This 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
40 responses so far
1 Churl // Feb 4, 2009 at 4:03 am
Again, Mr. Frum, could you vouchsafe to tell us how this rehash of the past by bureaucrats and biased journalists fits with a plan to restore a conservative majority?
Or, do you actually have any sort of plan for this project?
Honestly, it seems you don’t.
2 InTheMiddle12 // Feb 4, 2009 at 4:19 am
Confessiod is good for the soul and the party. Until the GOP gets honest with the horrendous failure of the last 8 years, especially on what is prided itself on the most, military operations and security, it can not move forward with any integrity. It will be a weight around its neck. I respect Mr. Frum for getting honest though I wish, considering he was one of the neo-con leaders of the Iraqi debacle, he would have done it when it could have made a difference to many American’s soldiers lives and countless innocent Iraqi ones. Even if the motive now appears political, half measure as it may be, it’s better than it not being said.
What will go down in American history as probably the worst conceived, fought and dealt with conflict will take many years for the nation to fully grasp, whether Iraq ends up soverign or not.
3 Churl // Feb 4, 2009 at 6:27 am
InTheMiddle12:
Quite a broad statement there “horrendous failure”. Are you sure? History takes a while to unfold. You could say WWII was a failure also (and you might). Think of 1946: sure, Hitler was dead and the Japanese militarists were defanged. But there were thousands of fricasseed and starving innocent Japanese and Germans (Tokyo, Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima, Nagasaki), Communist takeovers immanent or happening in numerous countries, England cold and hungry, Japanese Americans in internment camps…. But things looked better after a while. Could happen in Iraq, too. It would be wise to hold down the rhetoric for a while, just in case.
4 Chekote // Feb 4, 2009 at 7:42 am
InTheMiddle. Please read the following from the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/03/comment-iraq-elections. Were mistakes made in Iraq. Sure. Is it a debacle? NO! Removing an oppressive, cruel tyrant like Saddam Hussein is NEVER a debacle. Giving a chance to millions to live in freedom and deciding their own destiny is NOT a debacle. It took decades to shape Western Europe into democratic countries. I never understood why we had the expectation that Iraq would be a fully functioning democracy is a couple of years.
5 JJWFromME // Feb 4, 2009 at 9:01 am
Again, I think you too conveniently avoid addressing some things by pointing the finger at the National Security Council, as opposed to discussing the secrecy and fierce ideological blinders of the civilians at the Pentagon. George Packer points out that the National Security Presidential Directive number 24 was drafted at Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0374299633/ref=A9?keywords=nspd%20drafted%20office%20special%20plans&v=search-inside# Why was this done? The obvious effect of this action was to get the State Department out of the way. Why would they do that? Well, it was widely reported that the Pentagon favored a different plan than the State Department. If you begin to connect some dots, it seems likely that that plan involved installing Ahmad Chalabi as leader of Iraq over the State Department’s objections, as Chabi was a close ally of the Neoconservatives and was, from their point of view, sympathetic toward their plans (which were pretty fruity if you bring PNAC into the picture). Their sympathy and the State Department’s antipathy is well known and reported. Even Bill Safire alluded to it: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/24/opinion/24SAFI.html
Juan Cole once wrote about a conversation “in the run up to the 2003 war, I’m told, Douglas Feith was challenged by a State Department official who knows the Middle East about what in the world the US would do in Iraq once it won the war.
State Dept. Official: “Doug, after the smoke clears, what is the plan?”
Feith: “Think of Iraq as being like a computer. And think of Saddam as like a processor. We just take out the old processor, and put in a new one–Chalabi.”
State Dept. Official: “Put in a new processor?”
Feith: “Yes! It will all be over in 6 weeks.”
State Dept. Official: “You mean six months.”
Feith: “No, six weeks. You’ll see.”
State Dept. Official: “Doug.”
Feith: “Yes?”
State Dept. Official: “You’re smoking crack, Doug.”
Feith: “Oh, so you’re disloyal to the President, are you?”
6 JJWFromME // Feb 4, 2009 at 9:06 am
Read the whole page, particularly how Packer relates ORHA to National Security Presidential Directive 24: http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0374299633/ref=A9?keywords=nspd%20drafted%20office%20special%20plans&v=search-inside# (I loved the discovery that you could link to specific book page on Amazon–long live the Intertubes!!)
7 bibs // Feb 4, 2009 at 10:08 am
Chekote – we had the expectation that Iraq would be a fully functioning democracy is a couple of years becasue that is what the Bush administration believed and said. Whenever it was said that we might need more troops or that the cost of the war could be as much as $200B (which nows seems ridulously optimistic) we were told that those statements were patently false. I understand that these facts don’t fit your ideology, but they are facts nonetheless.
