George W. Bush’s reëlection was not his only victory last fall. The
President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control
over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and
covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the
post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive
and ambitious agenda for using that control—against the mullahs in Iran
and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism—during his second
term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will
increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the
Pentagon put it, as “facilitators” of policy emanating from President
Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way.
Despite the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, the Bush
Administration has not reconsidered its basic long-range policy goal in
the Middle East: the establishment of democracy throughout the region.
Bush’s reëlection is regarded within the Administration as evidence of
America’s support for his decision to go to war...
In interviews with past and present intelligence and military
officials, I was told that the agenda had been determined before the
Presidential election, and much of it would be Rumsfeld’s
responsibility. The war on terrorism would be expanded, and effectively
placed under the Pentagon’s control. The President has signed a series
of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and
other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against
suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle
East and South Asia.
The President’s decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the
books—free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current
law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a
Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence
committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the
nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted
assassinations of foreign leaders.) “The Pentagon doesn’t feel
obligated to report any of this to Congress,” the former high-level
intelligence official said. “They don’t even call it ‘covert ops’—it’s
too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it’s ‘black
reconnaissance.’ They’re not even going to tell the cincs”—the regional
American military commanders-in-chief.
In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic
target was Iran. “Everyone is saying, ‘You can’t be serious about
targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,’” the former intelligence official told
me. “But they say, ‘We’ve got some lessons learned—not militarily, but
how we did it politically. We’re not going to rely on agency pissants.’
No loose ends, and that’s why the C.I.A. is out of there.”
The Iraqi resistance is no emerging "marriage of convenience," but
rather a product of years of planning. Rather than being absorbed by a
larger Islamist movement, Saddam's former lieutenants are calling the
shots in Iraq, having co-opted the Islamic fundamentalists years ago,
with or without their knowledge...
Keep in mind that there was never a formal surrender ceremony after
the U.S. took control of Baghdad. The security services of Saddam's
Iraq were never disbanded; they simply melted away into the population,
to be called back into service when and where they were needed... The
recent anti-American attacks in Fallujah and Ramadi were carried out by
well-disciplined men fighting in cohesive units, most likely drawn from
the ranks of Saddam's Republican Guard...
The more the United States props up [Iraqi president] Allawi, the
more discredited he will become in the eyes of the Iraqi people - all
of which creates yet more opportunities for the Iraqi resistance to
exploit.
We will suffer a decade-long nightmare that will lead to the deaths of thousands more Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis. We will witness the creation of a viable and dangerous anti-American movement in Iraq that will one day watch as American troops unilaterally withdraw from Iraq every bit as ignominiously as Israel did from Lebanon.
The calculus is quite simple: the sooner we bring our forces home, the
weaker this movement will be. And, of course, the obverse is true: the
longer we stay, the stronger and more enduring this byproduct of Bush's
elective war on Iraq will be.
There is no elegant solution to our Iraqi debacle. It is no longer a question of winning but rather of mitigating defeat.
A remarkable briefing yesterday by Ahmed S. Hashim, a Naval War
College professor and sometime adviser to the U.S. occupation regime in
Iraq, painted in broad outlines the potentially catastrophic situation
that the Bush administration faces in Iraq over the next few months.
With polls showing that just two percent of Iraqis view the United
States as “liberators,” Hashim’s report was sobering indeed. “We went
into Iraq with ideological lenses,” he said. “If you start with a rosy
scenario and work backward, you’re in a world of shit. And that’s where
we are.”
The subject of Hashim’s report was the evolving resistance in Iraq.
He’s just returned from traveling throughout Iraq, and he showed slides
of himself dressed in battle fatigues, wearing sunglasses, a
bulletproof vest and carrying a weapon as part of the Commander’s
Advisory Group to CENTCOM. [You can also read a 2003 report by Hashim
on the Sunni insurgency in Iraq by clicking here .]
The resistance, he reports, in highly organized. “They have web sites,
both the Baathists and the Islamists. It’s an incredibly sophisticated
outreach program.” The organizational infrastructure for the resistance
is not visible to U.S. counterinsurgency teams. Why? It’s in the
mosques. “The mosques are organizational centers.” Across Iraq, people
are reverting to the mosque for leadership, and a country that was
heavily secular for decades is drifting deeply into the religious,
Islamic fundamentalist camp—both Sunni and Shia.
