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USA Today: War in Iraq's aftermath |
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War in Iraq's aftermath hits troops hard
By Barbara Slavin and Dave Moniz, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — On March 16, just three days before the first U.S. bombs fell on Iraq, Vice President Cheney signaled on NBC's Meet the Press what sort of war the Bush administration thought American troops were about to fight: "Things have gotten so bad inside Iraq ... we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators," Cheney said.
Soldiers are mired in a guerrilla war in Iraq according to the commander of U.S. forces in the region.
By Jack Gruber, USA TODAY
Baghdad fell just 21 days after the initial assaults, and military analysts describe the campaign as historic, even brilliant.
But so far, the verdict on the aftermath of that campaign is much harsher. More than three months after Baghdad fell, American soldiers are not being treated like liberators. Instead, they are mired in a guerrilla war, according to Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of U.S. forces in the region. Shadowy forces prey on U.S. troops, sabotage the nation's electric grid and other vital infrastructure, and spread fear among average Iraqis that Saddam is coming back.
Administration officials say the violence will eventually subside. But as of mid-July, even the top U.S. official in Iraq was offering no clear forecast for when. "We need to be patient," Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator for Iraq, told Meet the Press on Sunday. While expressing confidence that resistance could be overcome, he conceded that "we are going to be there for a while. I don't know how many years."
Interviews with more than 30 current and former U.S. officials, analysts, Iraqi-Americans and others — including a cross-section of those involved in the planning process — identified a number of pre-war decisions that they say helped create the current situation. Hasty planning, rosy assumptions about Iraqi attitudes and a failure to foresee and forestall the disastrous effects of looting and sabotage all contributed, they say. Most spoke on the record, but a few in sensitive positions requested anonymity.
Whatever the reasons for the disarray, the stakes are enormous. A failure to create a successful, stable Iraq could have grave re-percussions throughout the Middle East and beyond, jeopardizing U.S. efforts to deter support for terrorism, curb proliferation of dangerous weapons and encourage democratic reforms. The outcome could also affect voters' views of the war and President Bush's reelection prospects.
Failure to secure the peace in Iraq "has the potential to outweigh every accomplishment of American foreign policy," says Leslie Gelb, who recently stepped down as president of the Council on Foreign Relations, a prominent think tank.
Should planners have foreseen the chaos and disorder that now stalk Iraq? And how did such a well-fought combat operation give way to such a messy and seemingly open-ended guerrilla conflict? Those interviewed disagree about precisely what went awry, but they identify at least six different reasons for the current difficulties:
•Deploying a limited number of troops
When major cities were captured quickly by a comparatively small force of allied ground troops, military officers and analysts who had advocated a massive invasion force were silenced — for awhile. Now they say the postwar chaos shows they were right after all, that it was crucial to have a massive force on the ground, not just to win the war, but to establish a commanding presence the minute the war was over. Instead, once Saddam loyalists sensed how thin the U.S. forces were, they became emboldened to begin looting, conduct sabotage and, finally, wage guerrilla war.
"Once we got to Baghdad, we needed to establish an immediate presence to show the people we were in charge," says Ralph Peters, a retired Army officer and strategist. "We did not present tangible strength on the ground."
Four years ago, those who devised an Iraq war game called "Desert Crossing" concluded that a large force would be needed to subdue the country. "We were concerned about the ability to get in there right away, to flood the towns and villages," says retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, who was commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and the surrounding region when he supervised "Desert Crossing." "We knew the initial problem would be security."
The 1999 exercise recommended a force of 400,000 troops to invade and stabilize Iraq. But at the insistence of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, ground forces in the March invasion were held to less than half that: about 130,000 U.S. combat troops and some 30,000 British troops.
Top Pentagon officials fiercely defend their decision to hold troop numbers down. Douglas Feith, undersecretary of Defense for policy and an influential adviser to Rumsfeld, says the strategy prevented much worse problems that could have arisen if Saddam Hussein's regime had had more time to react.
Taking time to deploy more troops, Feith said in an interview July 8, would have given Saddam "more chances to send a Scud missile into Kuwait or Israel, rig bridges to explode, or prepare to hide or use chemical weapons." Feith said it's easy in hindsight to identify problems that should have been planners' primary focus. "But if we didn't have a looting problem, but we had the oil fields blown, and refugees fleeing across the border, and mass starvation, and all other things we planned against ... would everybody now say that was a brilliant job of planning because you put an extra 100,000 forces in and a building didn't get looted?"
