from vagueness. Haziness about ends and means, about what to do and how to do it, is a mark of strategic ineptitude; in war it gets people killed. But a Churchill could only call the flattening of German cities "terror bombing" in private.

Thus, unsurprisingly, in a public document of this kind, euphemism and imprecision abound. The U.S. needs to give "disincentives" to Syria and Iran: But the real question has always been whether we are willing to use a variety of overt and covert means--from bombing insurgent safe houses to sabotaging refineries, from mining harbors to supporting their own insurgents--to do so. And, in fact, the report mentions no means for squeezing either country.

True, as James Baker irritably noted at the press conference releasing the report, the U.S. talked to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But as the U.S. did so it also bankrupted the U.S.S.R. in an arms race, undermined its client governments in Eastern Europe by supporting Polish labor unions, and killed its soldiers by providing surface-to-air missiles to Afghan guerrillas. Real pain, and not merely tough talk sweetened by a bucket of goodies, paves the way for successful negotiations with brutal opponents.

What we need in Iraq is not a New Diplomatic Offensive (capitals in the original) so much as energy and competence in fighting the fight. From the outset of the Iraq war much of our difficulty has stemmed not so much from failures to find the right strategy, as from an astounding and depressing inability to implement the strategic and operational choices we have nominally made.

This inability has come from things as personal as picking the wrong people for key positions, in the apparent belief that generals are interchangeable cogs in a counterinsurgency machine. It has come from an unwillingness or inability to grab the bureaucracy by the throat and make it act--which is why, three years after the insurgency began, we still send soldiers out to risk roadside bomb attacks in overweight Humvees when there are half a dozen commercially available armored vehicles designed to minimize the effects of such blasts. It is why--although the government has declared long before the ISG issued its report that training the Iraqis is Job One--we still embed fewer than a dozen American advisers in an Iraqi battalion when the right number is three to five times that many.

We have not come up to the brink of failure because we did not know how important it is to employ young Iraqi men or to keep detained insurgents out of circulation or to prevent militia penetration of the security forces by vetting the commanders of those forces. We have known these things--but we have not done these things.

The creation of the Iraq Study Group reflects the vain hope that well-meaning, senior, former public officials can find ideas that have not already occurred to people inside government; that those new ideas can redeem incompetent execution and insufficient resources; that salvation can come from a Washington establishment whose wisdom was exaggerated in its heyday, and which has in any event succumbed to a kind of political-intellectual entropy since the 1960s; that a public commission can do the work of oversight that Congress has shirked for five years in the misguided belief that it would thus support an administration struggling to do its best in a difficult situation. This is no way to run a war, and most definitely, no way to win it.

Mr. Cohen is Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.

REPUBLICAN SENATOR GORDON SMITH

CNN'S WOLF BLITZER DOES INTERVIEW WITH REPUBLICAN SENATOR GORDON SMITH WHO ON THE FLOOR OF THE SENATE SAID THE IRAQ WAR MAY BE ILLEGAL.

This is a man who has studied and reflected on what is happening in Iraq- and has in hiw own words- "come to the end of his rope". The dying US troops really are effecting him. He is not pointing fingers, rather, he accepts responsibility as part of the US Government. "What I say I say not in anger, but in sorrow."

posted by paul grant (follower of Basho)

Military Readiness Lowest Since Vietnam

Salon (watch short ad for a site pass):

Whatever its ultimate fate, the Iraq Study Group report released Wednesday should have destroyed the spurious notion that flooding Iraq with more U.S. troops might win the war. As the report makes clear, a major influx of U.S. combat brigades into Iraq is somewhere between totally unrealistic and completely impossible.

[..]The military is running out of troops and equipment. The cold, hard facts about military readiness and a 1.4 million-strong active-duty force rule out a big increase in the size of the U.S. footprint in Iraq. "We don't have enough is the short answer," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University [..]Advocating a big increase in troop levels now is just political theater, Hoffman argued. "This is the beginning of the who-lost-Iraq debate," he explained. "No one wants to be a charter member of the club."

Even though the new report articulates a dark picture of U.S. readiness, some politicians, including leading Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, continue to argue that a significant increase in troops in Iraq is needed to save the country from sinking into the abyss. Read on…

Meanwhile, Bush said in his weekly radio address that he is "is confident Americans can move beyond political differences and agree a new direction for Iraq leading to victory." Um, George? The American people HAVE by and large agreed on a new direction for Iraq. It appears YOU are the one who needs to move beyond political differences.

It's too easy to get mired in the political gamesmanship of this inside the Beltway. But I hope that we never let them forget that these are real people whose lives hang in the balance. pment. The cold, hard facts about military readiness and a 1.4 million-strong active-duty force rule out a big increase in the size of the U.S. footprint in Iraq. 'We don't have enough is the short answer,' said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University [..]Advocating a big increase in troop levels now is just political theater, Hoffman argued. 'This is the beginning of the who-lost-Iraq debate,' he explained. 'No one wants to be a charter member of the club.'

Even though the new report articulates a dark picture of U.S. readiness, some politicians, including leading Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, continue to argue that a significant increase in troops in Iraq is needed to save the country from sinking into the abyss. Read on…

Meanwhile, Bush said in his weekly radio address that he is 'is confident Americans can move beyond political differences and agree a new" new direction for Iraq leading to victory." Um, George? The American people HAVE by and large agreed on a new direction for Iraq. It appears YOU are the one who needs to move beyond political differences.

It's too easy to get mired in the political gamesmanship of this inside the Beltway. But I hope that we never let them forget that these are real people whose lives hang in the balance.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Failure in Iraq: A Retrospective Analysis of the Reconstruction

Brilliant piece of writing


The Seven Deadly Sins of Failure in Iraq: A Retrospective Analysis of the Reconstruction

Iraq, Middle East, Islamic World

Kenneth M. Pollack, Director of Research, Saban Center for Middle East Policy

The Middle East Review of International Affairs

December 01, 2006 —
It never had to be this bad. The reconstruction of Iraq was never going to be quick or easy, but it was not doomed to failure.[1] Its disastrous course to date has been almost entirely the result of a sequence of foolish and unnecessary mistakes on the part of the United States.