In Fallujah and Ramadi, strongholds of former Saddam loyalists and
Sunnis, former Iraqi army officers are increasingly reverting to the
Islamic camp, abandoning their secular, pro-Baathist ways. “They’ve
gone back to religion,” said Hashim. At the same time, they’ve held on
to the fierce Iraqi nationalism that they’ve imbibed over the past 30
years.
Hashim predicted the growth of what he calls a “complex warfare
pattern” over the next few months. The insurgency will grow. Iraqi
organized crime is expanding by leaps and bounds, tied to drug lords in
Iran and Afghanistan. “They’ve coalesced into a kind of Iraqi mafia.”
Communal tensions between Sunni and Shia will get worse, but Hashim
also predicted intra-communal warfare among various factions of Kurds,
Sunni and Shia. “The idea that the Kurds, or the Sunni, or the Shia are
monolithic is absurd,” he said. Even sheer greed plays a role, said
Hashim: The sabotage and disruptions of pipelines throughout Iraq is
being caused by tribal militias who were paid by Saddam’s government
for oil security, and were then cut off by the U.S. forces—and are so
taking their revenge.
So, he expects things to get worse, with ethnic cleansing in some
areas, the spread of what he calls “incipient civil war,” and the
looming threat of “massive national resistance.”
"The most experienced military figure in the Bush Cabinet, Secretary of State Colin Powell, was cast as the main "wet," because of his obvious discomfort with an effort that few allies would support. His instincts fit the general sociology of the Iraq debate: As a rule, the strongest advocates of pre-emptive attack, within the government and in the press, had neither served in the military nor lived in Arab societies. Military veterans and Arabists were generally doves. For example: Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense and the intellectual leader of the war party inside the government, was in graduate school through the late 1960s. Richard Armitage, his skeptical counterpart at the State Department and Powell's ally in pleading for restraint, is a Naval Academy graduate who served three tours in Vietnam."
A four star general, formerly in charge of the Middle East Central
Command.. blasted the Bush
administration's handling of postwar Iraq, saying it
lacked a coherent strategy, a serious plan and sufficient resources..
"There is no strategy or mechanism for putting the pieces together,
we're in
danger of failing... Why the hell would the
Department of Defense be the organization in our government that deals
with the reconstruction of Iraq? Doesn't make sense... We
certainly blew past the U.N. Why, I don't know.
Now we're going back hat in hand."
There has been poor strategic thinking in this,” says Zinni. “There
has been poor operational planning and execution on the ground. And to
think that we are going to ‘stay the course,’ the course is headed over
Niagara Falls. I think it's time to change course a little bit, or at
least hold somebody responsible for putting you on this course. Because
it's been a failure.
In the lead up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw at a
minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worse,
lying, incompetence and corruption
The U.S. occupation of Iraq is a debacle not because the government did no planning but because a vast amount of expert planning was willfully ignored by the people in charge. The inside story of a historic failure
When your aim is remaking the Middle East, you don't want to get stuck making it up as you go along....
A yearlong State Department study [before the war] predicted many of
the problems that have plagued the American-led occupation of Iraq...
findings included a much more dire assessment of Iraq's dilapidated
electrical and water systems than many Pentagon officials
assumed... The working group studying transitional justice was
eerily prescient in forecasting the widespread looting... The man
overseeing the planning, Tom Warrick, a State Department official, so
impressed aides to Jay Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general
heading the military's reconstruction office, that they recruited Mr.
Warrick to join their team... But top Pentagon officials
blocked Mr. Warrick's appointment, and much of the project's work was
shelved... "[Dept of] State has good ideas and a feel for the
political landscape, but they're bad at implementing anything. [Dept
of] Defense, on the other hand, is excellent at logistical stuff, but
has blinders when it comes to policy. We needed to blend these two
together."
Also see The Iraq Reconstruction Fiasco (NYTimes via TruthOut.org, 8/9/04)
"Things have gone so obviously wrong with America's approach to
rebuilding Iraq that even the Bush administration is now willing to
listen to some informed advice...."
And yet another similar article: What Went Wrong in Iraq (Larry Diamond in foreignaffairs.org)
"Although the early U.S. blunders in the occupation of Iraq are well
known, their consequences are just now becoming clear. The Bush
administration was never willing to commit the resources necessary to
secure the country and did not make the most of the resources it had.