8 ireign // Feb 4, 2009 at 10:38 am
JJW-how would left-wing blogger Juan Cole know what took place in a private conversation between Doug Feith and a state department official? There are two possibilities: (1) Cole made up the conversation. (2) The State Department official told Cole directly or told a friend of a friend of a friend (at which point the story may have changed).
Even assuming Cole’s source was the state department official, the state department official’s memory could be wrong or alternatively he could be making up stuff.
9 JJWFromME // Feb 4, 2009 at 10:43 am
The Cole conversation boils it down. I’ll admit to it probably being an artifact of the DC rumor mill. But it has a reason to be there. But if you dig around in the reporting, there are many places where it’s reported that the Neocons favor Chalabi in power, State and CIA thinks this is a terrible idea, and the Neocons obviously did an end run to cut out State, as Packer reports. Like I said, even William Saffire is talking about a bureaucratic fight between State, the CIA, and the Pentagon involving Chalabi.
10 dragonlady // Feb 4, 2009 at 11:00 am
Chain of command is one of the most fundamental principles in the military. When it’s confused, the results are usually not good. JJ–have you read Feith’s book War and Decision? He documents it with citations and posts a bunch of official documents at his website showing presidential orders. Just wondered if you care to hear what his side of the story is rather than rely on “RUMINT” or what is known as rumor intelligence in the government.
11 Chekote // Feb 4, 2009 at 11:10 am
bibs. Bush also believed that Iraq had WMDs. Again, many of the mistakes can be traced back to bad intelligence about Iraq. I think it is worthwhile to go over what happened and learn from the mistakes. What I object to is referring to Iraq as a debacle. It was not. Somalia was a debacle. Same with the Marines in Lebanon. Unless Obama snatches defeat from the jaws of victory, Iraq is not a debacle.
12 dragonlady // Feb 4, 2009 at 11:13 am
I think history has not yet been written on the Iraq war. Mistakes will be documented but if it does turn out to be a stable democracy in the region, history will be much kinder than many folks suggest. Afghanistan is important, but whether or not it becomes a democracy is fairly inconsequential–we would end up pouring resources in there for decades to little avail. What we should care about is that it’s no longer a launching platform for AQ. But Iraq is in the heart of the Arab world (bordering 2 countries of state sponsered terrorism and one where the majority of 9-11 highjackers came from) and has the potential to change the psychology in the region heavily. Are we supposed to keep supporting the same old autocracies in the Arab world that spawns terrorism? Didn’t we do that and get 9-11? I haven’t heard any convincing alternative strategies to deal with the problem of apocalyptic Islamic terrorism. I realize democracy isn’t a panecea but its role in shaping the future of the Middle East warrants some serious consideration.
13 sinz54 // Feb 4, 2009 at 11:13 am
You can sum up these particular failures with Rumsfeld’s infamous remark to reporters about the looting: “Democracy is messy.” That breezy attitude toward the postwar occupation is what caused all these problems. (You wonder what the attitude toward maintaining postwar order would have been, if Giuliani with his “broken glass” theories had been president instead of Bush.) The Bushies were focused on getting rid of Saddam. They were never focused on “building democracy” in Iraq. Rather, they thought that democracy for the entire Iraqi nation would follow more or less automatically from the aspirations and thirst for freedom of the Iraqi people. That was a fantasy. It wouldn’t even have been believed as the plot of a bad Star Trek episode.
14 sinz54 // Feb 4, 2009 at 11:16 am
Churl: I will tell you exactly how it fits. Going forward, we conservatives should propose an alternative foreign policy that learns from these mistakes, and proposes something quite different. From Vietnam and now Iraq, we conservatives should now be convinced that nation-building is NOT a strategy for winning a war. It’s something you do after the enemy has been vanquished and the war is over, as was the case with Germany and Japan. That was the conservative view pre-2000, until Bush and his Weekly Standard/American Enterprise Institute neo-conservatives trashed it. Let’s restore it to one of our fundamental principles.
15 Chekote // Feb 4, 2009 at 11:19 am
sinz. Democracy is messy. I am afraid that after Saddam was removed, the emphasis was to win “hearts and minds” instead of restoring order. The reality is that the turnaround happened when America made a “show of force” through the surge. But making security #1 priority, all the other issues started falling into place.