Perhaps at some point in the future, revisionist historians will try to claim that the effort was doomed from the start, that it never was possible to build a stable, let alone pluralistic, new Iraq in the rubble of Saddam Hussein's fall. However, that is decidedly not the view of the experts, the journalists covering the story, or the practitioners who went to Iraq to put the country back together after the 2003 invasion. Americans returning from Iraq--military and civilian alike--have proven unanimous in their view that the Iraqis desperately want reconstruction to succeed and that they have the basic tools to make it work, but that the United States has consistently failed to provide them with the opportunities and the framework to succeed.[2] Indeed, perhaps the most tragic evidence of this unrealized potential is that even three-and-a-half years after Saddam's fall, with Iraq mired in a deepening civil war and no sign of real progress on the horizon, over 40 percent of Iraqis still clung to the belief that Iraq was headed in the right direction--with only 35 percent saying it was headed in the wrong direction.[3]

If Iraq does slide into all-out civil war, the Bush Administration will have only itself to blame. It disregarded the advice of experts on Iraq, on nation-building, and on military operations. It staged both the invasion and the reconstruction on the cheap. It never learned from its mistakes and never committed adequate resources to accomplish either its original lofty aspirations or even its later, more modest goals. It refused to believe intelligence that contradicted its own views and doggedly insisted that reality conform to its wishes. In its breathtaking hubris, the Administration engineered a Greek tragedy in Iraq, the outcome of which may plague us for decades.

IGNORANCE AND ARROGANCE

The invasion of Iraq was born of a great many different ideas. As former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz noted in an interview with Vanity Fair, the threat of Saddam with weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) was simply the one threat upon which all of the senior members of the Bush Administration agreed--and believed that it could be used to justify the war to the public.[4] Not all of these ideas were foolish. Some of their rationales for war were quite reasonable: the international consensus that Saddam had reconstituted his WMD programs--which turned out to be entirely mistaken but was considered "incontrovertible"[5] at the time;[6] the fact that Saddam was one of the most brutal tyrants of the previous sixty years; the fact that his ambitions ran directly counter to those of the United States--and his efforts to achieve them had destabilized the Persian Gulf for twenty-five years; and the problem that the world was losing interest in keeping him bound by sanctions, as evinced by the postwar revelations of the Volcker commission concerning the corruption and manipulation of the Oil-for-Food program by the Iraqi government to secure the political support of France, Russia, and China, among other countries.[7]

However, there were also a great deal of unreasonable ideas, and unfortunately these unreasonable ideas were not only part of the justification for the war, but also became critical elements of the Administration's prewar thinking about postwar reconstruction. Some in the Bush Administration had convinced themselves that Saddam was the source of all of the ills of the Middle East and that, therefore, any progress on any issue in the region first required Saddam's removal. This was a key piece of the neoconservative support for Laurie Mylroie's bizarre claims that Saddam was responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, as well as a number of other attacks.[8] Likewise, during the 1990s, this author personally heard individuals who would later become senior Bush Administration officials insist that Saddam's opposition had doomed American efforts to make peace between the Arabs and the Israelis in the 1980s. In so doing, they simply dismissed all of the evidence that no Arab leader except Hosni Mubarak had been more supportive of the peace process than Saddam during that period. This was the basis of the neo-conservative refrain that "the road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad." Likewise, this mistaken conviction was part of the reason that Washington quickly shifted its attention from Afghanistan to Iraq, in the belief that Saddam somehow stood behind both the Taliban and al-Qa'ida. It is certainly the case that Administration figures regularly played fast and loose with the paltry evidence suggesting any kind of relationship between Saddam and bin Ladin, but it is also the case that they did so because they were certain that it existed, even if there was no evidence to support it and most of the evidence available suggested the opposite.[9]

As bad as some of these rationales for war may have been, far more damaging was the way in which these rationalizations influenced the Administration's senior leadership regarding the necessity and demands of postwar reconstruction. At bottom, many in the Administration--and virtually all of those leading the march to war--simply did not believe that a major effort at reconstruction was necessary. United States Central Command (CENTCOM), the military command responsible for the war, was told to prepare for humanitarian contingencies such as refugees, but little else. Both the CENTCOM commander, General Tommy Franks, and the office of the Secretary of Defense made clear that they wanted to reduce the American military presence in Iraq as quickly as possible, and if there were any serious efforts at nation-building to be made, they were determined that someone else do it.[10] Rumsfeld and other members of the Administration, including even the President, had made it clear that they did not believe that nation-building was the sort of operation in which the U.S. military should be involved.[11] Other members of the Administration, particularly those close to Iraqi National Congress (INC) leader Ahmed Chalabi, saw no need for a major American reconstruction effort, because they hoped to turn the country over to Chalabi and have him run it for the United States.[12]

To make matters worse, officials at the Department of Defense (DoD), the Office of the Vice President (OVP), and some at the National Security Council (NSC) decided that the State Department was "against" the war and would sabotage their plans to run Iraq the way they saw fit and to install Chalabi in power. They worked assiduously to retain complete control over the meager work on postwar reconstruction that was being done and to exclude State Department personnel, offices, and input. Thus one of the many Catch-22s of U.S. prewar planning for postwar Iraq is that while neither the military nor the civilian leadership of the Pentagon was interested in nation-building, they were absolutely determined to exclude those agencies that were both more willing and more able. While State's capacity to handle postwar reconstruction and nation-building probably would also have proven inadequate without massive international cooperation, it was still orders of magnitude beyond what DoD possessed. Instead, the Defense Department put together a small team (about 200 people at the time of the invasion) led by retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner to handle postwar reconstruction--at least temporarily--until a presidential envoy could be appointed.[13] Garner was not even asked to head this postwar transition team until January 9, 2003, a little more than two months before the start of the war. He was prevented from cooperating with Central Command planners, and many of his requests for key personnel were denied. Garner and his team wanted desperately to do the right thing, and some were quite able, but they started with everything stacked against them.

Once again, this was particularly true with regard to the intellectual foundations of the Administration's approach to war, which underlay all of the planning. Most of the Administration's chief Iraq hawks shared a deeply naive view that the fall of Saddam and his top henchmen would have relatively little impact on the overall Iraqi governmental structure. They assumed that Iraq's bureaucracy would remain intact and would therefore be capable of running the country and providing Iraqis with basic services. They likewise assumed that the Iraqi armed forces would largely remain cohesive and would surrender whole to U.S. forces. While the Administration does not seem to have intended to use the Iraqi army to secure the population, they believed that because it would remain cohesive, there would be little threat from disgruntled soldiers joining organized crime or insurgent groups, as actually happened.[14]

As has been documented by many other authors, the result of all this was a fundamental lack of attention to realistic planning for the postwar environment. As it was assumed that the Iraqis would be delighted to be liberated--with no allowance either for those who opposed the invasion, those glad but wary of U.S. intentions, or those simply looking to take advantage of the dictator's fall to grab as much loot as they could--little thought was given to security requirements after Saddam's fall. This was carried over into a larger dearth of planning for the provision of security and basic services in the mistaken belief that Iraqi political institutions would remain largely intact and therefore able to handle those responsibilities--especially after America's Iraqi friends (particularly Chalabi) were installed in Baghdad in Saddam's place. Although senior military commanders decided that the State Department would be responsible for reconstruction, thereby alleviating themselves of any responsibility for it, the Department of Defense prohibited Garner's team from interacting with Franks' staff, while also working to minimize its cooperation with the State Department. Across the board, planning was disjointed, inadequate, and unrealistic.[15]

