Iraq War: Fixing what we did Wrong

Fixing Iraq
Pratap Chatterjee | March 26, 2007
Editor: John Feffer, IRC
Foreign Policy In Focus www.fpif.org

$100 billion Pledged

Between revenue from oil exports and foreign aid, over $100 billion has been pledged to Iraq’s “relief and reconstruction” in the last four years. Yet there is precious little to show for it. About half of this amount is Iraq’s own money. The United States has allocated a total of $38.28 billion in aid as of the end of 2006, but only $12 billion has been spent on civilian reconstruction with most it going to the Iraqi army and police. Other donors have pledged just over $15 billion, but most of this has not been delivered because of the chaos and violence in the country.

Equal or greater than the post WWII Marshall plan

The amount of money spent on reconstruction is not at all trifling. It is equal or greater than the money in inflation-adjusted dollars spent by the United States on restoring post-Nazi Europe under the Marshall plan. There are, of course, clear differences between the Iraqi and German experience, as there was less violence and the Europeans were allowed to plan their own reconstruction. The grant money was spent on local companies, not U.S. companies. Most of the money went to fertilizer, food, fuel, raw materials, and semi-manufactured products, not for gigantic building projects.

These different priorities may well be a key explanation for why the Marshall plan was successful and Iraq is a failure. Much of the failure may also be easily explained by the deteriorating security conditions and the political mess. But there is definitely a third factor--the corruption, incompetence, and waste.
Misplaced Priorities?

$2 million per soldier

To date, over $387 billion of U.S. taxpayer money that has been spent on the war in Iraq alone to date--roughly $13,750 per Iraqi in the country. Yet the money has gone mostly to the U.S. soldiers and armaments. If we divide the money by the number of U.S. troops stationed in the country, it adds up to well over $2 million per soldier over the duration of the war so far.

Contrast this figure with the $12 billion of U.S. taxpayer money spent on civilian reconstruction, and add in the money spent by the Iraqi government on similar projects: the per capita expenditure per Iraqi citizen works out at a mere $1,000 or $250 a year plus a similar amount to equip and train the Iraqi security forces. Even if you add the entire Iraqi government budget to the amount spent in foreign aid, it adds up to less that $4,000 per citizen or $1,000 per year.

$3.33 out of every $100 in U.S. taxpayer dollars

Or, to put the priorities of the U.S. government a different way, just $3.33 out of every $100 in U.S. taxpayer dollars spent in Iraq has gone to Iraqi civilian reconstruction (not counting the cost of the security forces). Various estimates put the cost of private security at about a quarter of this expenditure, so the number is reduced to $2.50 on civilian reconstruction per $100 spent in Iraq. Factor in that U.S. companies that paid overhead and salaries for U.S. workers built many of these projects and the actual amount spent in Iraq dwindles to less than two dollars per $100 of expenditures.

On the Plus side: Cars, cell phones, internet - on the Minus side: Lack of clean water and proper sewage

The contrast between how the average Iraqi lives and the soldiers who patrol their city streets in Star Wars like-technology of Humvees and Black Hawk helicopters speaks louder than any pie chart. According to the Brookings’ Iraq Index, some indicators have improved for Iraqis, such as an increased number of children enrolled in primary schools, more cars and cell phones and Internet subscribers, and a much wider variety of media such as TV stations and newspapers. But the quality of life indicators in general offer stark evidence of the failures of the reconstruction. Water treatment capacity went down from three million cubic meters a day before the invasion to 1.3 million cubic meters a day in March 2006 (the latest available figures), while only 9.7 million people had access to this water compared to 12.9 million before the war. The number of people with proper sewage has dropped from 6.2 million to 5.6 million.

Inflation in Iraq at 70%

Adding to the hardship of ordinary Iraqis, government rations introduced in 1996 under the Oil-for-Food have been severely cut back. Essential staples like rice, sugar, flour, and cooking oil are still distributed to the population (without which there would be widespread starvation), but many other basic goods like salt, soap, and beans have been axed from the program.1 Meanwhile the cost of goods on the open market has shot up, because of IMF-mandated increases in fuel prices. Inflation in 2006 hit 70 percent, double the rate in 2003 and over three times the 2005 rate, largely because of the fuel price increases.

Coalition Provisional Authority = Ignorance and Incompetence

Why did the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and the subsequent Iraqi governments do such a bad job of fixing Iraq? There was next to no planning; there was a major shortage of qualified personnel; those that did volunteer were inexperienced; few stayed for very long; and the constant turnover of staff created chaos.