U.S. officials did get a number of things right, but they never
understood-or even listened to-the country they were seeking to
rebuild. As a result, the democratic future of Iraq now hangs in the
balance"
And yet another similar article: Iraq: The Bungled Transition (Peter W. Galbraith, The New York Review of Books)
And yet another similar article: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia (Harper's Magazine, by Naomi Klein, 9/24/04)
And yet another similar article: 'Staying the Course [in Iraq]' Isn't an Option (Originally in Newsweek 9/04, written by a former mideast militrary planner)
..the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) has become a symbol of
American failure in the eyes of most Iraqis. In a recent poll sponsored
by the U.S. government, 85 percent of respondents said they lacked
confidence in the CPA. The criticism is echoed by some Americans
working in the occupation. They fault CPA staffers who were fervent
backers of the invasion and of the Bush administration, but who lacked
reconstruction skills and Middle East experience. Only a handful spoke
Arabic.
At of the beginning of June [2004], 80 percent of the [$18 billion
dollar US] aid package, approved by Congress last fall, remained
unspent.
Several current and former CPA officials contended that key
decisions by Bremer favored a grandiose vision over Iraqi realities and
reflected the perceived prerogatives of a military victor. Critics
within the CPA also faulted Bremer for working to advance a
conservative economic agenda of tax cuts and free trade instead of
focusing on the delivery of basic services.
CPA specialists had virtually no resources to fund projects on their
own to create much-needed local employment in the months after the war.
Instead, they relied on two U.S. firms, Halliburton Co. and Bechtel
Corp., which were awarded large contracts to patch Iraq's
infrastructure.
The CPA also lacked experienced staff. A few development specialists
were recruited from the State Department and nongovernmental
organizations. But most CPA hiring was done by the White House and
Pentagon personnel offices, with posts going to people with connections
to the Bush administration or the Republican Party. The job of
reorganizing Baghdad's stock exchange, which has not reopened, was
given in September to a 24-year-old who had sought a job at the White
House. "It was loyalty over experience," a senior CPA official said.
"This was supposed to be our big effort to help them -- 18 billion of our tax dollars to fix their country," the senior reconstruction official said. "But the sad reality is that this program won't have a lot of impact in it for the Iraqis. The primary beneficiaries will be American companies.
As a direct result of President Bush's decision to invade Iraq without sufficient forces to secure and protect its nuclear research and storage facilities from rampant looting, enough radioactive material to build scores of dirty bombs now is missing and may be on its way to the international black market...
In the weeks before the invasion, the U.S. military repeatedly warned
the White House that its war plans did not include sufficient ground
forces, air and naval operations and logistical support to guarantee a
successful mission. Those warnings were discounted — even mocked — by
administration officials who professed to know more about war fighting
than the war fighters themselves... It wasn't until seven of
Iraq's main nuclear facilities were
extensively looted that the true magnitude of the administration's
strategic blunder came into focus.
..it is essential to remember that the Iraq war was not driven by
bad intelligence, per se. As Bush's former director of policy planning
admitted, this was a "war of choice." Intelligence was not used to make
a decision for war, it was manipulated to mislead Americans into
backing a war already planned.
Publicly, President Bush offered four rationales to justify the
invasion: the presence of WMD, Iraqi collaboration with Al Qaeda, the
possibility of giving WMD to Al Qaeda, and bringing democracy to Iraq.
Since the invasion, numerous commissions have shown the first three to
be plainly false. The lack of post-war planning, the elevation of Iyad
Allawi and the pervasive corruption among U.S.-funded contractors has
put the lie to the fourth rationale.
So just why did Bush choose war?
From the evidence before us today, there is no one single reason.
Rather, there are three converging and tightly interwoven reasons: oil,
Israel and military transformation. The Cheney energy strategy required
Iraqi oil; AIPAC and the Christian right wanted to weaken the Arab
world to strengthen Israel; and Don Rumsfeld wanted to expedite the
transformation of the U.S. military.
