I was discussing with some friends about the Iraq war and I mentioned that, no matter how you feel about the invasion (whether it was justified given the information at the time or not), if we focus solely on how the Bush administration handled the post-war situation in Iraq, it seems to me that they could have done a much better job.
One of my friends challenged me to come up with things they did wrong and/or things they could have done better.
I don’t follow the Iraq situation too closely, so I only had a basic answer for him. I thought Dopers would be able to come up with a much better list of things that the Bush administration did wrong in post-invasion Iraq.
BTW, off the top of my head, the things that came to mind are
Allowing disorder to reign right after the capture of Bhagdad, which led to lootings and general chaos, gave the first inkling to the locals that the US can’t control the situation.
Not restoring basic infrastructure (water, electricity) fast enough.
De-Baathification of Iraq. AFAIK, this sounded like a good idea at the time, but meant that people with experience, in several important posts, were no longer there and the vacuum that was created has caused all sorts of problems.
Abu Ghraib. No further explanation needed here.
Maybe a basic attitude issue towards Iraqis
Here is an interesting story in Salon that, while not being the cause of all the problems in Iraq today, is very indicative of the sorts of problems the US creates for themselves over there http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/02/07/soccer_balls
(you can read the article even if you are not a member of Salon)
The basic question is: “Could the US have done things differently so that the different factions wouldn’t start killing each other, like they are today?”
It seems that if they had maintained law and order from the beginning and if they had restored infrastucure quickly, this would have contributed greatly to people getting back to ‘regular life’ after Saddam, which would have reduced the chance that people would find themselves without jobs, without basic needs and a lot of time on their hands, which is a catalyst for the situation we are in today.
OTOH, maybe nothing the US did could have stopped the different factions (who were held together by Saddam’s regime) from starting to kill each other once Saddam left power.
Yugoslavia is an example that comes to mind where, after the force that binds different factions together dissappears, the centuries-old hatred surfaces and civil war starts.
Considering that intellegence agencies had predicted almost to the letter what would happen in Iraq, but were completely ignored, I think that no matter what was done, civil war was going to be the result.
With that being said, guarding the weapons caches so that the insurgents and now Al quada couldn’t get thier hands on them would have been a start. Bringing in more troops at the beginning would have allowed us to better control the borders. Lacking the troops, a bit of diplomacy with bordering nations, (Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Turkey and Iran) using them to patrol and control the borders would be the next step.
The looting that happened was a direct result of changing speed too slowly from a war footing to an occupation footing. That again is a result of the unbelievable hubris and arrogance that this would be a cake walk and we swould be met with flowers.
It brings to mind a phrase my T.I. used in Basic…" These guys could fuck up a wet dream."
The Baath military were trained as insurgents since Gulf War I, so not only was their bureaucratic infrastructure lost but they became well trained insurgents trained by Saddam to fight a long protracted insurgency against a US occupation.
The most important thing they could have done is explain to Bush the difference between Sunni and Shiite.
I wish the Administration had asked this question before invading. It could have been a useful thought experiment. IMHO, when you start designing a system for maintaining order and a secular government in Iraq, you end up coming up with a model that looks not so very different from the late Rt. Hon. gentleman from Tikrit. There’s a reason he held power for so long (apart from sheer brutality). There’s a reason the “Arab Strongman” model has been one of the few successful (or “successful”) models for ME governments. There’s a reason destabilizing his (enforced) stability could go wrong in all sorts of ways but not right in any evident pathway.
So while I take your point that you don’t want to debate the basic premise – it’s hard to avoid. It’s like the old question: “When sticking your [penis] into a fan, how do you avoid getting hurt?” Answer: “Don’t stick your [penis] into a fan.”
Going it alone. (with a little Brittish help) made it an American occupation. That doomed it from the start. Not fixing the water and electricity made the Iraqis wonder if we were incapable of delivering or did we just not care.
I don’t believe any strategy or solution would have been possible for dealing with the inevitable Shia reprisals against the Sunni or for any of the sectarian divisions at all. The only way that Saddam held Iraq together was by sheer brute force. Maybe we could have reduced some of the damage in Iraq by preserving the military and the bureaucracy which was already in place but the civil war was going to happen no matter what. The invasion of Iraq was poisoned in its very conception, not just in its execution.
This is what I came in to say, and I can’t believe only one person has mentioned it.
After all that was said about keeping Weapons of Mass Destruction out of enemy hands, it was unbelievable that caches of weapons, explosives, and potentially dangerous material wasn’t guarded, shipped out, or exploded. If we didn’t go in to prevent such things from being used, then what was the point of the invasion? I think they lost a lot of Hearts and Minds when they didn’t appear to be taking this seriously – but went to great lengths to secure the oil fields.
