OT - How Iraq Went Wrong

[NoMyths]

While the Army's involvement with Iraq is just one piece of the puzzle (after all, the decision to invade was the largest mistake), the Army's newly released official history of the invasion reveals a number of ways in which the effort had serious problems from the beginning. Interesting story.

Link: Army criticizes itself in Iraq invasion report (http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/06/30/iraq.mistakes/index.html)

Full Text:
(CNN) -- The U.S. Army's official history of the Iraq war shows military chiefs made mistake after mistake in the early months of the conflict.

Failures to recognize the chaos engulfing the country and to send in enough troops to restore order after the 2003 invasion have long been highlighted by critics, but a new report shows the Army assessing itself.

Frank opinions from officers serving in the 18 months from the start of war to Iraqi elections in January 2005 reveal there were concerns at the time, not just about assumptions made by planners but at decisions taken once U.S.-led coalition forces had control of Iraq.

"I flipped," Gen. Jack Keane, then the Army's deputy chief of staff, told the historians of his reaction to a June 2003 decision to transfer control of all coalition troops away from the land forces command that had been preparing for the mission.

He recounted a conversation with Gen. John Abizaid, who succeeded the invasion's architect, Gen. Tommy Franks. "I said, 'Jesus Christ, John, this is a recipe for disaster. We invested in that headquarters. We have the experience and judgment in that headquarters."

Keane said it took the U.S. command between six and eight months to get the new headquarters up and running. During that time, troops in the field saw the mood of ordinary Iraqis turn against Americans and watched the insurgency take root.

"By the time we got a plan together to resource everything, the insurgents had closed that window of opportunity quickly," Col. David Perkins, a brigade commander in the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, told the historians. "What we started doing in September was probably a good idea to have done in April 2003."

Franks, who would soon retire and be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, said he ordered the transition to force the Pentagon to get leaders into the field to work with civilian occupation officials.

"That is a task that John Abizaid and I very simply laid on Washington and said, 'Figure it out. Do it fast. Get me a joint headquarters in here. We have a lot of work to do and [civilian administrator of Iraq] Jerry Bremer has a lot of responsibility and he needs help,' " he recalled.

The 720-page report compiled by the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, details the effects of having too few coalition troops on the ground when the reality after the fall of Baghdad was "severely out of line" with the anticipated conditions.

Previous experience "should have indicated that many more troops would be needed for the post-Saddam era in Iraq," historians wrote in the report, "On Point II: Transition to a New Campaign."

"The coalition's inability to prevent looting, to secure Iraq's borders and to guard the vast number of munitions dumps in the early months after Saddam's overthrow are indicative of the shortage," the study found.

About 150,000 U.S. and allied troops were in Iraq after the invasion, at a time when war planners were assuming that Iraq's government would remain functional after Hussein's ouster and that there would be no mass insurgency.

"These factors were in line with prewar planning for a quick turnover of power to Iraqis and a quick withdrawal of U.S. forces, leaving Iraqis to determine their own political future -- options that proved impossible to execute," the historians wrote in the report released over the weekend.

"We had the wrong assumptions, and therefore, we had the wrong plan to put into play," Gen. William Wallace, who commanded the Army's V Corps during the invasion, told the authors.

But some of the most critical decisions were made between May and August 2003, which some participants called a "window of opportunity that could have been exploited to produce the conditions for the quick creation of a new Iraq."

Among those decisions were the frequently criticized dissolution of the Iraqi army and the order that barred former members of Hussein's Baath Party from public life as well as the change in plan over the joint headquarters.

[Flasch186]

I'm sure this is Clinton's fault.

in all seriousness, it amazes me all of the prople (and posts) that denied these events back then and some of whom still continue to argue that these things didnt occur as stated above.

Perhaps they only interviewed disgruntled ex-employees.

[GrantDawg]

I'm amazed that I as a laymen idiot knew they would need more troops to secure Iraq, and some how the military did not.

[Vegas Vic]

The most astonishing part of the Iraq debacle was the naivety of the Bush administration (namely Cheney and Rumsfeld), who thought the Iraqis would be “throwing roses at our feet” after the U.S. invasion ousted Saddam from power. Obviously, these idiots knew nothing of the history of Iraq; otherwise they would have known that Iraq was an artificial county set up by the British in the 1920’s, carved out of the three tribal provinces of the defunct Ottoman Empire. Those factions (whose hatred for each other is centuries old) was held in check by the brutality of Saddam’s regime. To somehow think that these people were going to hold hands and sing Kumbaya while the country was in anarchy was an egregious, inexcusable lapse in judgment by the administration.