..the [Sept 11 2001 terrorist] attacks provided an opportunity for those in the administration determined to topple Saddam to think more systematically about achieving this goal. Two camps emerged, united only in their desire to use Iraq as a means to advance their different goals. The first camp consists of Bush, Vice President Cheney, Rumsfeld and to some extent Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who apparently believed that the United States needed to establish its credibility after 9/11 and eight years of the Clinton administration's perceived dithering on Iraq. For this group, only a demonstration of decisive American power would sufficiently intimidate the Arab world, forestalling additional terrorist attacks and altering the behavior of other rogue states in the region. The belief of these officials in their own hypothesis-driven intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction gave the situation in Iraq a sense of urgency and set the United States on the path to war. Democracy and human rights in Iraq were added as a justification for the war only after it became apparent that the United States would not find troves of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
The second camp believed Iraq was the fulcrum for promoting democracy in the Middle East and for ensuring a range of other interests. Simply, these officials within the Pentagon and the White House believed that the construction of a peaceful, democratic, pro-Western Iraq would provide emotional and political encouragement to Arab reformers and liberals and thereby pressure authoritarian leaders in the region to undertake fundamental reforms. This group also assumed that with Saddam gone, the Palestinians would realize they had no military option and would thus become more forthcoming in peace negotiations. Moreover, the security of Saudi Arabia and its neighbors in the Gulf would increase, ensuring the flow of oil, and leaders in Syria and Iran would alter their ways for fear that they too would meet Saddam's fate.
Needless to say, things have not worked out as either camp within the administration expected.
To the detriment of broader Middle East policy, the administration continues to pursue key aspects of these deeply flawed strategies.
...In sum, the glaring contradiction between the policy of "regime
change" for already disarmed Iraq and regime-support for proliferating
Pakistan was not a postwar discovery; it was fully visible before the
war. The Nation enjoys no access to intelligence files, yet in an
article arguing the case against the war, this author was able to
comment that an "objective ranking of nuclear proliferators in order of
menace" would put "Pakistan first," North Korea second, Iran third and
Iraq only fourth—and to note the curiosity that "the Bush
administration ranks them, of course, in exactly the reverse order,
placing Iraq, which it plans to attack, first, and Pakistan, which it
befriends and coddles, nowhere on the list."
Was nonproliferation, then, as irrelevant to the administration's aims
in Iraq as catching terrorists? Or was protecting the nation and the
world against weapons of mass destruction merely deployed as a
smokescreen to conceal other purposes? And if so, what were they?
The answers seem to lie in the larger architecture of the Bush foreign
policy, or Bush Doctrine. Its aim, which many have properly called
imperial, is to establish lasting American hegemony over the entire
globe, and its ultimate means is to overthrow regimes of which the
United States disapproves, pre-emptively if necessary.
The Bush Doctrine indeed represents more than a revolution in American
policy; if successful, it would amount to an overturn of the existing
international order. In the new, imperial order, the United States
would be first among nations, and force would be first among its means
of domination. Other, weaker nations would be invited to take their
place in shifting coalitions to support goals of America's choosing.
The United States would be so strong, the President has suggested, that
other countries would simply drop out of the business of military
competition, "thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras
pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of
peace." Much as, in the early modern period, when nation-states were
being born, absolutist kings, the masters of overwhelming military
force within their countries, in effect said, "There is now a new thing
called a nation; a nation must be orderly; we kings, we sovereigns,
will assert a monopoly over the use of force, and thus supply that
order," so now the United States seemed to be saying, "There now is a
thing called globalization; the global sphere must be orderly; we, the
sole superpower, will monopolize force throughout the globe, and thus
supply international order."...
Richard Perle, who until recently served on the Pentagon's Defense
Policy Board, seemed to speak for the administration in an article he
wrote for the Guardian the day after the Iraq war was launched. He
wrote, "The chatterbox on the Hudson [sic] will continue to bleat. What
will die is the fantasy of the U.N. as the foundation of a new world
order. As we sift the debris, it will be important to preserve, the
better to understand, the intellectual wreckage of the liberal conceit
of safety through international law administered by international
institutions."
In this larger plan to establish American hegemony, the Iraq war had an
indispensable role. If the world was to be orderly, then proliferation
must be stopped; if force was the solution to proliferation, then
pre-emption was necessary (to avoid that mushroom cloud); if
pre-emption was necessary, then regime change was necessary (so the
offending government could never build the banned weapons again); and
if all this was necessary, then Iraq was the one country in the world
where it all could be demonstrated. Neither North Korea nor Iran
offered an opportunity to teach these lessons—the first because it was
capable of responding with a major war, even nuclear war, and the
second because even the administration could see that U.S. invasion
would be met with fierce popular resistance.