What he could do right now is not defer to the government to endorse our continued presence, but call for a vote of the people: Should we stay or go. He could even make it “Beat Terrorism or Cut and Run” if he thought that would get the results he wants. But even if the question is skewed like that, if he did win at least he’d have some excuse.
Hiring people based on their experience overseas and in the Middle East, not loyal Republicans would have helped. Having some decent oversight over Haliburton and such, to make sure that the infrastructure that was supposed to be repaired got repaired. (This might require security assistance, which would have been well worth it.)
If you remember, when contracts were bid, only those in the Coalition were allowed to bid. Perhaps some deal could have been worked out letting others have contracts in return for some military or economic support.
We’ve had these discussions before. Dio is most likely correct in that eventually things probably would’ve fallen apart. However, with proper planning and better execution things shouldn’t have collapsed so quickly. It’s conceivable it could’ve worked given a Herculean effort by the United States. However, it’s similar to other “What Ifs” – eventually, we get to the point of fundamentally changing the personalities of very important people and then we’re in situations that don’t make sense, because if Bush and the neo-cons weren’t full of hubris and arrogance and had knowledge of the area then we probably wouldn’t have started this all in the first place. Regardless…
Yes. This is very important because it immediately set the tone that we were ineffective at controlling the streets. It also led to major infrastructure damage to important government buildings (many ministries were stripped to the steel beams except, of course, for the ministry of oil) and universities and businesses. Computers, files, desks, insulation, mobile air conditioners, carpeting etc. were all whisked away.
Yes, another huge screwup. And it didn’t sound like a good idea at the time to anyone who knew anything about Iraq. Experts howled in outrage when they learned about it. Practically anyone in a high government position, teacher, and large amounts of the professional class were all Baathists. You had to be. But they were all considered no good and swept aside. An intelligent move would be to remove the truly evil people (you know, the murderers and corrupt people at the top) instead of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Suffice to say, people go bat shit crazy in 110 degree weather when their water is of questionable quality, there’s raw sewage in the street, and there’s six hours of electricity on a good day. I remember a quote from one of the books I read where a family was saying something like “America, she can send a man to the moon but she can’t give us clean water? I think American can, I think America doesn’t want to!”
The problem is, beside massive corruption and later terrorist activity, is that the Iraqi infrastructure was already on the edge of the abyss due to 10 years of the most comprehensive sanctions in history. Basic services steadily crumbled for years, leading to hundreds of thousands of people dying, and then we march in like a bull in a china shop and pushed it over the edge. We were somehow surprised at its poor condition and simply not prepared for such an endeavor.
Maybe? Hell yeah! I’m to understand things are slightly better now, but the first two years of the occupation were a disaster in terms of counter insurgency tactics. We pretty much broke every rule there is to break. We used ham fisted and many times immoral and ineffective methods and alienated thousands and thousands of people for no good reason. We also didn’t understand the culture at all.
More problems:
Disbanding the Iraqi army. This also led to outrage with the experts. This move set approximately 400,000 unemployed men who are trained to handle weapons and explosives loose on the street. Good one. An intelligent move would have been to incorporate them into the fold and use their manpower and knowledge of the environment to help fill out our ranks.
Speaking of lacking manpower, we needed a lot more troops. Like, double or triple. Shishenki is famous for saying publicly that we would need several hundred thousand troops at a minimum for the occupation and subsequently drawing severe criticism from the neo-cons. Of course, this was a major problem for him to say this because we don’t have that many troops at any one time. At least not for any extended length of time, due to the way rotations work.
A chronic shortage of Arab translators. It’s hard to “win hearts and minds” when you have no idea what they’re saying.
This part stunned me when I first learned about it. What in the world does your view on abortion have to do with running a bank? Why the hell would you take a guy in his early 20s who has 1) never been out of the country 2) has no experience in the financial sector and 3) has no experience running any large institution, and then put him in charge of running the stock exchange? Unbelievable. This pattern continually repeats itself across Iraq.
An extremely important failure was a lack of a coherent counter insurgency mindset during the occupation for the first two years. This is vital and we messed it so badly. It can’t be stressed enough. We let the insurgency balloon and acted in ways which threw fuel on the fire.
I recommend the following books if you’re really interested in Iraq, especially the details of how we failed in terms of counter insurgency and the fascinating personalities of people in the administration and the civil war between the ‘realists’ and the neo-cons:
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq
Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone
The One Percent Doctrine
State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III
Nothing could have made this not a disaster, but it would likely have been possible to create a SMALLER disaster.
Besides the above suggestions, don’t use for security an above the law mercenary group like Blackwater. Especially after officially, openly declaring them above the law.
Don’t write a set of neocon wet dream rules into Iraqi law, screwing up thier economy in the process.