[NoMyths]

It's also frustrating that the Bush administration didn't have the foresight to realize the extraordinarily damaging effect such an invasion would have in the Middle East and worldwide. I recognize that they were hoping democracy would take root and spread, but the historic record should have indicated that such an effort would take a much more comprehensive approach from the beginning than they pursued.

I'm also very worried that we're seeing the same approach in the current buildup to war with Iran. This is particularly in light of Seymour Hersh's recent New Yorker article reporting that the C.I.A. has been escalating covert operations inside Iran. I try to imagine how Americans would react if we were to discover that Iran were doing the same thing over here, and then ask myself how Iran's 65+ million people would respond to such actions if they were to come to public light.

Links:
The New Yorker article: Preparing the Battlefield (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_hersh)
If you prefer your news Faux-flavored: Report: U.S. Escalating Covert Operations Against Iran (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,373407,00.html)

[Vegas Vic]

I recognize that they were hoping democracy would take root and spread, but the historic record should have indicated that such an effort would take a much more comprehensive approach from the beginning than they pursued.

Yes, it's ironic that these three tribal groups were artificially held together under Saddam Hussein, but now that they've been "liberated", we're finding out that you can't force democracy on people who hate each other's guts.

[Klinglerware]

I'm amazed that I as a laymen idiot knew they would need more troops to secure Iraq, and some how the military did not.

Although, in the military's defense, many of the old guard (people like Shinseki come to mind) did recognize the need for force levels to be much higher than planned.

The civilian leadership of the DOD (i.e., Rumsfeld) had envisioned transforming the military into a much leaner force, with a greater ability to project power quickly. There seems to be tension between the civilians and many of the rank and file military leadership, since this was a fundamental change from traditional US force planning (i.e., build up a well-supplied overwhelming force, even if it had to be done slowly).

It does seem that the Iraq invasion and its aftermath was a manifestation of Rumsfeld's desire to implement his new vision for the US military. In hindsight, that vision was probably not the best approach to occupying and pacifying a densely populated, relatively urbanized country such as Iraq.

[Logan]

We still mark threads OT?

[Klinglerware]

We still mark threads OT?

Yeah, perhaps the only topics in the Off Topic thread that should be marked "OT" should be anything relating to FOF or TCY?

[flere-imsaho]

PBS' NewsHour did an excellent piece on this on Friday. The transcript, video & audio is available here (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june08/iraqreport_06-30.html).

The three guests were Donald Wright, the lead author of the study; retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey (32-year career & been to Iraq numerous times since the U.S. invasion)and retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor (author of "Transformation Under Fire: Revolutionizing How America Fights.").

Two choice bits:

Well, there's no discussion in there about, why didn't someone stand up who is a senior officer in the Army, whether it's General McKiernan or General Wallace, or anyone else, and say, "The United States Army and the United States Marine Corps are not structured or equipped in any way to conduct long-term occupations, simply aren't," tell the administration, "We're not structured for that."

Why didn't someone stand up, like Abizaid, who understood that this was a disaster in the making, who understood Arabs, and point out that no Christian army is going to be welcome as an occupation force anywhere in the Islamic world, least of all among Arabs? Why didn't someone bother to pay attention to history?

We fought a hollow army in 1991. There was nothing in 2003 that should have held us up for any length of time. The most significant enemy we faced on the way to Baghdad were men in pickup trucks.

Yet McKiernan and his brother generals seem to have obsessed for months over a fight that wasn't going to happen, to the point where people that tried to get in to General McKiernan -- by the way, he was the land component commander, and he was most responsible for this planning -- people that tried to get in to him weren't even allowed in to talk about it, because they had to plan for this great war.

And I found this section exceptionally interesting, based on my brother's experience:

There is this myth that Petraeus invented something entirely new and changed everything. The truth is that our forces adapted fairly early at the lowest levels to new circumstances. This book makes that very clear, and I think that's a good thing, because our forces at lower levels are adaptive, much more than they get credit for being.

[flere-imsaho]

While we're at it, the LA Times did a piece (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/columnone/la-na-curveball18-2008jun18,0,7555253.story) last month on "Curveball", the infamous source who provided the "evidence" that Iraq had WMD, the evidence specifically cited in Powell's speech to the UN.