It's thus no accident that the peril of weapons of mass destruction was
the sole justification in the two legal documents by which the
administration sought to legitimize the war—HJ Resolution 114 and
Security Council Resolution 1441. Nor is it an accident that the
proliferation threat played the same role in the domestic political
campaign for the war—by forging the supposed link between the "war on
terror" and nuclear danger. In short, absent the new idea that
proliferation was best stopped by pre-emptive use of force, the new
American empire would have been unsalable, to the American people or to
Congress. Iraq was the foundation stone of the bid for global empire.
The reliance on force over cooperation that was writ large in the
imperial plan was also writ small in the occupation of Iraq. How else
to understand the astonishing failure to make any preparation for the
political, military, policing and even technical challenges that would
face American forces? If a problem, large or small, had no military
solution, this administration seemed incapable of even seeing it. The
United States was as blind to the politics of Iraq as it was to the
politics of the world.
"Hijacking Catastrophe" exposes how the Bush administration used the
trauma of 9/11 and the war on terrorism to advance a radical
neo-conservative global plan. Narrated by Julian Bond,
"Highjacking Catastrophe" features interviews with prominent political
observers, including Daniel Ellsberg, Norman Mailer, Zia Mian, and Noam
Chomsky.
"Hijacking Catastrophe" is available on DVD or VHS for $19.95 (plus
shipping and handling) through the Media Education Foundation. To
order your copy, visit www.mef.tv
[Note, I don't agree with the author's other conclusions that the
war in Iraq was "a good idea" inspite of the fact that the
administration lied to the public about it. Specifically, maybe
invading Iraq stopped the Saudi's from funding Al-Qaeda, but what about
the tremendous anger it causes on the Arab street and the future
terrorists that anger will create? Also, is the situation in Iraq
really "manageable"? In anycase, Friedman's explanation of the
administration's motivations is interesting]
Q. Why did we go into Iraq?
A. We went into Iraq to isolate and frighten the Saudi government into
cracking down on the flow of money to Al Qaeda. Bush never answered the
question for fear of the international consequences. Early in the war,
the President said that the key was shutting down Al Qaeda's financing.
Most of the financing came from Saudi Arabia, but the Saudi government
was refusing to cooperate. After the invasion of Iraq, they completely
changed their position. We did not invade Saudi Arabia directly because
of fear that the fall of the Saudi government would disrupt oil
supplies: a global disaster.
Despite the widely-publicized conclusions of the [CIA] Duelfer report [saying no WMD in Iraq and no significant Iraq-Al Qaeda connection], the following unbelievable polling statistics were reported by The Program on International Policy Attitudes:
|
|
People Who Support Going to War in Iraq | People Who Oppose Going to War in Iraq | All People |
| Erroneously believe that Iraq had WMD or a major program for developing them | 73% | 29% | 49% |
| Erroneously believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda |
75% | 33% | 52% |
This article describes Cheney's distrust of the CIA when the US was surprised by the size of the Iraq nuclear weapons program after the first Iraq war. Cheney had the ear of an uninvolved president making Cheney essentially unstoppable when dealing with other agencies. Cheney slowly surrounded himself with other neo-conservative true believers who were sure the rest of government was slow, bureaucratic, and ignorant. Gradually a bubble formed where only politically correct (anti-Saddam) information made it to Cheney, and thus to Bush.
Passages extracted from Ron Suskind's book The Price of Loyalty (based heavily on info from Paul O'Neill) which describe the National Security Council meeting on only the tenth day of the new George W. Bush presidency, where Iraq replaced the Arab-Israeli conflict as the top national security issue
How conflicts between the Bush Administration and the intelligence community marred the reporting on Iraq’s weapons.
'...senior Administration people, soon after coming to power, had bypassed the government’s customary procedures for vetting intelligence... The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic—and potentially just as troublesome... [To] dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their [senior administration official's] position is that the professional [CIA] bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them... They [senior administration official's] were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn’t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information. The Administration eventually got its way, a former C.I.A. official said. “The analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenet”—the C.I.A. director—“for not protecting them. I’ve never seen a government like this.” '
A detailed description of how ideologically hardline senior civilians in the Pentagon cherry picked intelligence to support the case for war with Iraq. Based in part on interviews with retired Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski (who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq):
"It wasn't intelligence‚ -- it was propaganda," she says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together." It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for U.S. officials‚ -- including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony at the U.N. Security Council last February‚ -- that the administration pushed American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war.