NEGLECT AND STUBBORNNESS

All of these bad ideas--the products of arrogance and ignorance--began to bear tragic fruit during and immediately after the invasion of Iraq. There were certainly problems with the operation itself. The assumption that virtually no Iraqis would fight proved inaccurate. Most did not, but enough did to create some serious headaches for commanders throughout the chain of command. There were too few Coalition troops, which meant that long supply lines were vulnerable to attack by Iraqi irregulars, and the need to mask entire cities at times took so much combat power that it brought the entire offensive to a halt. American technology at times fell victim to simple Iraqi countermeasures--such as barrages of small arms fire that effectively neutralized the fearsome Apache attack helicopters that the United States had hoped would pulverize Iraqi mechanized formations. Nevertheless, the invasion itself was, overall, a remarkably successful operation, resulting in the capture of Baghdad and the fall of the regime in a little less than four weeks.[16]

Yet the invasion was not the war. It was merely the beginning of the war. Unfortunately, the prewar planning guidance handed down from the civilian chiefs in the Department of Defense now dictated what the military forces on the ground did and did not do, and that meant that they did far too little.

Almost immediately, the mistaken assumptions and inadequate planning for postwar Iraq began to plague U.S. actions. Combat units found themselves in charge of large urban areas with no sense of what to do, whom to contact, or how else to get help. As no orders were issued to the troops to prevent looting and other criminal activity--since it was mistakenly assumed that there would not be such problems--no one did so. The result was an outbreak of lawlessness throughout the country that resulted in massive physical destruction coupled with a stunning psychological blow to Iraqi confidence in the United States, from neither of which has the country recovered.

It was at that moment, in April 2003, that the United States created the most fundamental problems in Iraq. At that point, having torn down Saddam Hussein's tyranny, there was nothing to take its place; nothing to fill the military, political, and economic void left by the regime's fall. The result was that the United States created a failed state and a power vacuum, which even as of this writing has not been properly filled. That power vacuum and that failed state allowed an insurgency to develop in the Sunni tribal community of Western Iraq, left the Shi'a communities to be slowly taken over by vicious sectarian militias, spawned organized crime rings across the country, and prevented the development of governmental institutions capable of providing Iraqis with the most basic services such as clean water, sanitation, electricity, and a minimally functioning economy capable of generating basic employment. The persistence of these problems over time led to the emergence of low-level civil war in Iraq, and it now threatens to plunge the country into a Bosnia- or Lebanon-like maelstrom.

Compounding the problem, the Administration concurrently took a number of steps that discouraged those who might have helped them to address these failings by helping to build new political, economic, and security institutions in Iraq capable of replacing Saddam's fallen regime. Such capabilities were resident in segments of the UN bureaucracy and, to an even greater extent, in scores of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have assisted in nation-building around the world in the past. However, the Bush Administration's stubborn insistence that the United Nations be denied overall authority for the reconstruction, and that the international community conform to American dictates in Iraq effectively denied the United States their assistance.

It is not true, as many seem to believe, that the Administration simply barred the United Nations and other states from participating in the reconstruction. However, Washington did impose conditions on that involvement that made it unattractive for the UN, international NGOs, and a long list of foreign governments to participate. Even countries that disagreed with the United States on the decision to invade Iraq were eager to assist with the reconstruction--indeed some, like Germany, hoped that their fulsome participation in reconstruction would help assuage the anger that their opposition to the war itself had created in the United States. Unfortunately, another pathology of the senior leadership of the Bush Administration was that most of them shared an abiding antipathy to the UN and other international organizations. This, coupled with their ignorant but adamant belief that a major reconstruction effort would be unnecessary in Iraq, hardened them in their stand-offish approach to the UN and other members of the international community. Washington insisted that the reconstruction be headed by an American and that all UN and international personnel be integrated into the American effort.

However, neither the UN, the international NGOs, nor many other governments were interested in working under these conditions. Most UN bureaucrats disliked the Bush Administration (if not the United States altogether) and the invasion of Iraq to begin with. Moreover, they and members of the Security Council were loathe to make the UN subordinate to the United States given both the greater resources and success of the UN in nation-building operations in the past.[17] The United Nations provided only a small staff of several hundred people and most of the NGOs either stayed away or sent only small numbers of personnel themselves. To its credit, the United Nations did send one priceless commodity: Sergio Vieira de Mello, an outstanding international administrator who had headed the successful effort to stabilize East Timor in the years before the invasion of Iraq. To the extent that the United Nations and the rest of the international community participated meaningfully in the reconstruction of Iraq in the days after the fall of Baghdad, it was largely because Sergio de Mello was determined to make it work. When de Mello was killed in August 2003 by a truck-bomb attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad, the Secretariat immediately reduced its presence in Iraq to little more than a skeleton crew on the grounds that the United States, which had insisted on retaining complete control of the effort, was failing in its most basic task: providing the security that was the sine qua non of any reconstruction efforts.

In retrospect, the meager participation of the international community was an important factor in the many failures of reconstruction. The United Nations, through its various agencies, can call upon a vast network of personnel and resources vital to various aspects of nation-building. One of the greatest problems the United States faced was that it simply did not have enough people who knew how to do all of the things necessary to rebuild the political and economic systems of a shattered nation. The UN, in contrast, had worked with thousands of people with such skills in Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Had the UN asked those people to help in Iraq, they probably would have come. In contrast, they proved mostly unwilling to answer the same call from the Bush Administration, especially when Washington rudely and repeatedly emphasized that reconstruction in Iraq would be done their way and no other. The ability to tap into a much larger network of people with desperately needed skills, by itself, was a crucial virtue of the UN that was lost to the United States out of sheer hubris.[18]

PANIC AND HASTE

It did not take long after the fall of Saddam's regime for reality to intrude upon the pipe dreams of the Administration. It quickly became clear that Iraq's governmental apparatus had largely collapsed. The people had all gone home and most were not reporting to work. The buildings had been ransacked by looters. The equipment had largely been stolen or destroyed. Many of the files had been destroyed, stolen, or acquired for other nefarious purposes. A comprehensive survey undertaken by the new Iraqi minister of water resources after he took office in late 2003, found that the ministry had lost 60 percent of its equipment--from pencils to massive dredgers--in the looting.[19] The Administration did look briefly to Ahmed Chalabi and his INC to fill the void, flying Chalabi and 400 of his personnel into al-Nasiriyah early in the war. However, the paltry numbers of followers that Chalabi could scrape together compared to what he claimed, and the increasing evidence that those on the inside did not know or care for him, made it impossible to simply hand the reins of power to Chalabi and expect that he could manage the state. What's more, it was equally clear that the United States lacked the personnel with the expertise to step in and fill these roles--and the international community, which did have such personnel, was not willing to provide them unless the Administration agreed to major changes in its handling of the postwar reconstruction.