It's uncertain whether a force of 400,000 or more would have prevented looting and sabotage or headed off a guerrilla war. Peacekeeping missions vary from country to country, and what worked in one nation might not work in another. But participants in the war preparations offer insights into the information planners considered and what assumptions they made when they rejected the idea of a larger force.
As late as February, barely a month before the war began, the question of how many troops to send to Iraq to stabilize the country after the war was unsettled, according to a high-ranking Defense Department official involved in the planning process.
To help planners reach a decision, staff members on the White House's National Security Council (NSC) prepared a memo that looked at the numbers of troops used in recent peacekeeping operations and stated what numbers would be sent to Iraq if those models were followed, the official said. If the peacekeeping operations during the 1999 Kosovo crisis were used as a benchmark, the memo said, 500,000 troops would have been deployed to Iraq. A large number of peacekeepers was also sent to Bosnia, but relatively smaller forces were deployed in other crises in Haiti, Sierra Leone, where the outcome has been less successful than in the Balkans.
The memo did not set an inflexible rule for force size, but instead laid out the apparent lessons of recent peacekeeping operations. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice saw the memo, but it is not clear whether President Bush did. Michael Anton, an NSC spokesman, refused to comment on the document, apart from denying that any specific recommendation had been made regarding how many troops should be deployed. "The NSC staff does not make recommendations or provide estimates to the president on the number of troops needed for any mission," he said.
Yet about the same time the document was drafted, Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz harshly criticized then Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki for telling the Senate Armed Services Committee that it would take "something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" to stabilize Iraq in the months after the war.
In the end, the conviction that U.S. forces would be warmly welcomed was at the heart of the decisionmaking, judging from the administration's public statements and inside accounts from those who took part in the debate. Thomas White, who served as secretary of the Army until Rumsfeld pushed him out after the war over differences about force size and other matters, traces the force-size decision to the belief by Cheney, Rumsfeld and others that U.S. troops would be hailed as liberators.
The implication was that "liberated people don't misbehave," White said in an interview. "Anybody who looked at the situation, that string of assumptions, it affected what kind of force we took in there and how we are conducting ourselves now. This is going to be a long, drawn out affair."
White's description of Rumsfeld's view was corroborated by three serving high-ranking Pentagon officials, as well as analysts at the Pentagon's own academic institution, the National Defense University.
Former and current Pentagon officials also say Rumsfeld decided to limit ground forces in part because of his conviction that high-tech arms can transform military operations and reduce the need for boots on the ground.
Feith confirmed that the decision to limit the number of troops sent in was "strategic and goes far beyond Iraq. This is part of his (Rumsfeld's) thinking about defense transformation. It's an old way of thinking to say that the United States should not do anything without hundreds of thousands of troops. That makes our military less usable."
•Starting too late
While war planning started more than a year before the March 2003 invasion, Pentagon planning for postwar Iraq did not get underway in earnest until shortly beforehand.
The Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), tasked with initial post-Saddam political and economic work, was not created until Jan. 20 and did not really start functioning until a few weeks before the war began. Wolfowitz told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that "to my knowledge this is the first time we have created an office for postwar administration before a conflict had even started." While that's technically true, U.S. planning for the occupation of Germany began three years before the end of World War II.
Retired Army general Jay Garner, who headed initial post-Saddam planning and reconstruction efforts, says U.S. officials were inhibited partly by the need to show the world that they were giving diplomacy a chance. But he says he could have used more time. "I didn't have all the people who had been appointed to work in the ministries," Garner says. Also "10 of 13 major contracts (for reconstruction work) weren't signed until after the war started. Should we have done it earlier? Sure."
•Underestimating the impact of looting and the poor state of local infrastructure
Only three brigades of about 6,000 soldiers were in Baghdad when the city fell on April 9, controlling just 15% of a city with a population of more than 5 million. Among them were only 140 MPs, says Maj. Gen. Buford Blount, commander of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division. As a result, U.S. forces were not in a position to stop the widespread looting that broke out after Saddam fell, even if they had been ordered to. And they were not given such orders because the pilferage was regarded by Rumsfeld and his top aides as a minor annoyance, a letting off of steam by newly liberated Iraqis.
"Looting wasn't taken into military consideration," Blount says. "It never came in the order process that it would be a major problem."
But the devastation seriously undermined the postwar mission. Iraqis stole, destroyed or scattered furniture, computers, electric lines, archaeological relics, crucial records, and vital equipment at power plants, oil installations and hospitals.
"It presented us with a hard problem," acknowledges Garner. "Our plan was to immediately stand up 20 of 23 existing ministries," he says. "But 17 of them had been vaporized."