“There seemed to be too many chiefs in the palace, multiple people who had been summoned to the White House and told that they had been personally selected to run a part of Iraq, only to arrive and find that someone else had been told the exact same thing,” Rory Stewart, the CPA official in charge of Maysan, would write later.2 “Then there were the non-Americans, who had been appointed by their politicians to do the very same jobs. Much of the energy of the CPA went into trying to establish office space, size of personal protection detail, access to cars and helicopters, reporting lines and access to Bremer.”

Paul Bremer should have read the UN reports

Then there was the complete lack of preparation. In Paul Bremer’s autobiographical book about his year in Iraq, he expresses surprise at the state of collapse of the Iraqi society (“Nobody had given me a sense of how utterly broken this country was”) and then goes on to explain how he tried to create a political leadership to take charge of the country. He dismisses the UN as excessively bureaucratic and ridicules the socialist system of rations, subsidies, and employment in the country (almost one in ten Iraqis had government jobs). Yet had he read any of the UN reports that he so disparagingly dismissed, he would have known that the country was in a state of collapse, and the only thing holding it together was the system of rations, subsidies, and employment in the country created under the much criticized Oil-for-Food program.

Bremmer's mistakes empowered people who would later become the leaders of the insurgency.

By refusing to put the army and police back together, and approving the de-Ba’aathification of Iraqi society and downsizing the ministries, Bremer caused the fragile society to break apart. Without jobs, the people grew poor and restless. Without fixing the electricity and health system that people depended upon, he created anger. Finally by manipulating the politics of the country, he disenfranchised and empowered some of the very people who would later become the leaders of the insurgency.

Modern Iraq is an intrinsically unsustainable society, like many other Middle Eastern nations, because it was built around the plentiful supply of petro-dollars. It stayed together during the sanctions, although this supply of money had been cut off, because it was controlled by a dictator who brooked no opposition to his policies and because the Oil-for-Food program supplied the basic necessities of life.

Saddam had to deal with bombed out infrastructure and Sanctions

The excuse that CPA officials used as they struggled to put the country back together was pat: it was all Saddam Hussein’s fault. The Ministry of Health repeatedly told me that the former regime spent just 16 cents per citizen on health per year, and Bechtel informed me that the dictator had failed to fix the sewage treatment plants. While these statements had a measure of truth in them, they were by no means the complete picture. The U.S.-led bombing in the 1991 Gulf War had destroyed much of the infrastructure, and the sanctions delayed or limited much of the medical supplies requested by Iraq, which was dependent on imports for much of its needs.

Yet the lack of knowledge of history was hardly the only problem. “I saw enormous incompetence, which was more costly than even Iraqi corruption,” Richard Garfield, an expert of the Iraqi healthcare system, would say later.

Iraqi's not Consulted in Reconstruction Effort

A year and a half after the invasion, Larry Crandall diagnosed the same problems. Crandall is a retired USAID official who accompanied the army on the 2003 invasion and later became the second highest-ranking officer in the reconstruction program in 2004. He explained that the U.S. officials had not consulted with the Iraqis on the reconstruction. “You hardly ever hear members of the Iraqi government talk about it, be it in terms of their support for it, their concern about it, their participation in it, and it’s simply because they don’t understand it very well. It’s basically implemented through American contractors who have little, if any, contact with significant members of the Allawi administration out there or the previous interim government administration. So it is like an island unto itself, if you will.”

For the CPA officials, all that mattered was numbers. “Achievements were tallied like body counts: another 100 schools painted, another clinic opened, another 1000 Iraqis employed--statistics that said little about the reality on the ground. It was rebuilding without a foreman or blueprints,” wrote T. Christian Miller later, who sarcastically described the CPA’s nation-building process as “crafted with the care of a sand castle.”3 Even at its height, the reconstruction program employed 140,000 people in the country, or about half-a-percent of the population.

The basics were not considered

One of the key issues is what Miller calls the “pipes” problem. Put simply, a brand new water purification plant is useless if there are no pipes to deliver the water to the community or worse yet, if they are rusty. Yet the CPA’s grand projects were just that--gigantic high-tech schemes to deliver electricity, health and water, and nobody had even bothered to work out if they actually be connected to the community. They supplied gas turbines without fixing the gas supply. They built electricity sub-stations in Basra but not power distribution lines. They bought expensive health clinic equipment that sits in a warehouse while hospitals have to beg for simple supplies like disinfectant.

These schemes were built by reputable international companies who did what they could and left when it became too violent and even their expensive private security could not prevent attacks. Indeed the international companies often attracted attacks, as they were easily identified by their hardhats and goggles or because they were accompanied by gun-toting guards.

Today the Army Corps has learned its lessons and stopped hiring international companies. It now realizes that local companies are less likely to be attacked, cost far less, and are perfectly capable of doing a good job if properly supervised.

