RSS Feed MenuThis is part three of a series. Read part one here, part two here, and part four here.
The bureaucratic chaos in Washington detailed in the SIGIR report opened the door to real-world chaos in Iraq.
Two weeks had passed since Saddam’s regime had fallen. Outside the gates of the Republican Palace where ORHA was trying to set up shop, anarchy reigned. “We found the city in utter chaos,” said Richard Miller, one of six police advisors sent by the Justice Department. In some places, “corpses littered the streets, AK-47 fire was near constant, and looters operated with impunity.” Many government buildings had been destroyed.
“A lot of the ministries turned out to be blasted cinders,” noted Ambassador Tim Carney, senior advisor for the Ministry of Industry and Minerals. “They not only took everything out of there, but they stripped the electrical wires out of the wall, and they stripped most of the plumbing out, and then they set the buildings on fire,” Garner said. Fires burned so hot that concrete in many buildings exploded. ORHA advisor Christopher Spear waded into ransacked rooms filled three feet deep with paper debris. Clean-up crews hauled away six tons of scattered documents from the Ministry of Health alone. “We would say they took everything but the kitchen sink, [but] they took that, too,” Spear said. The looting quickly changed into organized theft by gangs of Iraqi criminals and insurgents trying to destabilize the country. In a military compound under nominal guard by U.S. soldiers, one of these gangs smashed through a rear wall and used a crane to remove valuable precision milling equipment used to manufacture Scud missiles. “They knew exactly what they were going for,” Spear said. Millions of dollars in cash stored in Rafidain and Rasheed bank branches and at the Central Bank were looted or destroyed, as were the contents of safety deposit boxes. “Organized crime found its golden opportunity,” the Iraqi politician Samir Sumaida’ie said. …
The oil infrastructure seemed to have emerged from the invasion largely intact. Fewer than ten oil well fires were set. But post-invasion looting in the oil sector went on for ten weeks, from March 20, 2003, through the end of May. Of the oil sector damage the Coalition had to repair, only one-third resultes from the war. The remaining two-thirds of the damageÑamounting to $943 millionÑwas caused by looting. (60)
Confronted with this unexpected breakdown in authority, Washington reversed policy. On March 10, 2003, President Bush approved a rapid transfer of power to a provisional government of Iraqis. In April, CENTCOM commander Tommy Franks ordered instead the creation of a Coalition provisional government. On May 6, President Bush named Paul Bremer as the head of this new Coalition government. Immediately upon arriving in Iraq, Bremer issued his first order, constituting himself the supreme executive, legislative, and judicial authority in Iraq.
The Inspector General’s report observes of Bremer:
Neither his Foreign Service background nor his private-sector work included experience in post-conflict peacekeeping, contingency operations, or reconstruction. He had never participated in a joint civilian-military operation, had little experience in international development, had never served in the Middle East, and did not speak Arabic. (69)
Yet Bremer’s CV was not the most important problem in the new CPA.
Rather, the most important problem was the lack of any clear line of command in Iraq.
Bremer was a presidential special envoy, subordinate only to the president in the organizational chart. Tommy Franks, the CENTCOM commander, reported to the Secretary of Defense.
In consequence of these crossed lines, Bremer could not issue an order to Franks, and Franks could not issue an order to Bremer.
Result: While Bremer was settling in for a long occupation of Iraq, Franks was accelerating plans for troop withdrawals – first canceling a planned reinforcement of 50,000 post-conflict troops, then planning for a reduction to fewer than 30,000 US troops by the end of August 2003.
In March, the president had decided that the Iraqi army would be preserved and that de-Baathification would be “light.” In his second and third order, however, Bremer dissolved the army and purged mid-ranking Baathists from government jobs.