Choice bits:

Along with confirmation of Curveball's identity, however, have come fresh disclosures raising doubts about his honesty -- much of that new detail coming from friends, associates and past employers.

"He was corrupt," said a family friend who once employed him.

"He always lied," said a fellow Burger King worker.

And records reveal that when Alwan fled to Germany, one step ahead of the Iraq Justice Ministry, an arrest warrant had been issued alleging that he sold filched camera equipment on the Baghdad black market.

Alwan didn't share all his secrets. He didn't disclose that he had been fired at least twice for dishonesty, or that he fled Iraq to avoid arrest. But he did tell some whoppers that should have raised warnings about his credibility.

He claimed, for example, that the son of his former boss, Basil Latif, secretly headed a vast weapons of mass destruction procurement and smuggling scheme from England. British investigators found, however, that Latif's son was a 16-year-old exchange student, not a criminal mastermind.

When a Western intelligence team interviewed Latif outside Iraq in early 2002, a year before the war, he warned that Alwan had been fired for falsifying invoices at work. Latif also denied that anyone produced biological weapons at the plant where he worked with Alwan.

"They thought I was lying," Latif, who now lives in Oman, said in an interview. "But I was telling the truth. It upset me very much."

German officials instead believed Alwan's story that he helped manage an Iraqi factory that installed fermenters, spray dryers and piping within tractor-trailers to brew anthrax, botulinum toxin and other biological agents. CIA and Pentagon biological warfare analysts embraced Alwan's account without corroborating evidence or directly questioning the informant.

President Bush declared in his State of the Union address in January 2003 that "we know" that Iraq built mobile germ factories. Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell highlighted Alwan's supposed "eyewitness" account to the U.N. Security Council when he pressed the case for war.

In October 2004, more than a year after the invasion, a CIA-led investigation concluded that Baghdad had abandoned all chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The germ trucks never existed.

His direct supervisor was Hilal Freah, a British-trained engineer and friend of Alwan's mother. Freah, who now lives in Jordan, viewed himself as Alwan's mentor but had trouble trusting his protege.

"Rafid told five or 10 stories every day," Freah said in an interview. "I'd ask, 'Where have you been?' And he'd say, 'I had a problem with my car.' Or, 'My family was sick.' But I knew he was lying."

He had a gift for it and "was not embarrassed when caught in a lie," Freah said.

At the Djerf al Nadaf warehouse, laborers treated seeds from local farmers with fungicides to prevent mold and rot. But Alwan convinced his BND handlers that the site's corn-filled sheds were part of Iraq's secret germ weapons program. He worked there, he told them, until 1998, when an unreported biological accident occurred.

In fact, Alwan had been dismissed three years earlier, in 1995, after inflating expenses and faking receipts for tools, supplies and lamb for a party.

"I fired him," Freah said. "He was corrupt and he was found stealing." But the family friend gave Alwan one more chance.

I've highlighted the most egregious part. The CIA & Pentagon failed to do even the most basic due diligence on what was the single most important piece of evidence supporting the case for war.

[NoMyths]

We still mark threads OT?

Some of us are beholden to patriotic tradition. I think of it as the flag pin of FOFC. ;)

[NoMyths]

dola...

[Great stuff]

Thanks for posting the transcript. Fascinating.

[sachmo71]

Originally Posted by Col. Douglas Macgregor
Well, there's no discussion in there about, why didn't someone stand up who is a senior officer in the Army, whether it's General McKiernan or General Wallace, or anyone else, and say, "The United States Army and the United States Marine Corps are not structured or equipped in any way to conduct long-term occupations, simply aren't," tell the administration, "We're not structured for that."

Why didn't someone stand up, like Abizaid, who understood that this was a disaster in the making, who understood Arabs, and point out that no Christian army is going to be welcome as an occupation force anywhere in the Islamic world, least of all among Arabs? Why didn't someone bother to pay attention to history?


While it would have been nice for someone to stand up, I think it's bad juju to expect the military heirarchy to blow the whistle on issues like this. It's their job to do what they can with what they have and they aren't trained to say "I can't."

[flere-imsaho]

I disagree. Military leadership can and should be expected to provide clear strategic assessments to their civilian superiors.

[Flasch186]

While it would have been nice for someone to stand up, I think it's bad juju to expect the military heirarchy to blow the whistle on issues like this. It's their job to do what they can with what they have and they aren't trained to say "I can't."

Duckman would disagree with that sentiment.