The result was a sort of panic in both Washington and Baghdad, as it became apparent that postwar realities were radically different from the Administration's prewar expectations. Initially, the panic took the form of criticism of Jay Garner. In essence, the first response of those in Washington who had devised the vision for the threadbare postwar reconstruction was to blame Garner for not being up to the task. They whispered to the press that it was his execution and not their unrealistic expectations and inadequate preparations that were to blame.

Not surprisingly, Garner was soon on his way out. He was relieved of his charge in June 2003, and replaced by the more senior and more politically savvy L. Paul Bremer. Yet Bremer knew even less about Iraq when he took charge than Garner had, having never handled operations there before and not even having had the benefit of Garner's few months of pre-planning to get a sense of the country. Bremer's early remarks upon arrival in Baghdad were largely focused on the need to privatize Iraqi industry. It was as if he had inherited leadership of an Eastern Europe nation that had just shed Soviet-style Communism--and not an Arab country suddenly freed from war, comprehensive sanctions, and a near-genocidal dictatorship.[20] However, Bremer had another problem to deal with: Washington's demands.

The manifest problems in Iraq--from the looting and anarchy, to the persistent insurgent attacks, to the lack of any progress in restoring basic services--coupled with the lack of progress in finding WMDs, were putting a serious damper on the Administration's ability to claim that it had truly "liberated" Iraq and would quickly be able to leave it a stable, prosperous state. Washington began to put intense pressure on its small, but constantly growing, staff in Baghdad to produce results, and fast. The result was a series of mistaken decisions in the summer and fall of 2003 that further crippled the reconstruction effort.[21]

The best known of these decisions was the disbanding of the Iraqi military and security services. This decision actually requires a bit of explanation in order to understand the problematic facets of it. As Bremer and his senior staff have repeatedly argued, and not incorrectly, "the Iraqi Army disbanded itself." As noted above, and as should have been expected, during and after the war, most Iraqi soldiers simply went home. Thus, to some extent, the decision merely reflected the reality of the situation. Moreover, the Administration's critics are probably wrong in their contention that the Army could have been used to maintain order, and so take the place of the missing Coalition soldiers who should have been there to do so. The Iraqi Army was Saddam's Army--and his security services even more so--and it is very unclear how the population would have reacted to an American decision to use them to clamp down on civilians after the regime's fall. In this author's conversations with Iraqis both inside and outside Iraq since the end of the war, there certainly have been those who suggested that since most of the conscripts were Shi'a and merely following orders, the people would have accepted them as enforcers of law and order after Saddam's fall. However, far more have suggested the opposite. Bremer's team heard the same thing, and an important element in their decision to disband it was to try to send a signal to the people that the old regime was gone, and the Coalition would be starting again from a clean slate to create new institutions without the taint of Saddam.

While this rationale was understandable, it did not mean that the decision was faultless. In fact, there was a major problem, albeit one principally derived from the poor prewar planning rather than from mistakes made by Bremer's team in Baghdad. This was the failure to entice, cajole, or even coerce Iraqi soldiers back to their own barracks or to other facilities where they could be fed, clothed, watched, retrained, and prevented from joining the insurgency, organized crime, or the militias. During its various forays into nation-building in the 1980s and 90s, the United States learned the importance of a Disarm, Demobilize, and Retrain (DDR) program for any reconstruction effort. The purpose of such a program is to take the soldiers and officers of the old army and put them into a long-term program of transition so that they can eventually be reintegrated into the society with the skills needed to find themselves jobs as civilians.

In Iraq, there was no DDR program, nor could one have been pulled together overnight. Doing so would have required places to put those Iraqis (their barracks had been bombed in some cases; looted in every case), money to pay, feed, and otherwise care for them; personnel and supplies to train them; and additional troops to guard them (in both senses of the word). As a result, the Coalition had nothing to offer former Iraqi soldiers and (particularly) officers, who had once enjoyed privileged positions in their society. By abruptly disbanding the military and security services without a DDR program, the United States turned as many as one million Iraqi men loose on the streets with no money, no way of supporting their families, and no skills other than how to use a shovel and a gun. Not surprisingly, many of the Sunni officers were humiliated by how they were treated and went home to their tribes in al-Anbar province and joined--along with their sons, cousins, and nephews--the burgeoning Sunni insurgency. Equally unsurprisingly, many of the rank and file were quickly recruited by the insurgency, by militia leaders, or by organized crime. The result was a massive boost to the forces of instability in the country.[22]

Although the decision to disband the Army without a DDR program is the best known of the rushed decisions made during the summer and fall of 2003, it was hardly the only one, and two other important ones bear mentioning. The first of these was the decision to accelerate massively the training of the new Iraqi Army. When Major General Paul Eaton was given responsibility for setting up a training program in Iraq for the New Iraqi Army, he was told that his goal was to have nine trained battalions (about 10,000 to 12,000 men) at the end of twelve months. This was a realistic goal, and Eaton's plan was fully capable of achieving it. However, soon after the program had started running, Eaton was suddenly ordered to accelerate his training program so that he could produce twenty-seven battalions in only nine months.[23] The reason for this was that the Administration had realized that they were desperately short of troops to fill the security vacuum the United States had created when it toppled Saddam's regime. However, rather than mobilize and deploy additional American soldiers--or do what would be necessary to secure greater participation in the Coalition by other nations--Washington's response was to have Eaton start pumping out as many Iraqi troops as he could, heedless of the fact that the accelerated programs would inevitably produce Iraqi soldiers who were neither properly trained nor fully committed to the mission.

This problem became even more severe with the creation of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps (ICDC) in the fall of 2003. The purpose of the ICDC was to provide local militia forces--like those used successfully in many other counterinsurgency and stability operations around the world--as adjuncts to the national military forces. Again, the basic idea was sound. However, in Washington's fever to churn out more Iraqi soldiers to hold up as proof that no more American or other foreign forces were needed, the Administration insisted on a breakneck pace that virtually eliminated any ability to vet personnel before they were brought into the ICDC. At the same time, training time was cut to just two or three weeks. Not surprisingly, the ICDC turned out to be a total debacle: It had virtually no combat capability, was thoroughly penetrated by the insurgents, militias, and organized crime, and collapsed whenever it was committed to battle.