More Waste Than Fraud

For all the outcry about corruption and war profiteering, the problems in Iraq really boil down to ignorance, incompetence, and waste. The level of fraud in Iraq contracting is far less significant. Yet the public and policymakers are easily confused. At a recent Congressional hearing, Democratic lawmakers repeatedly mixed up these basic concepts. A dozen politicians denounced the missing $8.8 billion of Iraq’s oil money without fully comprehending that the money was spent on Iraqi government salaries and that only the receipts were missing. 4 It’s entirely possible that 99 percent of the money was stolen, but it is also entirely likely that just a few dollars were misappropriated. The reality lies somewhere in between and the solution is to have a proper tracking system.

War Contractors had more power than the US Government

Even the $2.4 billion of “unsupported” and “questioned” costs that Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) wants Halliburton to account for in Iraq does not represent $2.4 billion in lost or stolen money.5 The “unsupported” costs represent charges without receipts (a total of $450 million) that may well have been legitimately spent. The “questioned” $1.9 billion represent costs that are unreasonably high, but if Halliburton could provide answers and receipts, the numbers might conceivable drop considerably. The actual waste may lie anywhere between zero dollars and $2.4 billion. And a simple answer to this problem would be to refuse to pay for anything without a receipt and proper justification. Unfortunately for the military, there are simply not enough supervisors to make sure that the company does not waste money. Nor doest he military have any leverage over the companies. The day that Halliburton stops working, the military would cease to function. This situation, where the contractor has more power than the government, is unequal and rife with potential for abuse.

No Bid Contracts trickled down into a virtual pyramid of contractors

Much has also been made of “no-bid” contracts in Iraq. But once again the reality is more complex. A GAO report shows that almost all military and USAID contracts were competitively bid. The main agency guilty of no-bid contracts is the U.S. Department of State, which has relatively fewer dollars to spend.6 Even the much criticized Restore Iraq Oil contract, which Halliburton was awarded without bidding, was in fact legal.7 Just because the contract was legal, however, does not make it morally justifiable, nor does it mean that the government hired the best contractor. Also, the people in charge of managing the contracting were contractors themselves. A virtual pyramid of contractors exists, making accountability impossible. When anything goes wrong, everybody pointed their fingers at each other. The original idea of using private contractors to do reconstruction was that they would be more efficient, but that seems extremely unlikely.

All this subcontracting perhaps suggests excessive staff, but that’s not true. Only 24 people were in charge of issuing the billions of dollars worth of contracts, and that was far too few. In the military, the same sum of money would be overseen by hundreds, if not thousands, of contract staff. But there was no clear chain of command and no rules to follow. Too few people, with no rules, make a bigger mess than a few people following well thought-out plans and rules.

Looking on the Bright Side

While thousands of projects “completed” have later been discovered to be failures, some have succeeded. The repair of Umm Qasr ports, a massive dredging job completed by Stevedoring Services of America, appears to be one. The vaccination of millions of Iraqi children is another.

The most successful reconstruction program in Iraq is generally considered to be the Commanders Emergency Response Program (CERP), which was funded largely with the Development Fund for Iraq. U.S. soldiers handed out over a billion dollars in cash to local people in return for favors such as rebuilding offices or building football fields. “The military commanders love that program, because it buys them friends,” said an administration official, referring to the cash distribution. “You want to hire everybody on the street, put money in their pockets and make them like you. We have always spent Iraqi money on that.”8

"We had more money than we could throw at the problem, which then breeds corruption"

Terry Callahan is a colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves who spent a year in Iraq following the invasion, where he was in charge of distributing CERP money in northern Iraq, as the CPA chief of staff. He explained that the accountability over Iraqi money was loose, compared to appropriated money that came later. He says that the program had many small successes--like a three room kindergarten school for $4,000 and a community center for $250,000.

“We had more money than we could throw at the problem, which then breeds corruption,” he told an interviewer from the U.S. Institute for Peace. “The funds were there in more than adequate amounts because we had a problem with absorption. If someone says, in a small region the size of one-third of Iraq, you have $20 million to spend on projects and you have 30 days to define where those projects are, you can't do this properly. For example, we had trouble in some cases finding enough contractors to do the work in the timeframe allotted.”

Some of the well-intentioned military projects were not welcome. “For example, we had a project in Baghdad called Operation Neighborhood Clean-Up or some such thing,” Crandall related. “We had Civil Affairs guys and MPs (military police) and others out cleaning the garbage in towns, and in some of the suburbs and small neighborhoods in Baghdad. As our front loaders were loading up the garbage and suddenly a few people started getting really irritated. We asked, ‘Why are you so angry, we're cleaning up your garbage?’ Well, as it turns out, the garbage fed the goats, and the goats provided meat.”

