Three More Iraq Report Cards
Do you remember the feeling of coming home with a bad report card? The Bush administration has failed Iraq policy again and again, and if any more proof is needed we got it this week.
1. A new 700-page study from the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command’s Contemporary Operations Study Team at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas comes to the unsurprising conclusion that we tried to occupy Iraq without sending enough troops. The PDF of On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign by Donald Wright and COL Timothy Reese is the second in a series on the contemporary history of the Iraq fiasco, covering the period May 2003—January 2005. The PDF is a 100 MB+ monster download, but well worth reading.
“The Army, as the service primarily responsible for ground operations, should have insisted on better Phase IV planning and preparations through its voice on the Joint Chiefs of Staff… The military means employed were sufficient to destroy the Saddam regime; they were not sufficient to replace it with the type of nation-state the United States wished to see in its place.”
Former Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki was right when he told a congressional committee that based on his experience, several hundred thousand soldiers would be needed to secure Iraq (Shinseki was downplaying his disagreement with the Bush administration– he actually had in mind at least 400,000). Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy secretary of defense, was wrong. Wolfowitz told Congress, “[I]t’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam’s security forces and his army. Hard to imagine.”
What about the so-called “surge”? We’ve been told that the temporary deployment of five more combat brigades has improved security. Well, maybe not. An analysis by GardaWorld, a leading private security and intelligence contractor in Iraq, shows that the security picture hasn’t changed significantly since October 1, 2007. In fact, violent incidents are now increasing as the last of the “surge” brigades departs from Iraq.
2. After Saddam: Prewar Planning and the Occupation of Iraq by the RAND Corporation begins by examining prewar planning efforts for postwar Iraq. Then it moves on to the role of U.S. military forces and the activities of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) from May 2003 to June 2004. The study ascribes the failure of the occupation to three factors: wrong assumptions, ineffective interagency coordination, and not enough troops to provide security in the aftermath of the invasion.
3. The Bush-supported Maliki regime in Iraq ranks fifth on the 2008 Failed States Index, just behind Chad. The weak Green Zone government is faced with growing pan-sectarian nationalism. There is strong opposition to the U.S. occupation and Iraq’s status as a virtual U.S. colony, forced to hand over control of its oil wealth to foreigners. Meanwhile, ordinary Iraqis form miles-long lines in 100-degree heat to buy gasoline.
UPDATE: Michael Gordon of The New York Times wrote a good piece about the second volume of the Army’s history of the Iraq fiasco, On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign.