Hire Iraqis whenever possible, instead of letting them languish with no jobs.
Make a point of killing as few Iraqis as possible, even if it means more military casualties. Valuing American soldiers above Iraqi civilians sends a very clear message to the Iraqis about how we feel about them.
Immediately after 9-11 when Suddam was saying he wanted to help the U.S. in any way he could (He did, in fact, make the offer). Take him up on the offer. Have a major American player meet with him to cement the offer. Kill them both with Suddam’s sons there as well, but make it look like Osama did it.
We would have gotten Suddam out of the way, bonded with the Iraqi people, a real government in place, no American soldiers being used as targets in Iraq, and the Bathists would be focused on Osama being the bad guy. And since Bush would not tell anyone otherwise, we would have a wonderful martyr ourselves.
I wish the US had quit saying “You can’t blame us, we’re in unexplored territory and we’ve never invaded anyone like this before” when in point of fact we’ve invaded the Philippines, Cuba, Italy, Germany and Japan. We’ve had a lot of practice at reconstructing countries we’ve defeated and in fact we’ve done very well by at least some of those countries, and yet we ignored all that past experience, started from scratch and royally screwed up.
In addition:
This was a war of ideology and a battle of words as much as swords.
Rumsfeld made a huge HUGE mistake in how he portrayed day-one. If he replaced the “shock and Awe” rhetoric with “precision strike to avoid casualties” it would have been perceived differently. We announced we were going to war so there was no sucker punch involved. We specifically targeted Saddam’s regime and gave civilians a chance to evacuate before striking. This was never promoted.
Any President willing to go to war should make his case clearly and be prepared to follow up on it. President Bush listed a flock of reasons for starting the war and then let politcal opposition make WMD’S the only reason for invading. That should have been addressed immediately. We stopped 2 civil wars for the sole reason of preventing mass genocide. We had the same justification for invading Iraq with the addition of of Saddam’s weapons programs and a standing army that was the 3rd largest in the world.
Where would the civilians evacuate to? Actually, though, I don’t recall a lot of complaints on this subject. IIRC, Iraqi civilian casualties during the war proper weren’t too bad. I don’t think you can advertise that you’re trying to protect civilians, because when the eventual mistake is made, it seems worse. We underpromised and over-delivered in this, and that was okay. The casualties are happening now because they screwed the aftermath.
What mass genocide was going on, under the noses of the UN inspectors? And though the standing army was big, the years of sanctions made it not a very credible force, not even compared to the army we beat during GW I.
Removing dictators for human rights reasons might be a good reason for war - but then it would have to be a general policy, and he’d have to explain why Iraq and not worse offenders. And the American public would have to buy in, which would be dubious. Only WMDs offered an excuse for invading then, so they only have themselves to blame for it.
Best I can tell, your answer is that they should have fabricated a better excuse for the war.
Oh yeah, that would have made all the difference. :rolleyes:
The Iraqis don’t give a rat’s ass what precise kind of political garbage the neocons want to spout from their lie holes at home. How the hell is that supposed to do anything about long simmering sectarian hatred?
This is false. There is no question that Bush sold the war primarily by fabricating the bogus WMD threat. It’s true he tossed in a couple of other lies as well, like that Saddam was connected to al Qaeda or had something to do with 9/11, but mostly it was the fictional threat from WMD which he used to shill the invasion.
You also seem to think that political opposition or failures to keep the truth out of the media at home are the reason that Iraq is a disaster. That’s absurd. There is opposition at home BECAUSE Iraq is a disaster. It was diseased idea from the outset. I don’t know why you think that lying more cleverly about it at home would actually have changed anything on the ground in Iraq.
What weapons program?
And what does the size of an army have to do with anything?
I just want to know what “mass genocide” is. That’s the 2nd time in less than a week that I’ve encountered that term (from 2 different people, I believe). Is that when you try to destroy many, many different ethnic groups all at the same time?
What could Bush have done better? Gee… almost everything. I would be easier to make of list of what was done right. The only thing he seems to have done right is to leave the Kurds alone in the north. But wait until the vote on Kirkuk takes place-- that is going to ignite a powder keg up there no matter which way the vote goes.
This is, IMHO, very accurate. Had the only goal of the U.S. administration been to get rid of Saddam, the best way to accomplish that plan would have been to start shipping boatloads of distributable bribe money to his Secretary of the Army.
Great response, I came in here to say something similar, but you basically did it for me. I always thought that it was doomed from the beginning, and I predicted how it would end. The simple point is that if Bush were to somehow get it right, he’d have to be extremely lucky and brilliant. The odds were always low, so I find it pointless to discuss whether or not we could have done something better. Al Gore, or Clinton, or anyone else probably would have screwed it up too. Although I doubt they would have been so idiotic to go in though.