Checklist for Fixing Iraq

The $12-plus billion spent to fix Iraq has provided very few real results, because of corruption, waste, and war. Here are ten things that Congress can do to help turn things around:

First, it should fix Iraq’s electricity, water, sewage, health and oil infrastructure--with local small-scale familiar technology not big high-tech modern equipment that no one knows how to use. Make that the first goal for withdrawal. Shias, Sunnis, Kurds all agree on this.

Congress should put its money where its mouth is. Write a check for $100 billion. That’s the minimum that Iraq needs and that’s what we spend on the war every year.

Iraqi companies should do the work. When companies like Contrack pulled out of fixing the Baghdad Central Railway Station, Iraqi companies finished the job, cheaply and well. Every Western contractor used Iraqi labor. Pay the workers in the country directly, not the CEOs abroad.

Protect Iraq’s infrastructure. Ignore the people who say you shouldn’t have guarded Iraq’s oil ministry. The question: is why haven’t you protected the oil pipelines or the water plants, the sewage plants, and the power lines?

Fix the “pipes” problem. Connect the new power, water, and sewage plants with the people. Ditto with power plants. Iraq was given new combustion turbines but is running them off crude oil. Make sure that natural gas is used in a natural gas plant not dirty crude oil. Fix that last mile between the gas fields and the turbines.

Provide propper training. If you provide Iraq with new technology, don’t walk away without providing proper training and maintenance. That’s ten years of customer support not ten days, as is currently the fashion for most Western suppliers in Baghdad. (Did I mention, use local contractors and equipment?)

Fix the oil meters so that Iraq’s oil exports don’t get stolen--this is ludicrous for a country whose entire economy depends on one resource. Halliburton hasn’t done this simple job, so find someone who can.

Domestic gasoline prices will have to be raised to shut down the black market. Provide a gas credit for poor people like in the food ration system. Eventually that can be phased out. But right now, in Baghdad, people are paying five times the market rate that their neighbors are paying in Kuwait. (Make sure it doesn’t get smuggled to Turkey though.)

Provide Iraq with as many basic medicines and medical supplies as it needs. Free. Iraqis don’t need high-technology hospitals like the one Bechtel was building for Laura Bush in Basra. But they do need disinfectant and back up power generators.

Demand completion and correction for already funded projects. Make the companies that took obscene profits for bad work--like Bechtel and Parsons who walked away from unfinished hospitals and schools--pay to fix them. Ultimately there should be a system of transparency and accountability for all actors, with strict enforcement of penalties.

Pratap Chattergee is the Managing Editor/Program Director at CorpWatch and the author of Iraq Inc.: A Profitable Occupation. This essay is excerpted from his upcoming book, Baghdad Bonanza: Iraq’s Failed Reconstruction.




Sources

1. Daud Salman, “Cut in Food Rations Hurting Poor Iraqis,” Environmental News Service, April 3, 2006.

2. Rory Stewart, The Prince of the Marshes (New York: Harcourt, 2006).

3. T. Christian Miller, Blood Money (Little, Brown, August 2006).

4. “Oversight of Funds Provided to Iraqi Ministries through the National Budget Process,” Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Report # 05-004, January 30, 2005.

5. Memorandum from Congressman Henry Waxman to U.S. House of Representatives, Government Reform Committee, February 15, 2007.

6. “Rebuilding Iraq: Status of Competition for Iraq Reconstruction Contracts,” General Accounting Office Report # 07-40: October 2006.

7. “Attestation Engagement Concerning the Award of Non-Competitive Contract DACA63-03-D-0005 to Kellogg, Brown, and Root Services, Inc.,” Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Report # 05-019 September 30, 2005.

8. Steven Weisman, “U.S. Is Quietly Spending $2.5 Billion From Iraqi Oil Revenues to Pay for Iraqi Projects,” New York Times, June 21, 2004.

Republicans misdirect thier " Slow Bleed" rhetoric

The republicans have come up with a rhetorical response to the Democratic led rejection of the Bush "Surge Policy".



Bush's surge policy began prior to the State of The Union Address when he announced it, and without Congressional input. This lead the House to pass a non binding resolution opposing it - after it already was happening. Unfortunately, the President and the military did not have the 21,500 extra troops the President wanted- and so far only a part of the Surge has been sent.



The "Surge Policy" is part of a joint effort with the Iraqi military and Police to firmly secure the one city and surrounding area of Baghdad. This has been met by heavy violent resistance and many US military have already lost their lives. The Democrats have so far refrained from calling this the "Quick Bleed Strategy"



Democrats deny that they are seeking to cut off funding for the troops, however Democrat Senator Murtha promises to seek legislation to tie the funding to troop readiness= ADQUET TRAINING AND EQUIPMENT.

