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thedrifter
11-12-03, 06:00 AM
11-10-2003

Why We Are Losing the Peace in Iraq



By David T. Pyne

In mid-October, PBS aired a special program on Iraq aired titled “Truth, War and Consequences.” Based on interviews with various U.S. political and military leaders who had experience on the ground in Iraq as well as a few members of the Iraqi Governing Council, the program aimed to find out the truth about what has actually gone wrong in Iraq.



This little-publicized report laid bare some uncomfortable facts about how the United States has mismanaged post-combat Iraq.



The PBS report exposed the fact that retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, who was originally tasked with heading up the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, was sacked by neocons in the Bush Administration at the urging of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. The reason was that he was viewed as “weak” due to the fact that he had allowed some low-level Ba’ath Party bureaucrats to keep their jobs. Garner also planned to call-up half of the former Iraqi Army to help in the reconstruction of Iraq and serve as a hedge against the emergence of the radical Shiite terrorist threat we have seen emerge in Iraq over the past several months.

On May 12, Garner was replaced by Paul Bremer, who acting under the direction of Feith and other neocons at the Pentagon immediately moved to outlaw the Ba’ath Party and ban all of its members from serving in the new government, police, military or security forces. Eleven days later, Bremer disbanded the entire 425,000-man Iraqi Army.

These two actions were without a doubt the two most glaring mistakes of the entire postwar period to date, leading to increased terrorist attacks against Coalition forces and making the restoration of peace, security and order in Iraq all but impossible. Outlawing the Ba’ath Party left Sunni Iraqis unrepresented by any political party, forced its members to go underground, and caused them to move from collaboration with the new U.S.-led regime to full militant opposition. It caused them to forge an unholy alliance of convenience with Al Qaeda’s newly empowered affiliate in Iraq and the Ba’athists’ long-time enemy, Ansar-al-Islam, against the American occupiers.

The disbanding of the Sunni-led Iraqi Army also created a massive security vacuum, which was quickly filled by foreign Iranian-backed Shiite terrorist groups, which proceeded to enter Iraq in force mere days later. Representatives of these militant Shiite terrorist organizations were then foolishly welcomed into the new U.S.-appointed Iraq Governing Council in July as representatives of Iraq’s Shiite majority.

Bremer decided to give these and other mostly radical Shiite groups a majority on the Council with thirteen of the twenty-five seats. In fact, the first interim Iraq President, who led the Iraqi Governing Council during the month of August, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, serves as the chief spokesman for Al Dawa, a terrorist group implicated in the killing of scores of American soldiers during the 1980’s.

The rising influence of these Iranian-backed Shiite terrorist groups in Iraq and on the Governing Council poses the greatest medium- to long-term threat to U.S. national security. Unlike the other groups suspected of being responsible for recent attacks, they have a long record of supporting terrorist attacks against U.S. soldiers and civilians. These groups are trying to accelerate the timetable for democratic elections in Iraq which they believe they would win due to the fact that 60 percent of the population of Iraq is Shiite. Accordingly, it is they, not the Ba’athists or Al Qaeda surrogates operating in Iraq, who are likely to wield power once elections are held and transform formerly secular Iraq into a terrorist-supporting Islamic Republic similar to Iran.

The United States must take swift action to counter them. Representatives of these Iranian-backed terrorist groups should immediately be banned from further participation in Iraq’s Governing Council and replaced by representatives of more moderate Shiite factions and perhaps a few former lower-level Ba’ath Party members found to be free of any connection to Saddam. The Ba’ath Party should be legalized and the ban against its participation in the new Iraq should be lifted.

Such an action would go far to decrease the Sunnis’ incentive for supporting further terrorist attacks against U.S. forces. Along with a much more rapid reconstitution of the Iraqi Army, these measures would deter Shiite terrorist attacks and thus go far to make the country safer for U.S. troops and civilians in Iraq, facilitating a swifter American withdrawal from the Iraqi quagmire.

Since Bremer took over in May, the number of attacks perpetrated against U.S. troops has skyrocketed, and since July, the average number of U.S. troops killed from all causes has nearly tripled, with a total of over 2,500 killed or wounded. In a recent poll of the American people, 64 percent of the respondents expressed their opinion that the current level of U.S. casualties in Iraq is “unacceptable.”

Had Bremer not banned the Ba’ath Party and disbanded the Iraqi military, it is extremely unlikely that either the Ba’ath Party loyalists or the Shiite majority would have engaged in terrorist attacks and raids against U.S. forces, leaving Al Qaeda and its affiliate, Ansar-al-Islam to execute them alone. At a minimum, such attacks would have been far fewer than those that have actually taken place and the number of American casualties far fewer.

President Bush has been poorly served by Under Secretary Feith, Paul Bremer, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and the other neocons in his administration who got him into the Iraq war quagmire in the first place. This governing neo-con council and other like-minded officials within the administration persuaded the president to invade and occupy Iraq in opposition to U.S. national interests.

As retired Gen. Wesley Clark recommended earlier this week, the president should immediately sack Bremer as head of the CPA for incompetence and replace him with someone who actually has a plan for restoring peace to Iraq and combating the terrorists and minimizing their influence.

In addition, the president should purge Wolfowitz and Feith from the Department of Defense and replace them with farsighted conservative realists who actually have a plan for extricating U.S. forces from Iraq and are ready and able to radically revise U.S. policy in Iraq without having to defend past mistakes.

Contributing Editor David T. Pyne is President of the Center for the National Security Interest. He can be reached at pyne@national-security.org. © 2003 David T. Pyne.

http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=DefenseWatch.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=247&rnd=105.72296309116564

Sempers,

Roger
:marine: