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W. Post on Fallows in the Atlantic |
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The Best-Laid Plans Go Oft Astray
By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 27, 2004; Page C01
Your liberal wimps and weenies have been whining for months that the Bush administration was so busy scaring the country into war with Iraq that it failed to plan for what to do after the war. That's baloney, veteran journalist James Fallows writes in a detailed 17-page Atlantic Monthly article titled "Blind Into Baghdad."
Actually, Fallows shows, many government agencies -- the Army, the CIA, and the State Department among others -- did lots of planning for postwar Iraq. But the Bush administration ignored their planning, fired planners who disagreed with it and, in several instances, barred Pentagon officials from attending meetings with planners suspected of harboring thoughts not approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
And guess what? The planners turned out to be right -- and the Bushies wrong -- about key issues such as how many troops were needed for the occupation, what dangers those troops would face and how much the whole bloody mess would cost.
Fallows -- author of several books, including "National Defense" -- won a National Magazine Award last year for an Atlantic article on Iraq. He deserves more honors for this exhaustively researched piece. But let the reader beware: Although Fallows is a sober, just-the-facts-ma'am reporter, reading this piece may leave you sputtering with rage at the arrogance and lethal folly of our leaders.
Here are just a few of Fallows's revelations:
• Twice -- in May of 2002 and January of 2003 -- the CIA held war game exercises designed to plan for postwar problems. Pentagon officials attended the early sessions but then their superiors in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) ordered them to stop going.
"Their displeasure over the CIA exercise," Fallows writes, "was an early illustration of a view that became stronger throughout 2002: that post-war planning was an impediment to war."
• In 2002, Congress appropriated $5 million to fund the "Future of Iraq" project, headed by State Department veteran Thomas Warrick and designed to plan for the aftermath of war. Gathering Iraq experts and Iraqi exiles into 17 working groups, the project issued 13 reports, each addressing a potential postwar problem. But when former general Jay Garner was named to run postwar Iraq, Rumsfeld told him not to bother reading the project's recommendations and ordered him to fire Warrick.
• The Future of Iraq project warned that one potentially devastating postwar problem would be looting. International relief agencies, experienced in Third World wars, agreed. So did the U.S. Army, which recommended sending 400,000 troops to pacify Iraq. Rumsfeld whittled that number down to 200,000.
"We went in with the minimum force," Thomas White, who was the Secretary of the Army until he was fired by Rumsfeld, told Fallows. "And then we immediately found ourselves shorthanded in the aftermath."
The result was unchecked looting that destroyed Iraq's infrastructure: "We sat there," White said, "and watched people dismantle and run off with the country, basically."
• Prewar reports by the Future of Iraq project, by the Army War College and by the Center for Strategic and International Studies all warned against disbanding the Iraqi army, which could, the War College predicted, "lead to the destruction of one of the only forces for unity within the society."
But last May, shortly after the war ended, Paul Bremer, Bush's man in Iraq, ignored that advice and sent the Iraqi soldiers home. That was a "catastrophic error," Fallows writes, because "it created an instant enemy class: hundreds of thousands of men who still had their weapons but no longer had a paycheck or a place to go each day."
Some of those men are using those weapons to kill Americans today.
Rumsfeld declined to talk to Fallows, but his undersecretary Douglas Feith said this in defense of his bosses: "The notion that there was a memo that once written, that if we had only listened to that memo, all would have been well in Iraq is so preposterous."
Unswayed by Feith's argument, Fallows concludes, quite convincingly, that Bush's mistakes in Iraq are comparable to such infamous fiascos as JFK's handling of the Bay of Pigs and LBJ's handling of Vietnam.
"What David Halberstam said of Robert McNamara in 'The Best and the Brightest' is true of those at OSD as well: they were brilliant and they were fools."
Final Thoughts
When fools rush into war, things tend to go bad. Thus far, our country has lost more than 500 military men and women in Iraq, most of them in the postwar period. They can no longer speak for themselves but Esquire has performed a public service in its February issue by reprinting letters written by 10 U.S. servicemen who later died in Iraq. They make for very sad reading.
Army Cpl. Mark Bibby, 25, wrote home to his family in Watha, N.C., before he was killed by a roadside bomb in July:
"I want to tell you about a wonderful woman in my life, her name is Secil and she has been with me throughout all of this craziness and I am so proud and honored to be with her. After I come back from here we have plans on getting married. . . . I would like for everyone to accept her as part of the family because she will be with me as soon as I get the hell out of Iraq."
Army Spec. Brett T. Christian, 27, of North Royalton, Ohio, wrote to his grandparents before he was killed in a rocket-propelled grenade attack in July:
"The closest way I could describe this place is if you could imagine what hell must be like. The days are unbearably hot, and filled with flies. The nights are also hot, but with swarms of mosquitoes instead of flies. The streets are covered with garbage and sewage, which the livestock enjoys grazing in, and wild packs of dogs seem to run things around here."
Marine Staff Sgt. James Cawley, 41, wrote to his son, Cecil, 8, in Layton, Utah, before he was killed in a firefight in March:
"If for some reason I don't make it home, I will need you to take care of your little sister and your Mom. You will be the Man of the Cawley Family. Be good my son and God will watch over you as he has me."
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http://zfacts.com/p/184.html | 01/18/12 07:24 GMT
Modified: Fri, 14 Apr 2006 04:48:49 GMT
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