It is ironic that the Republicans are complaining about the Democrats desire to spend the governments money more wisely, since in the past they were considered the more fiscally conservative party.

US money in Iraq has been 'squandered' - report

The US government wasted tens of millions of dollars in Iraq reconstruction aid, including scores of unaccounted-for weapons and a never-used camp for housing police trainers with an Olympic-size swimming pool, investigators say.



Paul Bremer former coolition authority leadr in Iraq recentlly blamed poor payroll records for the 12 billion dollars lost somewhere in Iraq.



The quarterly audit by Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, is the latest to paint a grim picture of waste, fraud and frustration in an Iraq war and reconstruction effort that has cost taxpayers more than $300 billion dollars and left the region near civil war.

"The security situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate, hindering progress in all reconstruction sectors and threatening the overall reconstruction effort," according to the 579-page report, which was being released today.

Calling Iraq's sectarian violence the greatest challenge, Mr Bowen said that billions in US aid spent on strengthening security has had limited effect. Reconstruction now will fall largely on Iraqis to manage, and they are nowhere near ready for the task.

The audit comes as President George Bush presses Congress to approve $1.2 billion dollars in new reconstruction aid as part of his broader plan to stabilise Iraq by sending 21,500 more US troops to Baghdad and Anbar province.



Democrats in Congress have been skeptical. Sen. Jim Webb has suggested that the US is spending too much on Iraq reconstruction at the expense of rebuilding New Orleans, Louisiana, from the devastation that Hurricane Katrina wrought 17 months ago. Rep. Henry Waxman plans in-depth hearings next week into charges of waste and fraud in Iraq.

According to the report, the State Department paid $43.8 million to contractor DynCorp International for the residential camp for police training personnel outside of Baghdad's Adnan Palace grounds, which has stood empty for months. About $4.2 million of the money was spent improperly on 20 trailers for important visitors and an Olympic-sized pool, all ordered by the Iraqi Ministry of Interior but never authorised by the US.

US officials spent another $36.4 million for weapons such as armoured vehicles, body armour and communications equipment that cannot be accounted for. DynCorp also may have prematurely billed $18 million in other potentially unjustified costs, the report said.

Responding, the State Department said in the report that it was working to improve controls. Already, it has developed a review process that rejected a $1.1 million DynCorp bill this month on a separate contract because the billed rate was incorrect.

Meanwhile President Bush has sent in troops ill equipped.




Meanwhile- Military families to Congress: cut the funds


The House passes a non-binding resolution against the "surge"; the Senate fails to. Opponents invoke the need to "support the troops." Is anybody listening to the troops and their families? From Military Families Speak Out, Feb. 5:

Military Families Urge Congress to Vote Down Bush Request for Billions to Contine Iraq War

Military Families Speak Out (MFSO) members today called on Congress to support our troops and honor the fallen by voting against President Bush's request for a supplemental appropriation that would allow the U.S. military occupation of Iraq to continue. Military Families Speak Out, an organization of over 3,200 military families opposed to the war in Iraq, is the largest organization of military families opposing a war in the history of the United States.



"President Bush is now requesting funds to continue an unjustifiable war that is taking the lives of three U.S. troops and countless Iraqi children, women and men each day," said Nancy Lessin, co-founder of Military Families Speak Out and stepmother of a Marine who served in Iraq. "Now is the time, and Congress is the vehicle, by which this horrific war can finally end. We call on Congress to support our troops by voting against the funds that would allow this war to continue. To do otherwise would be to abandon our loved ones and the people of Iraq to the unending and worsening violence of this misbegotten war. "

"Our elected officials cannot oppose this war and fund it at the same time. We expect more than resolutions, limitations and investigations," explained Charley Richardson, also a co-founder of Military Families Speak Out and father of a Marine. "The one thing that Congress can do to end this war, right now, with a 50% plus one vote of either house, is to de-fund it. 

Military families across the country with loved ones currently serving in Iraq, those with loved ones soon to deploy or re-deploy, families with loved ones who have been wounded physically and/or psychologically, and those whose loved ones died as a result of the war in Iraq are available for interview regarding President Bush's supplemental funding request for the Iraq war, and the need for Congress to support our troops by opposing it.

Posted by Paul Grant (follower of Basho)

Notes from Media Roundtable With Secretary Of Defense Robert Gates

(Paul Grant (follower of Basho) notes on SEC. Gates & GEN. Paces Media Roundtable February 15, 2007. These notes break up the press confrence into the issues that were covered- from weapons from Iran, to Russia's threat to pull out of the INF treaty, to poor pre-war planning and other topical issues. You can read the transcript at: http://www.defenselink.mil/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=3890)

Presenter: Secretary Of Defense Robert Gates February 15, 2007
Defense Department Media Roundtable With Secretary Of Defense Robert Gates And Chairman Of The Joint Chiefs Of Staff General Peter Pace

Iranian involvement in weapons that have made their way into Iraq
1. we know that the Qods Force is involved. We know the Qods Force is a paramilitary arm of the IRGC. So we assume that the leadership of the IRGC knows about this.


