Incompetence

Even those who once cheered the war to replace Saddam Hussein and bring democracy to Iraq are having second thoughts. Call it a scapegoat, or call it what you want, but many of the former cheerleaders place the blame at the foot of the Bush Administration and its incompetence.

Updated 1-17-2007.

How do you lose a war?

1. Take away the President's decision-making power by never letting him hear the disagreements.
2. Refuse to admit mistakes.
3. Ignore the real war while you war amongst yourselves.
4. Fire the guy who gets out and does stuff and then take as gospel truth everything the guy says who is hunkered down inside a Green Zone of his own making.
5. Start before the plan is complete or the players are in place.

I guess I don't blame Colin Powell for stepping down as Secretary of State. He probably saw it all coming. Actually, it was probably nearly there.

Some of the neo-conservatives became disillusioned with the Bush Administration's ability to prosecute the war in Iraq about the same time Colin Powell did. Others are just recently expressing their frustration. Cliff (and others) on OneUtah, probably fairly accurately, asks (my interpretation) if the Bush Administration could really be that stupid. I don't think so, but they sure act like it.

I thought it the epitome of irony that Bush chose the number 21,500 as the number of troops we would need to complete the Iraq "surge" so that we could "clear and hold" Baghdad. It's
as though he were saying, 'We can easy do it with 20,000 more, but let's throw in another fifteen hundred just for good measure." This after Jay Garner and nearly all Bush's generals (except for Tommy Franks, whose military leadership experience was limited to the art of blitzkrieg) told him that we would need about 400,000 troops to accomplish the task at hand.

It all is coming to a head for me right now as I contemplate that my contribution to Iraq is likely going to be that I made a few friends and impressed several with my ability to speak some Arabic. No, I really don't think Bush is that stupid. Nor Cheney. Nor Rumsfeld. So what gives?

These are some of the thoughts I had as I read a recent article in Vanity Fair magazine.

Update 1/17/2007 - Like me, a lot of the Neo-Conservatives (I'm not one) felt that America would be helping Iraq achieve liberty. But it hasn't worked out that way, at least yet.

Richard Perle has this to say about what went wrong:

The decisions did not get made that should have been. They didn't get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly. At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.… I think he was led to believe that things were chugging along far more purposefully and coherently than in fact they were.

If he were asked today, should we go into Iraq, his answer would be:

'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.'

Kenneth Adelman is more pointed about the incompetence of the Bush Administration:

I am extremely disappointed by the outcome in Iraq, because I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional.

James Woolsey was very in favor of an Iraq invasion, but now is angered and perplexed that we are making the same errors that we made in Vietnam. One of the greatest problems is that we don't stay in an area that we have cleaned of insurgents. As soon as we leave, the insurgents return. This is not a problem that the military leaders have caused. It is a problem that could only have been solved by using the approximately 400,000 troops that many advised the Bush Administration to use in the first place. The paltry addition of 21,500 troops in an area the size of Baghdad will likely make little difference.

The Greatest Mistake

When one's options are taken away, there always exists one remaining option--to fight. What might have happened--and where would Iraq be now--if we hadn't made The Greatest Mistake?

Retired Army General Jay Garner was originally assigned to make sense of the aftermath of the United States and coalition forces invasion of Iraq. It appears that he was doing an excellent job, despite an invasion that occurred perhaps prematurely, leaving Garner and his people not quite in place to organize security forces against looting and other destruction.

Garner's plan was to involve as many as 400,000 Iraqi army soldiers in the security and reconstruction of their country, providing them a generous paycheck that would at least offset the lucrativeness of a career in the insurgency.

Suddenly, Garner was replaced. Perhaps the images of day-after-day looting and upheaval weakened the Bush Administration's resolve. Enter Henry Kissinger protege, L. Paul Bremer.

In May, 2003, Bremer issued a decree disbanding the Iraqi army from top to bottom. An unnamed US Official in Baghdad at the time said "There was never a discussion that I was involved in where we would disband the military. It caught me completely by surprise."

During the transition phase, while Garner was still in Iraq, he was handed Bremer's "Coalition Provisional Authority [CPA] Order Number 1--De-Baathification of Iraqi Society", which effectively removed thousands of public school teachers and ministry workers who were members of the Baath party only because they had to sign up if they wanted their job. "We can't do this," Garner said, seeing the havoc it would cause in Iraqi society.

The very next day, Bremer's CPA issued an order disbanding the Iraqi army. The plan to throw hundreds of thousands of potential security and reconstruction workers out on the streets without a job was seen as a disaster by Garner.

A disaster it turned out to be.

In his recent book, State of Denial: Bush at War Part III, Bob Woodward discusses the results of CPA Orders #1 and #2. Electricity failed. Sewer systems backed up. The disorganization grew to beyond anything anyone had imagined. And the first Improvised Explosive Device went off, taking everyone in Bremer's group by surprise.

Beginning in early June, hundreds and then thousands of former Iraqi soldiers gathered outside the Saddam Palace that the CPA had decided to make as its headquarters. Now out of jobs, they threatened Bremer and his people that they would turn into aggressors against the occupation. Bremer did not listen until it was too late.

A recent documentary, produced by PBS Frontline, details the grievances and makeup of the Iraqi insurgency. While it is true that mujahideen have come from many other countries, including the West to fight, the common thread that wound through the Frontline documentary, "The Insurgency" was this--the bulk of the Iraqi insurgency is made up of former Iraqi military members who lost all their other options when the rug was pulled out from under them by L. Paul Bremer.

Where would we be now if the imperial Henry Kissinger acolyte L. Paul Bremer had not surprised a lot of people by disbanding the Iraqi government and military? It's hard to say exactly. But it is easy to say that it would have been much better than it is today.