What Went Wrong in Iraq – The Definitive Account Part 1

This is part one of a series.  Read part two here, part three here and part four here.

Early in the morning of February 2, the Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction released Hard Lessons, a summary of all that has gone wrong in postwar Iraq. Hard Lessons may be the single most dismaying state paper released by an American official in the post-Vietnam era.

This is a document that reflects incredibly poorly on just about every Iraq war decision maker, and it is all the more depressing for being so vividly – pungently – written. This is our most authoritative and most detailed single volume on what went wrong in Iraq.

Six years, four thousand lives and hundreds of billions of dollars later, we seem at last to have stabilized Iraq. This weekend’s elections occurred peacefully, and the US goal of an Iraq that does not threaten its neighbors or its people now looks within reach. Yet we all have to be haunted by the question: Did it have to take so long and cost so much?

Inspector General Stuart Bowen’s damning study strongly suggests the answer: No. I should probably mention here that Bowen is a friend of mine, and that his son Marshall is a sometime contributor to this site. This kind of acknowledgement is often couched in an apologetic tone, as if one’s personal knowledge of the integrity and devotion of a public servant somehow detracts from the objectivity of one’s assessment of his work. That way of looking at things seems to me upside down: It is precisely because I know and admire Bowen that I take his criticism of our Iraq errors so closely to heart.

Here are some of his “hard lessons”:

One of the crucial background failures of the Iraq war was the collapse of the National Security Council system. It’s natural for bureaucracies to disagree. It’s the job of the National Security Adviser to broker those disagreements – or, when they cannot be brokered, to bring disagreements to the president for ultimate decision. That did not happen in 2002-2005, leaving the government paralyzed in indecision. Instead:

The machinery of interagency planning in the National Security Council largely sat idle, leaving open the fissure between planning for war and planning for war’s aftermath. (9)

The immediate consequence of the NSC’s idleness was to leave undecided how postwar Iraq would be governed. Would there be a rapid transition to Iraqi control? Would the US military govern Iraq? Or would some kind of civilian transitional authority be instituted? The decision went unmade until 10 days after the fall of Baghdad.

Bowen describes

a planning process that had been fragmented from its beginning. For nearly a year, the NSC exercised loose coordination over separate efforts by State and Defense and did not seek the participation of post-conflict experts at USAID. The marked separation between civilian and military preparations, which had existed since late 2001, was followed by further fragmentation within the interagency planning process, which had begun in earnest in August 2002. Even as officials thought they were moving toward an integrated master plan, the building blocks of that plan were being developed in a piecemeal fashion that rendered risks and needs less visible. (16)

This fragmentation of effort isolated officials and deprived them of the information they needed to form intelligent plans.

All the interagency Iraq planning groups worked in secret. Few knew the others existed. Officials justified the extreme secrecy on the grounds that ongoing diplomatic negotiations would be undercut if Saddam knew that postwar planning was well underway. (64)

This explanation may have made sounded plausible or at least passable in Washington. It is doubtful however that it impressed anyone in the Middle East.

While postwar planning efforts progressed under strict secrecy, the build-up of troops and materiel around Iraq’s borders continuedÑa necessary threat to make diplomatic negotiations credible in the eyes of Saddam. (64)

In this atmosphere of self-inflicted ignorance, realistic assessments of the problem gave way to wishful thinking.

With military, political, and democratization plans developed out of sight of the Humanitarian Working Group, its members could consider only in general terms how reconstruction might help legitimize a new Iraqi state. … In the absence of direction from above, the working group … developed a set of core judgments about postwar Iraq. “It was taken as an assumption,” one participant said, “that the war would be brief, war damage would be minimal, and oil revenues would finance almost all of reconstruction.” They also assumed that the political people would somehow “pull a Karzai out of the hat,” and that the Iraqis would take care of the rest.

MORE TO COME