BACKGROUND Qods (Jerusalem) Force, also called Al-Quds Force or simply Quds Force, is an elite unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) that carries out operations outside of Iran.[1] The units name, “Quds,” is the Persian word for Jerusalem. The primary mission of the Quds Force is to organize, train, equip, and finance foreign Islamic revolutionary movements, like Hizbollah and the Mahdi_Army.

Reports have said that Qods Force has taken an active role in Iraq since September 2002, when they allegedly began building pro-Iranian militant groups in anticipation of the US led invasion of Iraq in early 2003. Since then they have been accused of providing training and financial support to cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army

A New York Times report on February 9, 2007, said that US intelligence has confirmed that Qods Force has provided Shia militants in Iraq with Iranian made explosively formed penetrators (EFP), which have been called the most effective improvised explosive device used against American troops.[33] Many of these have been brought into Iraq at night at the border crossing at Mehran. Two days later US military commanders in Iraq gave a briefing to reporters, in which they displayed EFPs with what they said are Iranian serial numbers. According to them, these devices have killed over 170 Americans in Iraq.[34] President Bush himself reaffirmed the information several days later.[35] Despite this, some members of the US military and intelligence community are unsure if Iranian leaders are actually behind the delivery of weapons.[36]

These claims were denied by senior Iranian leaders. "They condemn us for making problems in Iraq, but they don't have any documentary proof," Iran Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hossaini told reporters. "Lots of this evidence is fake, artificial. For example, when they wanted to start a war in Iraq, they made plenty of evidence that there were lots of weapons in Iraq, though the investigators of the International Atomic Energy Agency said they couldn't find any weapons in Iraq," he said. "Right now they're using weapons [with certain markings], but it doesn't prove where these weapons came from.[37]

2. SEC. GATES: We know the Qods Force is a paramilitary arm of the IRGC. So we assume that the leadership of the IRGC knows about this. Whether or not more senior political leaders in Iran know about it, we don't know. And frankly, for me, either way, it's a worry. Either they do know and have approved it, or they don't know and the IRGC may be acting on their own in Iraq.

3. GEN. Pace :What I tried to say when I said I didn't know about the Iranian government, I'm talking about the top two or three people in the government. " I cannot -- we do not have proof that the senior leadership in Iran is directing these activities in Iraq, but as the secretary just pointed out, either way, either they are -- and that's not good -- or they don't know -- and that's not good."

BACKGROUND: Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps is the largest[1] military organisation of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The literal Persian (Farsi) translation of the name means "The Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution".

They are separate from, and parallel to, the Iranian army. They are equipped with their own navy, air force, intelligence, [2]ground troops and special forces. The force is also responsible for Iran's missile forces. The operations of the Sepah-e Pasdaran are geared towards asymmetric warfare and less traditional duties. These include the control of smuggling, control of the Strait of Hormoz, and resistance operations.[3

4. GEN. PACE: I'm worried that any weapons end up in Iraq to be used against coalition forces, regardless of their home of origin.

5. GEN Pace and SEC. GATES dodge questions about the use of anonymous officials to report the Iran - weapons connection. SEC GATES: " Why it was anonymous, why it wasn't allowed to be taped, I don't know."

6.SEC. GATES: We are not going to war with Iran

7. Though "the explosively formed projectiles are a real problem" the bigger problem is "the IED problem in general, and those are coming from a lot of sources, including from inside Iraq. So the IED problem -- as I've said before, the IEDs account for about 70 percent of our casualties in Iraq. These explosively formed projectiles, as I understand it, account for a relatively small percentage of the IEDs we encounter through attacks or through finding them.

Iraq surge:
1. the major thrust in Baghdad has not yet started.
2. Only two of the Iraqi brigades are in Bagdad.
3. Iraq and US forces recentlly have had success against a a Sunni stronghold and a a Shi'a stronghold.