The last key mistake made in that summer of panic was the decision to create an Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), which laid the foundation for many of Iraq's current political woes. The experience of nation-building in other states over the past twenty to thirty years left the experts convinced that the process of political reconstruction could not be rushed. In most of these situations, the problem was that there was no readily available pool of leaders who genuinely represented the people. This was especially true in Saddam's Iraq, where he had effectively "decapitated" the population by killing or co-opting any person with the charisma or stature to lead segments of the population and so pose a threat to his rule. In all of these societies, it took years to allow new leaders to emerge from the people. Such men and women had to feel safe enough to want to lead, they had to become known to large groups of people (large enough to get elected to some new position), and then they had to demonstrate their ability to lead in the new systems. What this suggested was the requirement for a period of three to six years of political transition during which sovereignty and ultimate stewardship of the decision-making process resided in an external force--ideally a UN-authorized "high commissioner" or the like, backed by international security forces and NGOs skilled in political and economic reconstruction. These experiences of nation-building had demonstrated that when the process of turning control of the government back to the indigenous population was rushed, the old elites and anyone else with guns inevitably took over the government by buying or bullying the electorate.

Thus, the experts on reconstruction generally urged the inclusion of Iraqi voices in the decision-making process, but not the turning over of decision-making authority--or the appearance of it--to any Iraqi group. Instead, the focus was on a longer timeframe of building a new political system from the ground up over a period of years, during which time an international coalition, blessed by the UN, would retain sovereignty and only delegate authority to new Iraqi political entities as they became ready.[24]

To some extent, that was the intent of some Americans in Iraq. Both State Department personnel and U.S. military officers--particularly those who had served in the Balkans and witnessed UN and NGO personnel in action there--began establishing local governing councils all across Iraq as part of such a bottom-up approach of building local governance capacity first, before moving on to provincial and then national levels. However, the unhappiness of Iraqis, Americans, and others with the course of reconstruction after the fall of Saddam, coupled with the desire of Ahmed Chalabi and his allies to see him installed in power, led Washington to insist on a change. Rather than allowing the bottom-up process the time it needed to succeed, they short-circuited the process and instead opted for a top-down approach, in which a new council of Iraqis (what became the IGC) would work with a fully-empowered American viceroy--Bremer--to run the country.[25] It was a combination of wanting to put the Iraqis out in front so that they would take the heat for the mistakes and problems of reconstruction (some of which were inevitable), and wanting Chalabi in charge even though it had become apparent that he could not get himself elected dog-catcher of Baghdad if he were forced to actually work his way up in a process of bottom-up political reconstruction.[26]

As a result, the United States created the twenty-five-member IGC and gave it an important role in guiding reconstruction. However, because Washington had not allowed enough time--let alone created the circumstances--for genuinely popular figures to emerge, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) simply appointed twenty-five Iraqi leaders well-known to them. Some, like the Kurdish leaders Jalal Talabani and Mas'ud Barzani, truly did represent their constituency. Others, like Shi'a leader 'Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, were at least respected in their community, even if they could not necessarily be trusted to speak for it. Most could not even claim that. Most were entirely unknown--a State Department poll found that only seven of them were known well enough for 40 percent or more of the population to have any opinion of them, positive or negative. In some cases, like Chalabi, they were genuinely disliked. In other cases, the choices were equally unfortunate, because they were nothing more than militia leaders. Many of them used their positions on the IGC to engineer their own further political and military (and financial) aggrandizement, so that membership on the IGC became a ticket to political power for those who might otherwise have had none.

The seeds of a great many of Iraq's problems lay in this arrangement. The IGC set the tone for later Iraqi governments, particularly the transitional governments of Ayad Allawi and Ibrahim Jaafari that followed. Many of the IGC leaders were horribly corrupt, and they stole from the public treasury and encouraged their subordinates to do the same. They cut deals with nefarious figures, many in organized crime. They built up their militias and insinuated them into the various security services. They used the instruments of government to exclude their political rivals from gaining any economic, military, or political power--particularly Chalabi, who gained control of the de-Ba'thification program and used it to exclude large numbers of Sunnis from participating in the new Iraqi government.[27] Because they wrote the first Iraqi constitution, the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), this became a document largely suited to their own interests and not necessarily those of the country; and because the TAL became the basis of the subsequent constitution, the constitution carried over some of these problems, while leaving many key issues ambiguous, since delegates could not reach a consensus between what the TAL espoused and what was actually best for Iraq.

This last point raises another problem that resulted from the creation of the IGC: the marginalization of a number of important Iraqi communities, most notably the Sunni tribal segment of the population. The IGC itself included only one Sunni tribal leader, and he was not widely respected in his own community. As a result, the Sunnis saw the IGC as an American instrument for turning the country over to the Kurds and the Shi'a. The Sunnis became increasingly concerned as the members of the IGC and their followers set about using their new positions to steal, expand their political and economic power, and further discredit Sunnis through de-Ba'thification--all the while filling government jobs with their own cronies. All of these strategies had been previously employed by the Sunnis themselves under Saddam; thus, the Sunnis became convinced that in the new Iraq they would be oppressed just as they had once oppressed the Shi'a and the Kurds. More than anything else, this conviction fed the Sunni-based insurgency.[28]

Not everything that Bremer's CPA did was a mistake, however. In November 2003, Bremer and his team appear to have recognized the Frankenstein's monster that had been created in the IGC--something that Bremer reportedly opposed from the start. As a result, they fashioned a new approach to Iraqi participation in the reconstruction and the development of the Iraqi political sector, called the November 15 Agreement for the date that it was finally accepted. The November 15 Agreement received a lot of undeserved bad press. This accord was a very complex formula to produce a new Iraqi legislative and executive body through a bottom-up process of caucuses. The reason for the complexity was that it was designed to exclude the unpopular exiles and militia leaders who had been brought into the power structure through the creation of the IGC and allow for genuinely popular leaders to be elected to new regional and national political bodies.[29]

It is unclear just how well it might have worked, but it was a clever effort to repair the damage done by the creation of the IGC. Unfortunately, its very complexity doomed it. Those members of the IGC who knew they could not get elected in a truly representative system began lobbying heavily with their allies in Washington and in the Green Zone in Baghdad. Meanwhile, the Shi'a militia leaders convinced Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani--the Marja-e Taqlid al-Mutlaq, the most revered figure in Shi'a Islam and the spiritual leader of the Iraqi Shi'a community--to oppose the November 15 Agreement based on the spurious claim that because it did not include direct elections, it was therefore undemocratic and a plot to prevent the Shi'a from realizing their rightful place in Iraqi society. It is far more likely that Sistani just did not understand the agreement and its complex caucus system and allowed various other leaders in the Shi'a community to manipulate him into opposing it because it was a threat to their new power and wealth. Tragically, Sistani's opposition and Washington's machinations doomed the November 15 Agreement, America's best chance to derail the pernicious political system inaugurated by the creation of the IGC in the summer of 2003.