U.S. officials also overestimated the condition of Iraqi infrastructure, discounting reports from the United Nations and others about the jury-rigged nature of Iraq's oil industry and electrical grid. As a result, they face a much bigger task trying to restore basic services than they anticipated. Two prior wars and a decade of U.N. economic sanctions "killed this country," says a congressional aide who recently returned from Iraq. "We had no idea how bad it would be."
•Making wrong assumptions from the last Gulf War
Pentagon and State Department experts, studying the lessons of the 1991 Gulf War, expected ordinary Iraqi soldiers to surrender in large numbers instead of taking off their uniforms and melding back into the population. There was also an assumption, a senior State Department official involved in Iraq planning said, that U.S. forces could immediately use the rank-and-file Iraqi soldiers and police to stabilize the country once the top officers had been removed.
"The fact is that the so-called decapitation theory, the thought that somehow or other the United States would take out of commission police officers, army officers, people who were in the ministries, who were identified with Saddam Hussein and the regime, and the rest of the forces would continue on to do their duty, was totally inaccurate — a disastrous assumption," says Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.
"The policemen seem to have been better trained to raid people's homes at night than to patrol the streets," Wolfowitz acknowledged before the Foreign Relations Committee in May.
•Planning for crises that didn't happen
Much of the prewar planning focused on crises that did not materialize: oil field fires, large refugee flows and huge numbers of prisoners. In a clear strategic success, U.S. and British forces got to the oil fields before they could be sabotaged in a significant way. The initial combat ended so quickly that most Iraqis stayed in their homes.
"A lot of our current problems have to do with the fact that we planned for the wrong immediate aftermath," says Richard Haass, a former senior State Department official who now heads the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank. "The administration planned quite a lot. But planning is only as good as the assumptions, and one of the assumptions built in was that a lot of the initial period was going to be dealing with the humanitarian crisis."
Haass, who occasionally clashed with Pentagon hardliners over U.S. policy toward nations such as Iraq, says the swiftness of Baghdad's fall, ironically, made the post-Saddam effort more difficult. "The fact that the Iraqi people were so spared by the war, psychologically, there wasn't a sense of the defeated society," he says. "So it's not nearly as pliable as Japan or Germany were after World War II."
Turkey's refusal to allow 60,000 U.S. troops to invade Iraq from the north meant that the so-called Sunni Muslim triangle north of Baghdad was largely untouched. That region has become a focal point for resistance.
Feith conceded that he was surprised by the degree of opposition from remnants of Saddam's Baath party, which he said was "more sustained and more intense than anticipated."
•Failing to resolve interagency conflict
Chronic feuding between the State Department and the Pentagon's civilian leadership made the planning process even more difficult, those involved in the process say.
The office of the secretary of Defense largely ignored position papers produced over the past year by the State Department's Future of Iraq program, which brought together about 200 Iraqi exiles to discuss reorganization after the fall of Saddam.
Instead, the Pentagon early this year started a parallel operation with exiles vetted for support for Ahmad Chalabi, an exile leader close to Republican neo-conservatives and distrusted by the State Department.
Pentagon civilians also vetted State Department volunteers for service in Iraq and tried to bar those considered hostile to Chalabi, State Department officials said.
"What went wrong was turf war in Washington," says Feisal Istrabadi, an Iraqi-American lawyer in Chicago who participated in the State Department effort to draft new laws for Iraq.
"The Pentagon won the (bureaucratic) war in January and shunted us off to one side on the theory that they could re-invent in two months what we had done in ten months."
Pentagon and State Department officials, as well as Middle East experts from all sides of the political spectrum, also fault the National Security Council, which is supposed to be the coordinating body for foreign policy.
One Pentagon hardliner, who asked not to be named, said so-called "principals' meetings" that brought together Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Rice, often failed to reach decisions, leaving subordinates to improvise as they went along.
"We have to understand that it was the function of the NSC to insure that the interagency process worked," says Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). "Failure must be placed at the level of the NSC and the president."
As attacks on American and British forces intensify, concerns are growing about whether the U.S.-led coalition will be able to stabilize Iraq.
"The next three months are crucial to turning around the security situation," concluded a task force of foreign policy experts from CSIS and the Council on Foreign Relations who visited Iraq last week at Rumsfeld's request.
"The window for cooperation may close rapidly if they (Iraqis) do not see progress," the report said.
Contributing: Gary Strauss in Baghdad.
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http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2003-07-21-war-aftermath_x.htm
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http://zfacts.com/p/183.html | 01/18/12 07:24 GMT
Modified: Mon, 17 Apr 2006 17:51:20 GMT
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