In the words of the SIGIR report:
The NSC had not vetted the decision, and NSC Iraq coordinator Frank Miller said that the President had expected the army to continue after regime change because the Coalition could not “afford to put 300,000 men with guns in their hands on the street. (75)
The IG report quotes the shocked reaction of Iraqi exile leader Ali Allawi (not the future prime minister, but the future trade minister and author of The Occupation of Iraq: “within the space of a few days, the entire process that was to lead to a provisional Iraqi government had been abruptly stopped, and then upended.” (73)
MORE TO COME
sinz54 // Feb 5, 2009 at 8:59 am
chekote: It is precisely because the intelligence community can be disastrously wrong, that I am opposed to pre-emptive war unless the threat is immediate (like the enemy is about to go to DEFCON ONE in a few hours). You may attack, and find out that the enemy wasn’t the strategic threat you thought they were–and you’ll end up looking foolish, and lose public support. That’s what happened in Iraq. Or you may attack, and find out the reverse–the enemy is stronger than you thought; they concealed or hardened their forces so you can’t finish the job in one quick attack. And then you may face retaliation, from that adversary or any of his allies. That will happen if you adopt a strategy of pre-emptive war and announce it PUBLICLY, as Bush did, giving all adversaries time to adopt countermeasures in secret. The only way to catch the enemy before they can prepare, is to strike without warning. And I am morally opposed to an American President launching sneak attacks. We had that done to us at Pearl Harbor. Any Republican candidate for President should eschew pre-emptive war, except when the enemy is about to strike us within hours or days.
sinz54 // Feb 5, 2009 at 9:06 am
Chekote: “Democracy is messy”–but what was in Iraq in the weeks after Saddam fell wasn’t “democracy,” but anarchy. Democracy requires more than the toppling of a dictator. It requires social mechanisms for solving problems and redressing grievances without resorting to AK-47s and bombs. Those mechanisms–civil infrastructure (water, electricity, sanitation), the civil service, the police, and the army–had all collapsed. And the Bushies didn’t seem too concerned about that, just high-fiving each other that Saddam was gone. The Geneva Convention states that it is the responsibility of an Occupying Power to maintain civil order in the lands it has occupied–usually through temporary military government. America failed to live up to its responsibility under the Geneva Convention to maintain civil order in Iraq–until the surge.
sinz54 // Feb 5, 2009 at 9:13 am
chekote: Mainstream Democrats and many liberals supported Clinton’s bombing of Serbia–but the hard-core Left most certainly did NOT. In this country, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, including Barbara Lee, opposed it. So did International A.N.S.W.E.R. In Europe, opposition built as television started showing the collateral damage. The peacenik Left was against it. Harold Pinter called NATO (not just America) “war criminals.” The powerful German Greens party opposed it too. The German Government had to turn heaven and earth to keep the Greens from walking out of the center-left coalition. And yet this was a case where both NATO and America justified the bombing from the outset on humanitarian grounds to stop ethnic cleansing, which really was occurring. That rationale wasn’t grafted on to the war after the fact, as the Bushies did once their original rationale of WMD proved fallacious.
sinz54 // Feb 5, 2009 at 9:17 am
It is true that major mistakes have been made in every war in history. The Spanish-American War was more misbegotten than the Iraq War; at the time, Spain was less of a strategic threat to America than Saddam was in 2002. What has changed, perhaps permanently, is that today’s military operations are conducted under a magnifying glass of global television and the Internet. Drop some bombs–and TV and YouTube are right there to show the collateral damage of dead civilians and wailing women. Attack the wrong target by mistake–and TV and YouTube are right there to point fingers. Offensive military operations are much harder to conduct in today’s media-saturated environment. You can no longer afford to launch an offensive military operation based on a mistaken estimation of the enemy’s capabilities–your own citizens (not to mention the entire world) will be laughing at you. The bar for being right has been raised much higher.
dragonlady // Feb 5, 2009 at 2:54 pm
sinz54, preemptive war is legal under the UN if you need it to defend yourself. Preventive war seems to be what youre describing; it’s what stops a threat from materializing. But I would not rule it out; I would use it only as a last resort if American lives are believed to be on the line. Let’s not pigenhole these approaches into an either or situation because the world rarely works that way. I would not want any President to take one of his cards off the table in such an uncertain world. You say you’re morally opposed to a Pres launching sneak attacks but what about his moral obligation to save American lives? Were you also against Clinton’s cruise missile strikes into Afghanistan against Bin Laden’s training camps and sites? He had already killed Americans in the Cole and embassy bombing attacks and we knew he intended to kill more. Do you know how many other times we had him in our sights prior to 9-11 but debated the legalese of it all?
dragonlady // Feb 5, 2009 at 3:01 pm
JJ, political labels depend on context. There’s a difference between trying to smear someone and accurately stating where their viewpoint comes from on the political spectrum. Because goodness knows the left never labelled elements of the Right by disparaging them as “neocons” or calling certain elements of the former admin “chickenhawks.”