DENIAL

Unfortunately, the mistakes did not end there. As bad as the Administration's prewar assumptions were, as tragic as it was that General Franks and his command did not see the need to stabilize the country, and as badly as the mistakes of the CPA were in compounding these problems, there were still more to come, and these too became critical components in the overall problems besetting the reconstruction.

In 2004-05, the Bush Administration largely convinced itself that the problems besetting Iraq were not as great as their critics claimed. While recognizing that reconstruction had turned out to be more demanding than they had anticipated, they convinced themselves that the problems of the country were simple and straightforward, and so could be addressed by a limited number of simple steps. Of greatest importance, they convinced themselves that solving Iraq's problems did not require any difficult political, economic, or military decisions, and no matter how much the evidence diverged from their theories, they refused to accept reality and give up their theories. In particular, throughout 2004-05, Administration officials believed that the problems besetting Iraq were almost entirely the fault of the Iraqi insurgency, which they maintained was largely driven by al-Qa'ida and by a small number of former regime figures. They insisted that once Iraq held fair and free elections to constitute a new legislature, this would undermine the legitimacy of the insurgency, causing it to whither away, and thus alleviating--if not eliminating--all of the problems.

Unfortunately, none of this was true. Moreover, by insisting that all of the problems of the country were caused by the insurgency--rather than that all of the problems of the country were helping to fuel the insurgency--and that, especially in 2004 and early 2005, the insurgency was really about al-Qa'ida operatives and former regime "dead-enders," the United States concentrated its efforts in the wrong places and on the wrong problems. As a result, the United States not only failed to quash the insurgency, but allowed the rest of the country to fall effectively under the control of sectarian militias and organized crime.

A major manifestation of this fatally misguided approach lay in the realm of military operations. In both counterinsurgency and stability operations,[30] the best course of action is to blanket the entire country with a thick layer of security personnel to protect the population and make it difficult--if not impossible--for insurgents, militias, and criminals to harm the civilian population. That was the strategy that the U.S. military attempted to employ in Iraq immediately after the invasion. However, while numbers are always soft in warfare, historically it has required a rough ratio of twenty security personnel per thousand of the population to create such security in both counterinsurgency and stability operations.[31] Even if one allows that the 70,000 Peshmerga are more than adequate to secure Kurdistan, the rest of Iraq would still require roughly 450,000 troops to achieve such a ratio. It is clear that there were never going to be 450,000 troops available to adequately blanket the entire country,[32] at least not until many years into the future when much larger numbers of competent Iraqi troops would be available. The United States was never willing to commit more than about 150,000 troops, and the Coalition allies never produced more than 20,000. Even by 2006, the actual number of Iraqi troops capable of contributing meaningfully to this operation was probably around 60-80,000.

This gap, and the fact that the Administration had no intention of providing the numbers of troops they required to actually make such a strategy work, became apparent to American military commanders in late 2003. At that point, they faced a choice: They could either concentrate the troops they had available on the areas of insurgent activity to try snuff them out, or they could concentrate those forces in and around Iraqi population centers to try to protect them against insurgents and criminals. Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, the American military commanders made the wrong decision: They chose the former, rather than the latter.

In conventional warfare, the goal is to go on the offensive, take the fight to the enemy, focus on killing "bad guys," and put the enemy on the defensive. In unconventional warfare--including counterinsurgency and stability operations--the only way to win is to do the exact opposite: remain mostly on the defensive, focus on protecting "good guys," and create safe spaces in which political and economic reform/reconstruction can take place--thereby undermining popular support for the "bad guys." The U.S. military, and particularly the U.S. Army, has never liked unconventional warfare. The small number of officers who understood it were typically relegated to the special forces and rarely ever rose to prominent command positions. Those who did rise to the top were those steeped in the principles of conventional warfare, which Army ideology insisted was universally applicable, including in unconventional operations, even when centuries of history made it abundantly clear that this was not the case.

Thus for nearly all of 2004 and 2005, Coalition forces were inordinately concentrated in western Iraq, romping around the Sunni triangle trying to catch and kill insurgents. The results were disastrous. First, because the insurgents were always willing to flee to fight again another day, these operations had virtually no impact on the insurgency overall, which actually grew stronger as ham-fisted American raids antagonized ever more Sunni tribesmen, convincing them to join the insurgency.[33] Second, because the insurgency grew stronger and stronger over time despite the massive exertions of the U.S. military, Iraqis increasingly began to see the United States as a paper tiger, with a variety of detrimental consequences. Last, because too many Coalition forces were off playing "whack-a-mole" with insurgents in the sparsely populated areas of western Iraq, the rest of the country was relatively denuded of troops--indeed, there were vast swathes of southern Iraq where one might not see Coalition or Iraqi Army forces for hours if not days--which allowed the militias and organized crime rings to gradually take control over neighborhoods and villages all across the rest of Iraq. Many of the current problems with the virtually unchecked insurgent attacks on the Shi'a, the explosive growth of vicious Shi'a--and Sunni, and Kurd, and other--militias, and the spiraling sectarian violence among them, can all be traced to this mistaken approach.

To make matters worse, not until 2006 did the U.S. military even acknowledge that their strategic concept--and tactics--in Iraq were not working. Despite numerous criticisms from both inside and outside the armed forces arguing that a conventional approach to the unconventional mission of securing Iraq was bound to fail--and was manifestly failing--the military refused to give up its strategy. Only at the start of 2006, when Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli arrived in Baghdad to take over the corps command there, did the U.S. military command in Baghdad devise a true counterinsurgency/stability operations approach to dealing with the security problems of the country. This effort began with what became known as "the Baghdad Security Plan," which was designed to concentrate large numbers of Iraqi and Coalition troops in Baghdad and employed the proper tactics to secure the capital and allow political and economic reconstruction efforts to begin to take hold there.

It was a brilliant plan, the first that could have actually accomplished what it set out to, but when it was finally approved in the summer of 2006, Chiarelli was given only about 70,000 mostly Iraqi troops--and then mostly Iraqi police, the worst of their security services--not the roughly 125,000 that he would have needed (and reportedly requested). Moreover, Chiarelli's plan called for a fully integrated military and civilian chain of command with adequate numbers of civilian personnel to match their American military and Iraqi civilian counterparts--two more things sorely lacking in Iraq from the very beginning--but none of this was forthcoming. As of this writing, the Baghdad security plan appeared to be enjoying some real success in those pockets of Baghdad where mixed formations of Iraqi and American units were present, but accomplishing little everywhere else. It too seems likely to fail as a result of the too little, too late approach Washington has taken toward the reconstruction of Iraq from start to finish.

