And no back up plan if they started throwing bombs instead of flowers.
And not enough troops to start policing when we needed to. Though enough to protect the oil ministry.
Worse than that. The State Department had a plan for the occupation, done by experts. Rumsfeld and the neocons rejected it, and did not allow the people who did have this knowledge to participate. It was not that they didn’t have the facts, it was that they aggressively protected themselves from the facts.
I’d add the unwillingness to change course in any significant way over the past three years, so that they don’t have to admit they screwed the pooch.
Unbeleivable incompentence IMO… This goes way beyond groupthink (compentent people making incompentent decisions as a group). Given the number, and degree, of the errors made during this fiasco the only conclusion you can come to is that those in charge just do not have a clue.
Firstly, as plent of other people have pointed out, the biggest mistake was invading in the first place. Even without all the other SNAFUs, and if everything had gone exactly the way the people who planned this war had said it would. The end result would at still have been a win for Al Qiada (and a BIG win for Iran).
The other mistakes are to many to list here. The highlights being…
Not sending enough troops to properly occupy the country (and generally planning for the BEST not the worst, an absolute rookie mistake)
Laying of the entire Iraqi army without pay or pensions.
Putting faith in the reliabilty of handful of Iraqi exiles close to the US state department.
I hope the fact that officers at a high level who spoke the truth were punished by the civilian leadership will change this judgement. Civilians are far more culpable than the military for this mess.
Actually, a litle before that, when we made it our policy to obfuscate the difference between preemptive and preventative attacks. Once the situation on the ground started failing to comply with our expectations, that confusion left us without clearcut moral guideposts as to what to do about it. Remember how we spent the first year or two having to redefine why we attacked in the first place? That hurt us badly.
This is my only contention with your comments (hence, the only one quoted). Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen (and wimmin), and Marines are human beings, subject to all the same foibles and quirks the rest of the non-military society is. To expect that there would be no instances of the conduct you are deploring is unrealistic.
Where I do agree with you (sort of) is the lack of firm leadership and diligence on the part of the Command structure in identifying this behavior when it occurs, and making fine examples out of the perpetrators in a quick and forthright manner.
Yes, that contention is bound to cause excitement. In fact I may be willing to withdraw it, if you can convince me.
What the heck kind of soldier makes human pyramids of prisoners? Can we really blame others for not foreseeing this and preventing it? What kind of person kills a family after raping a girl?
Which is scarier? That the military allowed these moral deviants into the service, or the idea that these people are not deviant, but true reflections of American society?
On the other hand, perhaps I am getting old. I am complaining about young people and that is a sure sign.
I don’t believe that you can point to specific things that caused the failure. I believe that the aim that was finally arrived at, i.e. to establish a democratic government in Iraq that would serve as a model for the Mideast was a pipedream from the beginning.
The mind boggles at the effrontery of assuming that you can overthrow a dictator and the people will be so ecstatically grateful they will immediately set up a democratic government that will be your friend.
To look for specific mistakes in the process is to go down the path of assuming that we would be successful next time if we just correct some mistakes.
Instead we need to make sure there isn’t a next time. I’m almost to the point of believing that every single member of Congress who voted for that damnable resolution should be kicked out by the voters. How could they be so careless as to give any executive virtually carte blanche?
We managed to set up democracies in Germany and Italy. (Yes, I know, the parallels are not perfect. They never are.)
Failure I can live with. Unprofessionalism I cannot. What really gripes my grits is that the unprofessionalism of the American increased that chances of failure. That is not what we pay soldiers to do.
I’ve known more than one soldier who would’ve glady raped someone and then killed their family had their been no sergeants to watch over them, and unequivocal command directives that this sort of behavior will not only not be tolerated, but will be swiftly and brutally punished.
The “military discipline” is more about getting out of bed on time and doing your job with efficiency and precision under horrible circumstances, rather than “don’t rape people and kill their families afterwards,” because that’s a pretty goddamned basic human and societal more, and the Army has enough on its hands teaching basic and advanced soldiering without getting into, “don’t rape people and then kill their families.” They sort of take that as a given.
Yet it happens, around the world, in just about every society, at some point or another.