InTheMiddle12 // Feb 5, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Churl: There’s a problem with your argument. To compare the Iraq invasion, an invasion of a soverign nation that had not attacked America, with Nazi Germany, a nation that declared war on the US does not equate. The defeat of the Nazis was met with world support and ultimately world investment in Germany and Japan. The Iraq war had none of that and was a blunder that caused the USA its standing int he world, untold treasure, of human and financial means. Of course I hope everything comes out well but to compare the two is a false comparison.
JJWFromME // Feb 5, 2009 at 6:56 pm
Saying “the Left” can also be a way of pigeonholing arguments that have obvious merit, without actually taking them on in substance–as Yuval Levin did in the essay I linked to. By the way, the author that Levin criticized in his piece wrote a reply: http://www.scienceprogress.org/2008/05/there-is-a-war-on-science/
Chekote // Feb 5, 2009 at 8:52 pm
JJW. Left is just a short hand term. Don’t take it too personally.
Chekote // Feb 5, 2009 at 8:58 pm
InTheMiddle. Saddam had violated the cease fire agreement after the first Iraq War several times and thus there was plenty of legal justification for going in. We should have finished the job when we had Saddam on the run in 1991. Instead we waited 10 + years, during which Iraq’s infrastructure was left to rot as sanctions were enacted. So we can sit here and talk about the post-war mistakes which is useful. But let’s not lose sight of the big mistakes: bad intelligence on the WMDs and failure to finish the job in 1991.
JJWFromME // Feb 6, 2009 at 5:16 am
“…But let’s not lose sight of the big mistakes: bad intelligence on the WMDs…” Actually, the intelligence was good. It was just ignored. The truth was not what people in the administration was interested in, and was not pursued: http://policingwingnutwelfare.blogspot.com/2009/01/lots-of-evidence-no-wmd-and.html
And I don’t take “the Left” personally, I just think calling people a name, instead of engaging the merits of their arguments, is usually sloppy thinking.
InTheMiddle12 // Feb 6, 2009 at 5:53 am
Chekote: President Bush 41 chose, and rightly so, not to go all the way to Baghdad because he and his administration knew that it would be a quagmire and mistake. The intelligence failure is not true. The intelligence was cooked for a policy that had been pre-determined. The British knew it, everyone knew it but closed their eyes to it. The inspectors begged for more time but W wouldn’t allow it.
dragonlady // Feb 6, 2009 at 10:39 am
JJ, seeing as how you refuse to read or acknowledge any facts other than what bolsters your own viewpoint, my guess is that you’ll ignore that all the world’s intel agencies to include the UK thought Saddam had WMDs, George Tenet told the Pres “it’s a slam dunk!” IRT the intel, and Congress and Pres Clinton also believed he had WMDs.
dragonlady // Feb 6, 2009 at 10:49 am
IntheMiddle12, the WMD intel was not prepacked–the media parsed and deconstructed nuanced statements from declassified intel documents and took them out of context to pursue the “intel was politicized” angle. The Silberman-Robb commission found widespread failures among the intel community on its WMD analysis. Yes, mistakes were made in war planning, but people want to ignore the geopolitical ramifications of a regime who defied dozens of UN sanctions, supported terrorism, and possessed the infrastructure to produce WMD in a region where Islamic terrorism emanates. The sanctions regime was crumbling around Saddam–we could not contain him indefinitely.
InTheMiddle12 // Feb 6, 2009 at 7:36 pm
dragonlady: The US, for the first time in its history invaded a soverign nation that did not attack it. This departure from historic, and I might add, conservative, foreign policy was a choice by the Bush administration. Let’s be honest, W used the sanctions and the UN to fulfill a policy that his own Secretary of Treasury reported was the prime foreign policy aim set forth at the first Cabinet meet, January 2001. Please read Secretaray O’Neil’s book. W planned to ‘do Iraq as Rummie and Cheney planned, from the beginning. THe NeoCons had planned, since 1991, this ‘grand realignment’ of the middle east, based on exactly what they did in Iraq. It was a huge power play with the fall of the Soviet Union, believing the US the ultimate world power. A sin, let’s call it pride, that befalls all great nations who become too puffed up by their own egos.