At the political level, the United States actually began to do a bit better starting in 2005. The appointment of Zalmay Khalilzad as ambassador to Baghdad to succeed Bremer as the head of the civilian side of the U.S. reconstruction effort proved to be an inspired choice. Khalilzad did not have every skill that one would have wanted for that post--perhaps no mortal could--but he was a superb negotiator, and he understood some critically important basic truths. He knew that the Sunnis had to be brought back into the government to end the insurgency. He knew that real power-sharing arrangements had to be crafted so that the major figures in Iraq would commit to supporting the governmental structure. He also knew that the Iraqi people needed to be provided with basic security and basic services or they would begin to turn to warlords and militia leaders instead. As a result, he worked tirelessly to force a new national reconciliation agreement that might accomplish the first two goals and to make it possible to have a government that could partner with a new American military approach to achieve the third.

However, this has proven to be a Herculean (perhaps even Sisyphean) labor. The problem derives from the flawed decisions to rapidly create the IGC in 2003--an Iraqi executive body, manned mostly by those best known to the United States--and in doing so adopt a top-down approach to political reconstitution rather than the bottom-up approach that past experiences in nation-building demonstrated to be essential. Having brought exiles and militia leaders into the government and given them positions of power, it became virtually impossible to get them out, and even more difficult to convince them to make compromises. The militia leaders used their positions to maintain and expand their power, at the expense both of their rivals who were not in the government and of the central government itself.

The problem is most easily understood in this way. What was most needed in Iraq by early 2004 and on through 2005 and 2006, were basic security and basic services for the Iraqi people (electricity, water, sanitation, gasoline, as well as jobs, medical care, and in some cases food). The militia leaders exerted their power by laying claim to areas of the country that the government's security forces--and the Americans--could not occupy or patrol. They then built public support by providing the security and basic services that the government could not, explicitly following the model employed so successfully by Hizballah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. The best way for the federal government to rid the country of the problem of the militias was to acquire the capacity to provide both the security and the services for the Iraqi people so that they would not have to rely on the militias. However, with the militia leaders running the central government, they had absolutely no interest in having it acquire such capacity, because doing so would mean the loss of their own power bases. Thus they had every incentive to continue to use their posts in the government to reward their cronies, steal as much from the public coffers as they could, and otherwise block their adversaries from doing so--without lifting a finger to actually address the most desperate needs of the Iraqi state. Likewise, they had no incentive to cut real deals with their adversaries, particularly the Sunni tribal leaders, because doing so would bring them into the government, giving them access to the same power and graft, and thereby creating a threat to their growing control of the country and its resources.

Khalilzad and his colleagues struggled against this conundrum unflaggingly, but the challenges were enormous. There were too few truly selfless Iraqis devoted to making their nation safe, stable, and strong again, and too many simply looking to line their own pockets as best they could while preventing their rivals from doing the same. Thus, on the political side the United States came to the right idea much sooner than was the case on the military side, but the initial mistakes of the wrong ideas created a set of circumstances that has so far made it impossible to actually achieve what they knew to be the right goals.

CONCLUSIONS

The summary above barely scratches the surface of the many tragic mistakes made in the American reconstruction of Iraq. The United States has no one to blame but itself. There was so much potential in Iraq. It took so many needless blunders to drive the country to its current state. As of this writing, in late 2006, Iraq is caught in the swift current of a river of American mistakes. They are headed quickly toward the falls, and the leaders the United States put in power in Baghdad lack not just the ability, but even the desire to prevent them from going over. As it was in the beginning, the end of this story is entirely in the hands of the United States. This Iraqi leadership will not save the country. Only a dramatic change in approach by Washington can do so.

In nearly every previous instance of state failure and civil war, observers on the scene and experts elsewhere failed to recognize that they had passed the point of no return--when disaster became inevitable--until long after they had done so. As of this writing, the situation in Iraq seems bleak, but there are still areas of progress that could lead one to be hopeful that all is not lost. In other words, it does not yet look like the point of no return has been crossed. However, it is essential that the United States recognize that it is perilously close. At the very least, we should not assume that the United States has much longer to turn things around.

Haditha massacres: 5 Marines to Be Charged in Haditha Deaths - New York Times

December 6, 2006
At Least 5 Marines Are Expected to Be Charged in Haditha Deaths
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER

WASHINGTON, Dec. 5 — At least five marines are expected to be charged, possibly as early as Wednesday, with the killing of 24 Iraqis, many of them unarmed women and children, in the village of Haditha in November 2005, according to a Marine official and a lawyer involved in the case.

The charges are expected to range from negligent homicide to murder, said a senior Pentagon official familiar with the military’s nearly nine-month investigation into the episode. Several marines from the Third Platoon of Company K, Third Battalion, First Marine Regiment, are accused of killing the villagers after a roadside explosion killed one of their comrades.

Charges could also be brought against an additional one or two marines, the Marine official said, including one officer who was in the vicinity of the killings but did not participate in them.

Though it was nearly certain that marines would be charged with crimes for the killings, exactly when the charges would be made official was unclear, military officials and defense lawyers involved in the case said. But they said charges could closely follow a closed-door briefing by Lt. Gen. Richard F. Natonski, the Marine Corps deputy commandant for plans, policies and operations, to the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday morning.

That briefing will relate the findings of a military inquiry into how the Marine Corps managed its investigation of the slayings, which began with an inquiry in March, four months after the killings occurred, the Pentagon official said. Aides to committee members said Marine officials promised a confidential briefing before any charges were announced.

According to the Marine official and the defense lawyer representing one of the marines under investigation, criminal charges will be filed against Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, 26, of Meriden, Conn., the squad’s leader; Lance Cpl. Stephen Tatum, 25, of Edmund, Okla.; Lance Cpl. Justin Sharratt, 21, of Carbondale, Penn.; Cpl. Sanick Dela Cruz, 24, of Chicago; and Cpl. Hector Salinas, 22, of Houston.

The five marines are said to have been the ones who killed the 24 Iraqis, including five men in a taxi that approached the marines’ convoy after the explosion that killed a 20-year-old lance corporal and 19 other civilians in several houses nearby. About 10 of the dead were women and children who appeared to have been killed by rifle fire at close range, military officials said.

The marines have said they believed that they were coming under small-arms fire from a house on the south side of the road.

Jack Zimmermann, a lawyer for Lance Corporal Tatum, said his client had responded appropriately to a lethal attack in a dangerous region of Iraq. “There was no crime committed,” Mr. Zimmermann said.

Mark Zaid, a lawyer representing Sergeant Wuterich, said his client acted in accordance with military rules of engagement.

“We emphatically deny that Staff Sergeant Wuterich participated in any unlawful killings that day in Haditha,” Mr. Zaid said. “The collateral civilian deaths were absolutely tragic, but occurred as a result of legally justified actions that routinely occur during time of war.”

Lawyers for the other three enlisted marines declined to comment.

The senior Pentagon official said no other marines would face charges in the case. “The only people who will be charged with an offense will be those individuals who did the shootings,” the official said last week.

But the Marine officer, interviewed on Tuesday, said he expected charges to be brought against one or two additional marines, including one officer.