The Army I joined didn’t submit me to a morals test. Yet I never raped anyone and then killed their family. Hell, the closest I came to killing anyone was laying down suppressing fire during a breaching operation in GW 1, and if I hadn’t fired (and possibly killed someone), the Army would’ve had some pretty harsh words (and actions) to convey to and upon me.
I take rapists/murderes to be the darkest aspects of human nature; it’s out there, you pray it never happends, especially to you and yours, you hope the cops catch 'em when they do it, and at least lock them away for a long, long time.
To expect that any sufficiently large slice of humanity is without these people is unrealistic. To expect that the U.S. military would act swiftly and surely to prosecute such instances should be a given. I believe it is.
Investigative journalist Greg Palast (an American expat, now working for the BBC) addresses this in his new book: Armed Madhouse:
“Plan A:”
In February 2001, a meeting organized by Colin Powell’s State Department was held in Walnut Creek, California, in the home of Falah Aljibury, an Iraqi-born consultant on Iraq’s oil industry. The “Three-Day Plan” they came up with was “an invasion disguised as a coup,” “kind of a Marine-supported Bay of Pigs.” Saddam was to be replaced by some Ba’athist general cashiered by him, possibly the exiled General Nizar Khazraji – “the secret group was already contacting Saddam’s generals to switch allegiance. Then, according to their playbook, there would be snap elections, say within 90 days, to put a democratic halo on our chosen generalissimo.”
Thus, the State Department.
“Plan B:”
But, following the U.S. victory in Afghanistan, the Pentagon, dominated by PNAC members Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Elliot Abrams, had other and very different ideas:
But it goes deeper than that: The core of the neocons’ plan was to use Iraq to break the back of OPEC! Privatize the state-owned oilfields among several small companies, let them compete with each other, and they’ll up production and drive down the price of oil and even Saudi Arabia will have to follow suit! That was Ari Cohen’s baby, and he called it a “no-brainer.”
Thus, the Pentagon.
After the invasion, the first American viceroy was General Jay Garner, who was committed to neither plan but inclined strongly towards Plan A. His own view was that Iraq’s value to the U.S. was as a “coaling station,” a base for projection of American power in the MENA, the role the Philippines once played in the South Pacific. As for the oil, that would be left to the Iraqis to decide. Garner wasn’t much committed to democracy in Iraq, for its own sake, but regarded it as an urgent necessity:
All that was unacceptable to the Pentagon neocons. Rumsfeld fired Garner on 4/21/03 and replaced him with Paul Bremer, who put off elections indefinitely – even municipal elections – while proceeding to implement almost every economic and legal element of Plan B by his own fiat. Order 37: Flat tax on corporations, individual income tax capped at 15%; to apply "for 2004 and all subsequent years," meaning any later Iraqi government would be powerless to change it. Order 40: Iraqi banks sold off to three foreign financiers with no bidding process. Order 12: Iraq to become the only country on Earth with no tariff barriers or import quotas at all. Iraqi industry, limping along after 12 years of sanctions, was shattered by this. Agriculture too; Cargill flooded Iraq’s market with wheat, driving Iraqi farmers out of business. Hussein’s prohibition on public-sector labor union activity, however, remained in place; 12/03, Bremer arrrested the entire board of the Iraqi Workers Federation of Trade Unions. While this was going on several billion dollars in Iraqi oil revenue and U.S. reconstruction funds simply disappeared, but investigation is hampered by the Coalition Provisional Authority having been, according to some lawyers, neither an Iraqi nor a U.S. government agency – and later on, it was dissolved. “The perfect getaway car – one that simply disappears.” In fact, some lawyers argue the CPA never had any legal existence in the first place, so there. (See this thread and this one.)
Every element of Plan B was implemented, except privatizing the oil industry. There were two big problems with that plan that had somehow escaped the notice of the neocon ideologues, and which I’ll explain in the next post because this one is getting too long.
Military discipline (seems to me) is ebbing. In fact standards have slipped ever since I retired. But at this point even I realize I am geezing out.
The standard has been set. If you torture prisoners, you cop a walk. If you help lose the war by building human pyramids, you could be sentenced to months is jail. (Months I say!) If you disband the Iraqi Army you get the Medal of Freedom.