16 JJWFromME // Feb 4, 2009 at 11:20 am
I don’t think Feith is a reliable narrator. There’s just too much reporting and investigation into what Feith did–much of it involving propagandizing. Here’s just one example where Feith leaked faulty intelligence to the Weekly Standard: http://www.slate.com/id/2092180/ The New York Times had a story on the bigger picture after the recent investigation: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/09/washington/09feith.html Even some of his GOP, Bush-appointee successors in the intelligence community had problems with how he handled intelligence: http://thinkprogress.org/2006/05/18/hayden-i-wasnt-comfortable-with-administrations-approach-to-iraq-intelligence/ So if I were to take Feith seriously as a reliable narrator, I think I’d be foolish…
17 JJWFromME // Feb 4, 2009 at 11:21 am
(That last one was for Dragonlady, BTW.)
18 Chekote // Feb 4, 2009 at 11:26 am
What is interesting to me is that the Left criticized for decades the realpolitik of “I know he is a dictator but he is our dictactor”. Accusing Nixon, Kissinger of war crimes. Bush pursued a policy of promoting freedom and human rights only to have the Left still scream “war criminals”. I didn’t hear any cries of “Yugoslavia did nothing to us, so why are we bombing it?” during the Clinton administration. The Left also did not seem to mind that Clinton did not seek UN approval for the Kosovo action.
19 Chekote // Feb 4, 2009 at 11:37 am
Among the mistakes that Bush made was not to seek a formal declaration of war from Congress. This allowed the political cowards to wiggle out of their vote and say “we meant for him to go to the UN”. Bush allowed the opposition to re-write the whole history of the run up to the War in Iraq. Also, Abu Gharib was badly mismanaged. So was the failure to find WMDs. This ultimately hurt more than any other mistake. It completely undermined the “premptive approach” and left us in a position where we couldn’t deal with Iran.
20 JJWFromME // Feb 4, 2009 at 11:37 am
What I have a problem is the term “the Left”, which I’ve noticed is always capitalized by certain people to add extra paranoia. What the heck is “the Left”? Anyone who criticizes you? And I know nothing about Nixon and Kissinger. I wasn’t even out of diapers when they were in office.
21 JJWFromME // Feb 4, 2009 at 12:49 pm
For instance, I like how in this essay:
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/science-and-the-left
…”the Left” means all these people:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change
22 Chekote // Feb 4, 2009 at 1:00 pm
JJW, The Left means people on the left of the political spectrum. The fact that you don’t know about realpolitik explains a lot of your posts. Finally, I use caps also when I refere to the Right. Don’t read too much into it.
23 JJWFromME // Feb 4, 2009 at 1:34 pm
As far as “realpolitik” goes, I suppose I’m going cheerfully barefoot when I’m posting here. There are certain things that shouldn’t have any relationship to the “political spectrum.” Something either exists or it doesn’t (such as man made climate change). And people carrying out a process can be clearly competent, or clearly not so (such as the processes during the runup to the war). If you label someone as part of “the Left,” it’s a way of pigeonholing their presented facts, as if the community that gathers those facts is monolithic and shares the same views, when in fact, there isn’t one community. There are many. The most extreme example of this is when someone in the Bush administration told Ron Suskind about a “Reality Based Community”: http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/149156.php
There is no Reality Based Community, unless you mean people who have to deal with reality, which is just about all communities, except those who live on a steady diet of fantasy. I think part of the problem is that movement conservatives (which I think is more of a concrete term than “the Right) have built up suspicion of so many–they label whole classes of people “the Left,” as Yuval Levin does in that essay. Journalists come to mind. And scientists, as I noted before. And of course anyone with a job in government. John Bolton spelled this out this kind of view very nicely in this Daily Show interview: http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=84011&title=john-bolton
24 JJWFromME // Feb 4, 2009 at 1:42 pm
I thought Sam Tanenhaus (a conservative) alluded to this problem in a talk of his at the American Enterprise Institute: http://www.aei.org/events/eventID.1550/event_detail.asp
Note when he talks about Irving Kristol’s “New Class”. This is the problem. Modern movement conservatives have set themselves against all bearers of bad news, and they can do this because they’ve set up their own alternative suppliers of information–but without the quality control of the “reality based community.” Or rather, there *is* quality control, but it’s *ideological* quality control.
25 JJWFromME // Feb 4, 2009 at 2:30 pm
By the way, I’ve listened to that Tanenhaus speech about 6 times over the course of the past few months. I think I’ve finally gotten everything out of it I can get (although I haven’t picked up all the titles he mentioned), but I noticed something remarkable and new each time. It’s amazing that things decades old can have an impact now. As Faulkner said, “The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.”
26 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.
27 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.
28 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.
29 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.
30 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?
31 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.”
32 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.
33 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/
34 Chekote // Feb 5, 2009 at 8:52 pm
JJW. Left is just a short hand term. Don’t take it too personally.
35 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.
36 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.
37 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.
38 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.
39 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.
40 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.
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