“I don’t see just five of them being charged,” the official said. “I see six or seven. One of them, I see, is an officer.”

That officer, the Marine official said, was First Lt. William T. Kallop, 25, the only officer at the scene, who arrived sometime after the initial explosion that led to the marines’ sweep of the nearby homes.

A lawyer for Lieutenant Kallop declined to comment Tuesday.

David S. Cloud contributed reporting.

| Paul Rieckhoff: Investigation Reveals Military Punishing Wounded Troops | The Huffington Post

Soldier Tyler Jennings says that when he came home from Iraq last year, he felt so depressed and desperate that he decided to kill himself. Late one night in the middle of May, his wife was out of town, and he felt more scared than he'd felt in gunfights in Iraq. Jennings says he opened the window, tied a noose around his neck and started drinking, "trying to get drunk enough to either slip or just make that decision." (NPR)

1 in 5 Iraq vets are coming home with a serious mental health problem like anxiety, depression, or PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Experts believe that over time, the number will reach almost 1 in 3.

How has the military responded to these wounded warriors? A new investigation by National Public Radio looked at troops diagnosed with mental health disorders, and concluded that "officers at Ft. Carson punish soldiers who need help, and even kick them out of the Army."

Five months before, Jennings had gone to the medical center at Ft. Carson, where a staff member typed up his symptoms: "Crying spells... hopelessness... helplessness... worthlessness." Jennings says that when the sergeants who ran his platoon found out he was having a breakdown and taking drugs, they started to haze him. He decided to attempt suicide when they said that they would eject him from the Army. (NPR)

You can listen to the piece or read the transcript here. And check this story out: this isn't the first time we've heard about troops with mental health problems facing mistreatment at Ft. Carson.

The last thing Iraq veterans need is to face a new battle with the military here at home. Ordering troops with severe PTSD to continue their duties is like making a person with a broken leg run a marathon. And punishing them for their disease is a total outrage.

It's time for the military to step up. Just last week, they finally released new guidelines for troops suffering from mental health problems in theatre. It's a good start, but just issuing another memo isn't going to make difference.

As usual, the change needs to happen on the ground. A mandatory counseling session for all service members coming home from a combat tour would go a long way towards reducing the stigma of mental health treatment. And would help soldiers like Tyler Jennings get help before it's too late.

Sir! No Sir! Iraq

"This is some incredible anti-war trash talking propoganda"

Rumsfeld’s Memo of Options for Iraq War - New York Times

December 3, 2006

Rumsfeld’s Memo of Options for Iraq War

Following is the text of a classified Nov. 6 memorandum that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld sent to the White House suggesting new options in Iraq. The memorandum was sent one day before the midterm Congressional elections and two days before Mr. Rumsfeld resigned.

Nov. 6, 2006

SUBJECT: Iraq — Illustrative New Courses of Action

The situation in Iraq has been evolving, and U.S. forces have adjusted, over time, from major combat operations to counterterrorism, to counterinsurgency, to dealing with death squads and sectarian violence. In my view it is time for a major adjustment. Clearly, what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough. Following is a range of options:

ILLUSTRATIVE OPTIONS

Above the Line: (Many of these options could and, in a number of cases, should be done in combination with others)

¶Publicly announce a set of benchmarks agreed to by the Iraqi Government and the U.S. — political, economic and security goals — to chart a path ahead for the Iraqi government and Iraqi people (to get them moving) and for the U.S. public (to reassure them that progress can and is being made).

¶Significantly increase U.S. trainers and embeds, and transfer more U.S. equipment to Iraqi Security forces (ISF), to further accelerate their capabilities by refocusing the assignment of some significant portion of the U.S. troops currently in Iraq.

¶Initiate a reverse embeds program, like the Korean Katusas, by putting one or more Iraqi soldiers with every U.S. and possibly Coalition squad, to improve our units’ language capabilities and cultural awareness and to give the Iraqis experience and training with professional U.S. troops.

¶Aggressively beef up the Iraqi MOD and MOI, and other Iraqi ministries critical to the success of the ISF — the Iraqi Ministries of Finance, Planning, Health, Criminal Justice, Prisons, etc. — by reaching out to U.S. military retirees and Reserve/National Guard volunteers (i.e., give up on trying to get other USG Departments to do it.)

¶Conduct an accelerated draw-down of U.S. bases. We have already reduced from 110 to 55 bases. Plan to get down to 10 to 15 bases by April 2007, and to 5 bases by July 2007.

¶Retain high-end SOF capability and necessary support structure to target Al Qaeda, death squads, and Iranians in Iraq, while drawing down all other Coalition forces, except those necessary to provide certain key enablers for the ISF.

¶Initiate an approach where U.S. forces provide security only for those provinces or cities that openly request U.S. help and that actively cooperate, with the stipulation being that unless they cooperate fully, U.S. forces would leave their province.

¶Stop rewarding bad behavior, as was done in Fallujah when they pushed in reconstruction funds, and start rewarding good behavior. Put our reconstruction efforts in those parts of Iraq that are behaving, and invest and create havens of opportunity to reward them for their good behavior. As the old saying goes, “If you want more of something, reward it; if you want less of something, penalize it.” No more reconstruction assistance in areas where there is violence.

¶Position substantial U.S. forces near the Iranian and Syrian borders to reduce infiltration and, importantly, reduce Iranian influence on the Iraqi Government.

¶Withdraw U.S. forces from vulnerable positions — cities, patrolling, etc. — and move U.S. forces to a Quick Reaction Force (QRF) status, operating from within Iraq and Kuwait, to be available when Iraqi security forces need assistance.

¶Begin modest withdrawals of U.S. and Coalition forces (start “taking our hand off the bicycle seat”), so Iraqis know they have to pull up their socks, step up and take responsibility for their country.

¶Provide money to key political and religious leaders (as Saddam Hussein did), to get them to help us get through this difficult period.

¶Initiate a massive program for unemployed youth. It would have to be run by U.S. forces, since no other organization could do it.

¶Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing so on a trial basis. This will give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not “lose.”

¶Recast the U.S. military mission and the U.S. goals (how we talk about them) — go minimalist.

Below the Line (less attractive options):

¶Continue on the current path.

¶Move a large fraction of all U.S. Forces into Baghdad to attempt to control it.

¶Increase Brigade Combat Teams and U.S. forces in Iraq substantially.

¶Set a firm withdrawal date to leave. Declare that with Saddam gone and Iraq a sovereign nation, the Iraqi people can govern themselves. Tell Iran and Syria to stay out.

¶Assist in accelerating an aggressive federalism plan, moving towards three separate states — Sunni, Shia, and Kurd.

¶Try a Dayton-like process.

________________

Today's thought

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
- Isaac Asimov