[JPhillips]

Enough military folks provided clear assessments and predictions, but the civilian leadership decided to ignore that advice. There were plenty of military hacks who towed the line, but there really is no where to put the blame but on this administration.

[duckman]

Duckman would disagree with that sentiment.
Don't be putting words in my mouth, zorra.

While it would have been nice for someone to stand up, I think it's bad juju to expect the military heirarchy to blow the whistle on issues like this. It's their job to do what they can with what they have and they aren't trained to say "I can't."
It's extremely difficult to tell a superior that their thinking is flawed or there is better way of doing something. I've learned the hard way early in my Air Force career when I thought something needed changed, especially strategical and tactical plans (45 days of extra duty will break that habit reeeaaaallll quick) . You're trained not to say "I can't" or "I won't." You are a solider that can do almost anything with as little support as possible.

I'm glad that I'm not a part of that situation anymore. :)

[flere-imsaho]

Enough military folks provided clear assessments and predictions, but the civilian leadership decided to ignore that advice. There were plenty of military hacks who towed the line, but there really is no where to put the blame but on this administration.

I agree, and I don't want to place undue blame on the military folks. Certainly some blame is warranted, but if the Administration wasn't going to listen to Colin Powell and Eric Shinseki regarding planning and troop levels then let's be honest, they weren't going to listen to anyone.

[DanGarion]

We still mark threads OT?

Doesn't that stand for "On Topic"?

[Arctic Blast]

Enough military folks provided clear assessments and predictions, but the civilian leadership decided to ignore that advice. There were plenty of military hacks who towed the line, but there really is no where to put the blame but on this administration.

Agree completely. Rumsfeld and his clutch of self appointed geniuses decided they knew better than the guys actually wearing the uniforms, in a weird throwback to Robert McNamara and his 'Eggheads' back in the 60's.

[RealDeal]

Mythy-Pooo. Long time no see!

[CraigSca]

Agree completely. Rumsfeld and his clutch of self appointed geniuses decided they knew better than the guys actually wearing the uniforms, in a weird throwback to Robert McNamara and his 'Eggheads' back in the 60's.

Yep - reminds me a lot of Kennedy and "the smartest men in the room".

[Dutch]

Agree completely. Rumsfeld and his clutch of self appointed geniuses decided they knew better than the guys actually wearing the uniforms, in a weird throwback to Robert McNamara and his 'Eggheads' back in the 60's.

C'mon, politicians don't need experience to make decisions. :)

[JPhillips]

Dutch: Right. They need good judgment.

[Dutch]

Dutch: Right. They need good judgment.

Then military experience is a non factor. Yes?

[JPhillips]

No, it's a factor, but in itself it doesn't necessarily make for a better CiC. Judgment doesn't necessarily improve with experience.

[Zelig]

Agree completely. Rumsfeld and his clutch of self appointed geniuses decided they knew better than the guys actually wearing the uniforms.

I think this is the answer. The arrogance is mind boggling.

[Dutch]

No, it's a factor, but in itself it doesn't necessarily make for a better CiC. Judgment doesn't necessarily improve with experience.

Ah. Well then, agreed, it is a factor.

[flere-imsaho]

On that subject, it's possible to speculate that McCain's experience in Vietnam may actually be a detriment when considering our involvement in Iraq.

Excerpts: (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/magazine/18mccain-t.html?pagewanted=print)

There is a feeling among some of McCain’s fellow veterans that his break with them on Iraq can be traced, at least partly, to his markedly different experience in Vietnam. McCain’s comrades in the Senate will not talk about this publicly. They are wary of seeming to denigrate McCain’s service, marked by his legendary endurance in a Hanoi prison camp, when in fact they remain, to this day, in awe of it. And yet in private discussions with friends and colleagues, some of them have pointed out that McCain, who was shot down and captured in 1967, spent the worst and most costly years of the war sealed away, both from the rice paddies of Indochina and from the outside world. During those years, McCain did not share the disillusioning and morally jarring experiences of soldiers like Kerry, Webb and Hagel, who found themselves unable to recognize their enemy in the confusion of the jungle; he never underwent the conversion that caused Kerry, for one, to toss away some of his war decorations during a protest at the Capitol. Whatever anger McCain felt remained focused on his captors, not on his own superiors back in Washington.

Not all of McCain’s fellow veterans subscribe to the theory that the singularity of his war experience has anything to do with his intransigence on Iraq. (Bob Kerrey, for one, told me that while he was aware of this argument, he has never believed it.) But some suspect that whatever lesson McCain took away from his time in Vietnam, it was not the one that stayed with his colleagues who were “in country” during those years — that some wars simply can’t be won on the battlefield, no matter how long you fight them, no matter how many soldiers you send there to die.