Osama bin Laden
1. General Eikenberry, said that the trail for Osama bin Laden has gone cold.
2.The president gave this speech today. He never mentioned the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
3. SEC. GATES: Even thogh we no longer talk about Osama bin Laden, and even though we admitt that the trail for him is cold- doesn't mean that Osama bin Laden is safe

Russian Pulling out of the INF treaty
1. Russia is not upset over our plans to put a ballistic missile defense in Europe, even though they say they are, because they know it is no threat to them (Russia)"
2.And in fact, Defense Minister Ivanov said that much on his trip to India; that it was no threat to Russia " - so it's a non-issue.
3. But if they pull out of the treaty it will be a problem for both the US and for Europe


BACKGROUND:


U.S. President Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev signing the INF Treaty, 1987.
The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty was an agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union signed in Washington, D.C. on December 8, 1987 by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. It was ratified by the United States Senate on May 27, 1988 and came into force on June 1 of that year.

The treaty eliminated nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers (300-3,400 miles). By the treaty's deadline of June 1, 1991, a total of 2,692 of such weapons had been destroyed, 846 by the U.S. and 1846 by the Soviet Union. Also under the treaty, both nations were allowed to inspect each other's military installations. The full title of the agreement is The Treaty Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Elimination of Their Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles.


The Ballistic Defense

1 The U.S. is supposed to spend up to $4 billion between now and 2013 to develop the sites in Poland and Czechoslovakia, radar missiles to counter an alleged Iranian threat, ballistic missile threat.
2. Currently the Iranian Ballistic threat only reaches into Turkey not into the middle of Europe.
3. Gates is concerned that Iran will progress in thier missle technology, maybe even buying technology.
4. we're looking out to 2015 and beyond with our (US ) plans- to take into account the likelihood that Iran's missile program will reach beyond Turkey.

AFGANISTAN

1. It's a NATO undertaking- the commander is NATO (as opposed to the US.)
2. The plan is to be on the offensive this spring, because in past spring seasons that is when the Taliban rises up to attack us.
3. Gates does not consider the actions planned in Afghanistan's as a surge.


PRE WAR PLANNING

1. Documents from war plan back from 2002 have now been declassified
2. Plans projected that there would be just 5,000 troops, if that, in Iraq at this point, four years after the invasion. How is it war planners were so wildly off the mark about what it would take to secure Iraq?
3. It's a fair question. "There were some assumptions going in that turned out to not come out to be true. One assumption was that the Iraqi army, once freed of Saddam's dictatorship, would become a force of good for the people and that it would be a standing army at the time of liberation. As you know, it disintegrated in the very early hours of the fight, and therefore there was no army of some 400,000 Iraqis who were able to then provide security for their country." ( Didn't we dis-ban thier army?)
BACKGROUND: Before the war, President Bush approved a plan that would have put several hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers on the U.S. payroll and kept them available to provide security, repair roads and prepare for unforeseen postwar tasks. But that project was stopped abruptly in late May by L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, who ordered the demobilization of Iraq's entire army, including largely apolitical conscripts. Wrong Turn at a Postwar Crossroads?
Decision to Disband Iraqi Army Cost U.S. Time and Credibility Washington Post

4. the bombing of the holy mosque in Samarra. (See our post) That created enormous sectarian violence, not anticipated.


Unprecedented role of private contractors on the battlefield
1.Gates claims that he has not had a chance to look into this as of yet.

Muqtada al-Sadr-
1. we don't know that he has left to Iran.
2. Gates predicts he will `go to ground'
3. Gates hopes that in this period that we and the Iraqis provide enough security so that economic development, improvements in governance, political reconciliation can happen.

JAPAN
1. Japanese Defense Minister Mr. Kyuma, has been -- in the last couple of months has been -- repeatedly and publicly criticizing U.S. policy, especially regarding Iraq, saying the decision to go to war was a mistake.
2. Gates: " I have not at this point had any communication with him. My impression is that the prime minister and the government of Japan have been supportive and continue to be supportive. "


EQUIPMENT:

1. The units that are going to Iraq, the five brigades of the surge, are being equipped, in large part, by taking stuff out of war reserve stocks and borrowing equipment from non-deploying units.
2. GEN. PACE: We've got about 40 percent of all of our equipment that is either currently in Iraq or Afghanistan or in depots for repair, which leaves you about 60 percent of your inventory, which is an enormous amount of equipment.
3. It is true that for the five brigades that are flowing to plus up in Iraq right now, that we are moving equipment from some units to those units,
4. it is a fact that a good portion of our equipment is under repair. Congress has allocated the money needed to repair. Our depots are working on that backlog as quickly as they can.
5. our potential enemies around the world should not miscalculate we have sufficient reserve capacity -- don't forget, 2.4 million Americans active Guard and Reserve, about 200,000 in the gulf region, another 200,000 around the globe, leaving about two million Americans still available, with the vast fleet and air forces that we have, to respond to any other challenge that might come our way.

