Neocons sold us the WMD story.
They started in 1997, then their man, Chalabi, fed misinformation to the CIA, and the media.

• How pressure from the top kept Chalabi's Curveball story alive and in use in the State of the Union and U.N. speeches.

• The neocons wrote to Clinton in 1997 saying "We urge you to act decisively ... to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction."

• By May 2001 the neocons told us "Chalabi also established his own intelligence service, which dwarfed the reach and understanding of the CIA's clandestine service."

• But Chalabi sold fake WMD stories to 60 minutes and to other media.

• The President's Commission on WMD found that Chalabi's misinformation was used in the President's State of the Union message and Powell's speech to the U.N.

Neocons said U.N. sanctions had failed.
Sanctions plus a great U.N. inspection team, with strong U.S. backing at the start, did the job and did it fast. The report of Bush's Commission on WMDs is conclusive.

• "Does anyone really believe that sanctions today, no matter how much you increase their IQ, will prevent Saddam from acting for a third time on his dreams of a new Babylonian empire?" —PNAC's Pre-9/11 Iraq position paper.

• In fact sanctions were impossed in 1991 and were to be lifted only if Saddam got rid of his WMDs, and according to the Senate Committee and the President's Commission on WMD, he got rid of all his WMDs and WMD programs in 1991--not because he decided to be nice, but because of the U.N. sanctions.

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Neocons said we needed only 100,000 troops to keep the peace.
Wolfowitz thought "getting in [to Baghdad] is the dangerous part" and he worried considerably less about the occupation. Getting this completely backward, explains why his troop estimates were backward.


• Ambassador Paul Bremer, who ran the U.S. provisional government in Iraq for more than a year said "The single most important change would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout" the U.S. occupation. (MSNBC)

• Mr. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, opened a two-front war of words on Capitol Hill, calling the recent estimate by Gen. Eric K. Shinseki of the Army that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq, "wildly off the mark." Pentagon officials have put the figure closer to 100,000 troops. (NYTimes) ... "I am reasonably certain that they will greet us as liberators," Wolfowitz told a congressional committee, "and that will help us to keep requirements down." (Washington Post)

• The Pentagon said yesterday that it will boost the number of U.S. troops in Iraq to about 150,000, the highest level since the U.S. occupation began 19 months ago. ... The original war plan, which was based on that assumption, called for a series of quick reductions in troop levels in 2003, to perhaps 50,000 by the end of that year. (Washington Post)

• Before the invasion, U.S. intelligence agencies were persistent and unified in warning the Defense Department that Iraqis would resort to "armed opposition" after the war was over. Rumsfeld and his team disagreed. (W.Post)

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Neocons Said Chalabi’s network would rise up, help our troops and take power.

On April 5th, the U.S. military flew Chalabi and 700 of his Free Iraqi Forces from northern Iraq into the southern city of Nasiriyah. Unfortunately, only a third of the Iraqi forces have any combat experience, and none of the FIF have yet been issued weapons. US News

Here's what the Neocons had been planning:

• "Contrary to many critics' claims, the opposition's forces would likely have significant military and intelligence value; indeed, they would probably demonstrate quite quickly that they could rout superior forces when backed up by U.S. airpower.

The most significant role of the FIF in the war was when they posed for a photo op as the U.S. Army pulled down a statue of Saddam in Baghdad.

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Neocons said major hostilities would end in about five weeks.

• "I can't tell you if the use of force in Iraq today will last five days, five weeks or five months, but it won't last any longer than that." (Nov. 14, 2002, CNN) Repeated on Nov. 15.

• Clearly "five weeks" was Rumsfeld's best guess for the "use of force" in Iraq, so when there was a lull in fighting after Baghdad's capture, Bush announced "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended." Then we had suffered 113 combat fatalities. Since then we have suffered 1468 (as of 10/21/2005). It has been no 5 weeks but 135 weeks and there is no sign of an end to "major combat operations."

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Neocons Said Chalabi was the best bet to lead Iraq.
The Neocons thought he'd be ideal because he was rich, but the State Dept., CIA and the British did not trust him. As it turned out neither did the Iraqis. In fact his do-not-trust-at-all ranking topped every other Iraqi leader's including Saddam Hussein's. As it turned out, Chalabi was caught spying for Iran. Everyone one judged him right but the neocons.

• "Yet Chalabi may be ideal for the task, for the very reasons that often cause critics to trash him. He is rich, upper class (in the old-world sense), well educated, highly Westernized." —Noecon position paper

• National Survey of Iraq: Chalabi's Popularity
Oxford Research International Poll, February 2004

Which national leader in Iraq, if any, do you trust the most?
Talabani, 3rd with 14.4%  (the current President)
Chalabi,  12th with 0.6%

And, if any, which one do you not trust at all? (Out of a list of 28)
Chalabi,  1st with 44.7%
Hussein,  2nd with 13.6%  (Saddam)
Talabani, 7th with  4.0%

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Neocons Said Chalabi was one of us.

• "And Chalabi is unquestionably pro-American, in a deep, philosophical sense, which is rare among Middle Easterners."  —Noecon position paper

Too bad he was spying on America for the Iranians.  —zFacts

• "An intercept of an Iranian message -- from an agent in Baghdad to his superiors in Tehran saying Chalabi had told him that U.S. intelligence was able to read Iran's secret cables -- has triggered a major counterintelligence probe and concern about Washington's future ability to monitor Iranian developments. (Washington Post, June 4, 2004.)

• This occured just weeks after Chalabi visited the head of Iran's equilivalent of the CIA.

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Neocons thought there was no need to prepare for occupation.
Well, they never actually said that. They just didn't do it, and threw out the $5 million dollar study funded by Congress because it was done by the State Dept. The neocons were sure we would be "greeted a liberators"—why worry?

A Washington Post report on James Fallows' article in the Atlantic has this to say:

•  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."

• "Looting wasn't taken into military consideration," Blount says.

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."

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Neocons said Saddam's Baathists should be completely purged, even the army.
The Army was Baathist, but many in it did not love Saddam. If you wanted a good job, you simply had to be "Baathist." Once again, all those with experience understood this—but not the neocons.

• 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."

• The neocons supported Chalabi's de-bathification line: "Once freed of Saddam, Iraq will need an institution, untouched by the Ba'ath."  Chalabi, is a Shi'ite, who's base was shi'ite, while the Ba'ath party was controlled by Sunni's. Moreover, Chalabi wanted his Free Iraqi Forces to replace the Iraqi army.

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The Neocon's Pre-9/11 position paper: "Liberate Iraq"

Author: Reuel Marc Gerecht, the Director of PNAC's Middle East Initiative.
Publish in the Weekly Standard (May 14, 2001) and on PNAC's web site.

PNAC is the main neocon think-tank / lobby and includes:
Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Libby, Perle, Bolton, Abrams, Woolsey, Kristol, Kagan, and Podhoretz and others.

The Weekley Standard, is the leading Neocon magazine.

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