Barriers to the neocon plan to privatize Iraq’s oil industry, up production, and break the back of OPEC:
As Saudi-born economist, think-tanker and member of the Saudi National Security Assessment Project explained it to Palast:
The international oil companies don’t want OPEC busted.
The five big international oil companies own some oilfields of their own, but they have to buy most of the oil they refine from the nationalized oil industries of the OPEC nations. You might think they would want to buy it as cheap as they can, so they can pocket the difference, or else charge less at the pump and sell a lot more gasoline, but it’s not that simple:
Maintaining the status quo for the oil companies requires holding down oil production, and Iraq has been assigned that sorry role since it was founded (it has 74 known oil fields and only 15 in production). In 1927, the major oil company execs met at a hotel room in Belgium and signed an agreement: The Anglo-Persian company (now British Petroleum) would pump almost all its oil from Iran; Standard Oil, under the name of the Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco), would limit almost all its drilling to Saudi Arabia; Anglo-Persian would drill in Iraq’s Kirkuk and Basra fields but it would drill very little.
In the early ‘60s, the frustrated Iraqi government canceled the BP-Shell-Exxon concession and nationalized the oil fields, but that didn’t solve the problem.
When Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, he was hoping to increase Iraq’s OPEC production quota by adding Kuwait’s to it.
So why did Hussein, finally, have to go?
But neither could zealous neocon ideologues be allowed to upset the oil companies’ apple cart. In May 2003, Phillip Carroll, former CEO of Shell Oil USA, former CEO of Fluor corporation, flew to Baghdad and confronted Bremer. Palast interviewed Carroll in March 2005 and got the story:
Top global oil execs, including no Iraqis, met in Houston, 11-12/03, and drafted a 323-page plan, Options for a Sustainable Iraqi Oil Industry. Iraqis were to be offered seven options, all essentially the same: “seven flavors of state-owned oil companies.” Privatization was not an option.
Ahmed Chalabi, a University of Chicago-educated neocon who fully supported the privatization plan and whom the neocons intended for Iraq’s new president, was purged, and sought for arrest on espionage charges. His “governing council” was replaced by a new government headed by a Ba’athist blessed by the State Department. Bremer was booted out and the new Ambassador John Negroponte arrived to represent the U.S. in Iraq.
But it’s not over yet. In February 2005 there was another shift in power, Negroponte was replaced by PNAC favorite Zalmay Khalizad, and Chalabi returned to power with the Shi’ites and became temporary oil minister. He fired Big Oil’s favorites in the ministry – but still did not dare try to privatize.
So there you have it. Why the U.S. invaded Iraq, and why we fucked it up: We went in with three incompatible agendas: Plan A, Plan B, and the stated aim of establishing a democratic government – a promise that had to be honored in some form eventually, and was, with utterly disastrous results. With all that jerking back and forth, plus all that venality and corruption, plus the utterly intractable political, religious and ethnic divisions among the Iraqi people themselves, how was it to be expected any good would come of it? Maybe if Garner had been allowed to do it his way, the situation could have been saved, but it’s too late now.
And that’s why American troops are still in Iraq and still killing and still getting killed. And that’s why the Iraqi people are still suffering from high unemployment, destroyed infrastructure, and insurgent violence.
Where was W in all this? Who knows? But it appears Cheney backed both the Plan A and the Plan B team at different times or maybe even at the same time.
Parallels are hardly even on the same planet. The 80 millions of German people were exhaused by 6 years of war against an alliance with a population of over 350 millions. I think were also afraid that the Russions were coming and passively accepted whatever happened. I also believe that many were shocked when the full extent of what they had allowed their leaders to lead them into step by step came to light. Like the Jews they might have said “never again.”
In addition, I think it’s highly misleading to posit that because it worked once with a nation whose background and culture we semi understood that it’s anything but a pipedream in a place like Iraq.
I firmly believe that its risky to assume that if we had just kept the Iraqi army intact, or installed a different leader, or put in more troops we could have pulled it off.
I would argue with you David (and the arguement would point out you are dancing very close to the ‘Arabs can’t make democracy work’ line) if not but for the fact that your line of reasoning has been proven by events.
Having read through this thread, I’m thoroughly depressed, the only positive thing is that there seems to be a general consensus that it was both a balls-up and completely muddle headed.