“McCain is my friend and brother, and I love him dearly,” Max Cleland, Georgia’s former Democratic senator, told me when we talked last month. “But I think you learn something fighting on the ground, like me and John Kerry and Chuck Hagel did in Vietnam. This objective of ‘hearts and minds’? Well, hello! You didn’t know which heart and mind was going to blow you up!

In his book, Chuck Hagel writes of listening to declassified tapes from the mid-1960s in which Lyndon Johnson admitted to advisers that Vietnam probably couldn’t be won but rued that withdrawal would make him the first American president to lose a war. “I wish someone had told me when I was sitting on a burning tank in a Vietnamese rice paddy that I was fighting for a lost cause just to save a president’s legacy,” Hagel observes acidly. Although McCain was held and tortured for the same cause, he never saw the situation the way Hagel did. In his view, the American effort began to turn around with the promotion in 1968 of Gen. Creighton Abrams, who adopted the tactics favored by counterinsurgency experts like Fall. Abrams pulled back the search-and-destroy teams and instead focused on winning the “hearts and minds” of South Vietnamese villagers. His goal was to encourage the South Vietnamese military to take over their own defense — the process that came to be known as “Vietnamization.” McCain maintains that Abrams’s strategy was working, but it was undercut by the fact that, by that point, the American public had already rendered its verdict, and the drawdown of troops continued until the war’s chaotic end.

The parallels between Vietnam and Iraq can be too readily overstated. The very nature of the wars is markedly different, for better or worse; Vietnam was a Communist uprising against an autocratic government, while Iraq represents a multiparty, ethnic conflict more similar to that of the Balkans. The casualties, to this point, aren’t nearly analogous, either. The United States lost some 58,000 soldiers in Vietnam, compared with a death toll, after five years in Iraq, of about 4,000.

Still, in this current conflict there are echoes of Vietnam that have grown too loud to easily ignore. Both conflicts were entered into under pretenses that were later widely discredited. Reports from the front in Iraq depict American soldiers who find it difficult to discern friends from enemies as they try to navigate an unfamiliar culture, language and landscape. American leaders are talking yet again about transferring responsibility for the war to local forces and the police, but Iraqization doesn’t seem to be faring a whole lot better than Vietnamization did; last month, some 1,000 Iraqi troops deserted during a crucial battle in Basra. Veterans return from their tours with missing limbs and deep psychological trauma. Pro-war officials frame the conflict as a central front in a longer struggle against an evil ideology, and they warn ominously of the proliferation of terrorist cells that will ensue if the insurgents aren’t defeated in Iraq, just as the architects of Vietnam once promised a lethal fall of dominoes throughout Southeast Asia.


The lesson McCain drew from Vietnam all those years ago is that you cannot turn your back on a war when at last you figure out how to win it, and he is determined not to let that happen again. Far from having failed to internalize the legacy of Vietnam, as some of his friends in the Senate suspect, he is, if anything, entirely driven by it. “I don’t think you can isolate John’s views in Iraq from his experience in Vietnam,” Gary Hart told me. “Whether he is aware of it or not — and I want to tread carefully here, because I don’t like psychologizing people — I don’t think he can separate those things in his mind. In a way, John is refighting the Vietnam War.”

[Dutch]

On that subject, it's possible to speculate that McCain's experience in Vietnam may actually be a detriment when considering our involvement in Iraq.

On that subject, it's impossible to speculate about any of Obama's past experiences. He's basically a younger, better looking version of Donald Rumsfeld!!! :D

[GrantDawg]

On that subject, it's impossible to speculate about any of Obama's past experiences. He's basically a younger, better looking version of Donald Rumsfeld!!! :D


Except he hasn't been in bed with Defence contractors for decades and doesn't have an interest in making sure any war cost as much money as possible to fill there coffers with loot.

[flere-imsaho]

...and he's never shaken hands with Saddam Hussein....

[Flasch186]

...and he's never shaken hands with Saddam Hussein....

Eh, that doesnt mean much to me. Photo ops happen on both sides of the coin. I mean people were slamming Hillary for saying she wouldnt meet with Syria et al. because she didnt want the Pres. to be used as propaganda so while she's most definitely right in that regard you can spin that story however it best suits at the given time or when it fits 10-15-20 years later, to prove someone right/wrong.