6.The Air Force currently has a program to reduce its manpower by about 40,000. The Air Force is going to have to now go back and look at those plans in terms of the increase of 65,000 in the Army and 27,000 in the Marine Corps and see whether or not they can carry forward that full 40,000-person reduction and to see what the additional aircraft requirement might be to support those forces.
***

Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone? Bush would.

U.S. sent pallets of cash to Baghdad- Billions missing

By Jeremy PelofskyTue Feb 6, 8:46 PM ET

The U.S. Federal Reserve sent record payouts of more than $4 billion in cash to Baghdad on giant pallets aboard military planes shortly before the United States gave control back to Iraqis, lawmakers said on Tuesday.

The money, which had been held by the United States, came from Iraqi oil exports, surplus dollars from the U.N.-run oil-for-food program and frozen assets belonging to the ousted Saddam Hussein regime.

Bills weighing a total of 363 tons were loaded onto military aircraft in the largest cash shipments ever made by the Federal Reserve, said Rep. Henry Waxman (news, bio, voting record), chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

"Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone? But that's exactly what our government did," the California Democrat said during a hearing reviewing possible waste, fraud and abuse of funds in Iraq.

On December 12, 2003, $1.5 billion was shipped to Iraq, initially "the largest pay out of U.S. currency in Fed history," according to an e-mail cited by committee members.

It was followed by more than $2.4 billion on June 22, 2004, and $1.6 billion three days later. The CPA turned over sovereignty on June 28.

Paul Bremer, who as the administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority ran Iraq after initial combat operations ended, said the enormous shipments were done at the request of the Iraqi minister of finance.

"He said, 'I am concerned that I will not have the money to support the Iraqi government expenses for the first couple of months after we are sovereign. We won't have the mechanisms in place, I won't know how to get the money here,"' Bremer said.

"So these shipments were made at the explicit request of the Iraqi minister of finance to forward fund government expenses, a perfectly, seems to me, legitimate use of his money," Bremer told lawmakers.

WHERE'S THE MONEY?

Democrats led by Waxman also questioned whether the lack of oversight of $12 billion in Iraqi money that was disbursed by Bremer and the CPA somehow enabled insurgents to get their hands on the funds, possibly through falsifying names on the government payroll.

"I have no knowledge of monies being diverted. I would certainly be concerned if I thought they were," Bremer said. He pointed out that the problem of fake names on the payroll existed before the U.S.-led invasion.

The special inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction, Stuart Bowen, said in a January 2005 report that $8.8 billion was unaccounted for after being given to the Iraqi ministries.

"We were in the middle of a war, working in very difficult conditions, and we had to move quickly to get this Iraqi money working for the Iraqi people," Bremer told lawmakers. He said there was no banking system and it would have been impossible to apply modern accounting standards in the midst of a war.

"I acknowledge that I made mistakes and that, with the benefit of hindsight, I would have made some decisions differently," Bremer said.

Republicans argued that Bremer and the CPA staff did the best they could under the circumstances and accused Democrats of trying to score political points over the increasingly unpopular Iraq war.

"We are in a war against terrorists, to have a blame meeting isn't, in my opinion, constructive," said Rep. Dan Burton (news, bio, voting record), an Indiana Republican.

Video: Rajiv Chandrasekaran talks about the Green Zone

Brian speaks to Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post about the sometimes-surprising policies put in place by civilian decision-makers like Paul Bremmer. He talks about how the decision makers hidden in their sanctuary were not listening to the soldiers who were out in the country experiencing the reality of the situation.

Chandrasekaran has written a highly regarded book on the subject. It's called "Imperial Life in the Emerald City". It's a fascinating look inside the "Green Zone", the heavily protected and lavish neighbourhood of the U.S. civilian force, a community that lives in relative safety, strangely remote from the violent city outside.

About the book:
As the Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post, Chandrasekaran has probably spent more time in U.S.-occupied Iraq than any other American journalist, and his intimate perspective permeates this history of the Coalition Provisional Authority headquartered in the Green Zone around Saddam Hussein's former palace. He presents the tenure of presidential viceroy L. Paul Bremer between May 2003 and June 2004 as an all-too-avoidable disaster, in which an occupational administration selected primarily for its loyalty to the Bush administration routinely ignored the reality of local conditions until, as one ex-staffer puts it, "everything blew up in our faces." Chandrasekaran unstintingly depicts the stubborn cluelessness of many Americans in the Green Zone—like the army general who says children terrified by nighttime helicopters should appreciate "the sound of freedom." But he sympathetically portrays others trying their best to cut through the red tape and institute genuine reforms. He also has a sharp eye for details, from casual sex in abandoned offices to stray cats adopted by staffers, which enable both advocates and critics of the occupation to understand the emotional toll of its circuslike atmosphere. Thanks to these personal touches, the account of the CPA's failures never feels heavy-handed

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.