From my view, the situation was caused by a total lack of cultural understanding, confusing secular Ba’athists with Islamisists is unpardonable.
Also, even pro-USA Arab leaders were bound to get nervous when an invading army lands up on their doorstep.
The saddest thing is that a lot of the problems with Saddam were because he had little cultural understanding of the West. He could not speak English, he knew that he was sitting on a powder keg, and that brutal suppression of /dissidents/ was his only course.
Rather like Chavez, he did not understand that ‘grandstanding’ would create serious discomfort in the West - he thought he was jerking peoples chains, but reckoned as long as he did not invade a neighbour again, he was pretty safe.
He was foolish appearing to support 9/11, but just following that idiotic principle that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’.
The only people that he was a threat to was the Israelis, and they were keeping a very close eye on him, which is probably why no WMD turned up, it was simply too dangerous to have any.
If the West had been a little more understanding they would have found a way of boosting his kudos and keeping a lid on things, that actually benefitted everyone.
For example a carefully engineered USA made documentary highlighting the shortage of pharmaceuticals and medical equipment (including a statesman-like vignette of Saddam saying how he would like to buy such needed things for his people, but was prevented by sanctions) would have enabled the USA to say that they had been too harsh, with a little subtlety Bush et al could have acted embarressed and apologetic.
With a little coaxing, like Qaddaffi, he could have been encouraged into condemning 9/11, which would not have been difficult for him.
A little publicity about the Kuwaiti cross drilling, and the curious antics of an American woman in 1990 or 91, would have allowed the USA to go in for a bit of revisionism, ‘admit’ that the first Gulf war was the result of a mis-understanding, but it had established the principle that /nobody/ invades other sovereign territory except in retalliation.
A wild extrapolation would be a mutual defence pact.
Saddam was nervous of Iran, and he disliked the idea of them having a nuclear capability more than most people.
Personally I think he was a brutal tinpot dictator, very ignorant, and an egotistical grandstander, but he could have been turned into an ally.
We make too much fuss about ‘democracy’, which in the West is just a carve up between members of one political class. Lecturing other people just gets their backs up, after all, the penalty for losing power in many places is death, while for Westerners the worst is making a good living on the lecture circuit.
I don’t think he’s dancing anywhere near that line. What he’s saying is less “Arabs can’t make democracy work” than “because we don’t understand Arabs, their language, their culture, their predominant religion, etc., etc. in the least, we haven’t a hope in Hades of imposing democracy on an Arab nation by fiat and force of arms.”
Many tactical errors, in my observation as armchair tactician - all driven by one big error - which is the thought:
“They already hate us; we can’t possibly make it any worse”.
This, I feel, is severely erroneous; as I’ve said before, it’s not the degree of hatred that’s important, it’s the spread. If you convert formerly sympathetic people to antipathetic, you simultaneously convert formerly antipathetic people into supporters of violence, supporters into insurgents, insurgents into terrorists.
The other huge error is misinterpreting human nature. Amongst myriad other factors, humiliation (GD thread I started in 2002) is a huge driving force to tip people over this edge. And US military behaviour has imposed humiliation on the country and its people, countless times.
E.g. 1 Shock and Awe. This was so clearly designed for TV broadcast, morale at home, and to cow the enemy. It was a gigantic, noisy, smoke and flame-coloured sledgehammer to crush the clearly ineffective Iraqi army. But think of the effect it must have had on the ‘liberatees’. Think how you’d feel - whether you like your leader or not - if your country’s capital was subject to such a spectacular display of military domination. Look at how formerly neutral Lebanese are currently reacting to something way less showy: fear, horror, humiliation, and ultimately hatred. If someone did that to London, I’d probably take up arms.
E.g. 2 Total failure to win hearts and minds on the street - “they hate us enough already” - so drive around in HumVees, kicking down doors and interning young men with little or no motivation, but often great brutality. It’s like making a box of Betty Crocker Terrorist Mix - guaranteed perfect results every time. Contrast with the British Army which, while also guilty of its own criminal incidents, have not matched them in severity, and were walking round Basra unarmed until about 18 months ago. A more sympathetic area (at least it was), certainly, but I cannot imagine the US military ever doing this, anywhere in Iraq.