thedrifter
10-01-06, 08:43 AM
Many mistakes were made
Sunday, October 1, 2006
By BILL NORTON
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
Not too many weeks ago, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld accused Iraq war critics of suffering "moral or intellectual confusion."
If he really believes that, then he works in a building (the Pentagon) and oversees an arm of the government (the armed forces) that must be woefully confused, morally, intellectually and otherwise.
Why? Because some of the harshest critics of this war are the military commanders.
Their voices, their reports, their lessons-learned analyses, their investigations and even their private e-mails make up the bulk of "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq," by Thomas E. Ricks, veteran Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post.
Despite repeated warnings and memos and briefings to Rumsfeld, warnings that even reached President Bush, the military never had nearly enough troops on the ground to keep the peace. And the commonly accepted pre-war knowledge of Iraq was so faulty that some officials of the United States believed the troops would be treated as liberators, leaving the troops wholly unprepared for the insurgency that followed.
Who's to blame? The better question might be, "Who's not?" In the first third of the book, which looks at the run-up to the invasion, the main architects of this fiasco are Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, by extension Bush, and Gen. Tommy Franks.
Although Rumsfeld has created a deniability buffer, it's clear in Ricks' account the defense secretary repeatedly squeezed an invasion force once projected at 300,000 or more down to 145,000, the British included. It's also clear Franks didn't or couldn't stop him.
The apparent quick collapse of the Iraqi Army and the seeming fall of Baghdad, symbolized by the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein, belied the fact that most of the major cities, including Baghdad, had not been pacified; nor had a triangle of land inhabited by Sunnis.
Three years later, neither Baghdad nor the Sunni triangle is peaceful. In one of those cities, Fallujah, U.S. Marines engaged in the fiercest house-to-house fighting since Hue City in Vietnam in 1968. And that battle came long after Iraq was considered defeated.
Part of the problem was Paul Bremer, who was appointed by the Bush administration to head the reconstruction of Iraq. In short order, Bremer did two things he was cautioned not to do: He ordered the Iraq military to be disbanded and then decreed that no members of Hussein's ruling party, the Baathists, could be on the government payroll.
Both acts, Ricks quotes commanders as saying, fed the insurgency that was just then starting, an insurgency the military was not prepared, in terms of training or manpower, to handle.
In his afterword, Ricks lays out four scenarios he sees as possible outcomes to this military adventure in Iraq. He titles that afterword "Betting Against History."
None of the scenarios is optimistic.
Ellie
Sunday, October 1, 2006
By BILL NORTON
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
Not too many weeks ago, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld accused Iraq war critics of suffering "moral or intellectual confusion."
If he really believes that, then he works in a building (the Pentagon) and oversees an arm of the government (the armed forces) that must be woefully confused, morally, intellectually and otherwise.
Why? Because some of the harshest critics of this war are the military commanders.
Their voices, their reports, their lessons-learned analyses, their investigations and even their private e-mails make up the bulk of "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq," by Thomas E. Ricks, veteran Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post.
Despite repeated warnings and memos and briefings to Rumsfeld, warnings that even reached President Bush, the military never had nearly enough troops on the ground to keep the peace. And the commonly accepted pre-war knowledge of Iraq was so faulty that some officials of the United States believed the troops would be treated as liberators, leaving the troops wholly unprepared for the insurgency that followed.
Who's to blame? The better question might be, "Who's not?" In the first third of the book, which looks at the run-up to the invasion, the main architects of this fiasco are Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, by extension Bush, and Gen. Tommy Franks.
Although Rumsfeld has created a deniability buffer, it's clear in Ricks' account the defense secretary repeatedly squeezed an invasion force once projected at 300,000 or more down to 145,000, the British included. It's also clear Franks didn't or couldn't stop him.
The apparent quick collapse of the Iraqi Army and the seeming fall of Baghdad, symbolized by the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein, belied the fact that most of the major cities, including Baghdad, had not been pacified; nor had a triangle of land inhabited by Sunnis.
Three years later, neither Baghdad nor the Sunni triangle is peaceful. In one of those cities, Fallujah, U.S. Marines engaged in the fiercest house-to-house fighting since Hue City in Vietnam in 1968. And that battle came long after Iraq was considered defeated.
Part of the problem was Paul Bremer, who was appointed by the Bush administration to head the reconstruction of Iraq. In short order, Bremer did two things he was cautioned not to do: He ordered the Iraq military to be disbanded and then decreed that no members of Hussein's ruling party, the Baathists, could be on the government payroll.
Both acts, Ricks quotes commanders as saying, fed the insurgency that was just then starting, an insurgency the military was not prepared, in terms of training or manpower, to handle.
In his afterword, Ricks lays out four scenarios he sees as possible outcomes to this military adventure in Iraq. He titles that afterword "Betting Against History."
None of the scenarios is optimistic.
Ellie