[This idea that Bush administration has been biasing the intelligence on
Iraq is also described by Paul O'Neill in Ron
Suskind's book, The Price of Loyalty]"
The case of the bogus uranium purchases wasn't an isolated instance. It was part of a broad pattern of politicized, corrupted intelligence...
Literally before the dust had settled, Bush administration officials began trying to use 9/11 to justify an attack...
As Greg Thielmann, a former State Department intelligence official, said last week, U.S. intelligence analysts have consistently agreed that Saddam did not have a "meaningful connection" to Al Qaeda. Yet administration officials continually asserted such a connection, even as they suppressed evidence showing real links between Al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia...
...those who politicized intelligence in order to lead us
into war, at the expense of national security, hope to cover their
tracks by corrupting the system even further."
The New
Republic says that the White House setup
their own intelligence analysis group within DOD called the Office of
Special Plans (OSP). The purpose of the OSP was to provide a more
aggressive analysis of intelligence, which often involved bypassing the
CIA, and applying
pressure to the CIA when the CIA's reports didn't jibe with the
administration's. The OSP ran it's own intelligence operation not
sharing data or coordinating with the CIA and the State Dept. The
OSP also had direct access to the decision makers in the White
House. Another similar article can be found here
on The Guardian.
The Iraq on the Record report, prepared at the request of Rep. Henry A.
Waxman, is a comprehensive examination of the statements made by the
five Administration officials most responsible for providing public
information and shaping public opinion on Iraq: President George W.
Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,
Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice.
All of the statements in the database were drawn from speeches, press
conferences and briefings, interviews, written statements, and
testimony by the five officials.
This Iraq on the Record database contains statements made by the five
officials that were misleading at the time they were made. The database
does not include statements that appear in hindsight to be erroneous
but were accurate reflections of the views of intelligence officials at
the time they were made.
Bluntly contradicting the Bush administration, the commission
investigating the Sept. 11 attacks reported Wednesday there was "no
credible evidence" that Saddam Hussein had ties with al-Qaida.
A detailed (long) description of the deceitful lead up to the 2nd Iraq war (Sen. Edward Kennedy, 1/14/04)
It's hard to say when the trouble will begin (in post-war Iraq).
You know, the thing that worries me about this whole episode is the
magnitude of the grand scheme that the Bush administration has dreamed
up for transforming the political landscape of the Middle East. You know, big ideas are the ones that
give you the most trouble, and trying to make the world perfect, you
know, just leads to disaster, in my opinion, and I think that's sort of
been the record of human history. And whenever we've engaged in a really big endeavor, trouble comes.
Now exactly when that is going to happen, I don't know. There's going
to be some kind of a government there. We're going to be there.
Eventually, you know, after the fighting stops, the dust settles and
everything's quiet for a while, and for a time, it looks like, `Gee,
this wasn't so hard. You know, this is going to be a big success.' But
you've changed the fundamental relationships of peoples there, and
gradually they realize what the limits of their action are [against the
US] and they realize, `Well, we can't have any, you know, military
forces with tanks attacking the Americans, but it isn't that hard to
kind of sneak up on them in the streets.'
And I think sort of an endless amount of trouble will slowly begin to
bubble forth. So I figure we're going to have a month of war, and then
we're going to have a month of indecision, and then we're going to have
a couple of months where everything looks pretty good. And then after
that, things are going to start going downhill and it's going to be
trouble and it's going to be money and it'll take a generation to
resolve it." (these comments start at time 22:52 on the RealAudio
version and 25:12 on the ITunes version)
This article talks about how healing Afghanistan would've been the
most powerful way to weaken the popularity of the Islamic
radicals. Instead, the US has pursued a culturally ignorant and
arrogant path that has played right into the hands of the
extremists.
"The hardcore terrorists number an infinitesimal percentage of the
people out there, but they disappear against the camouflage background
of general resentment and hostility. Turn all that hostility into
goodwill, and then watch: against that background, the terrorists will
stand out like flies on vanilla ice cream."
[Note: This is an early article pointing out major problems with
planning for the 2nd Iraq war]
Going to war with Iraq would mean shouldering all the responsibilities of an occupying power the moment victory was achieved. These would include running the economy, keeping domestic peace, and protecting Iraq's borders—and doing it all for years, or perhaps decades. Are we ready for this long-term relationship?
"U.S. intelligence agencies warned Bush administration policymakers before the war in Iraq that there would be significant armed opposition to a U.S.-led occupation, according to administration and congressional sources familiar with the reports... The general tenor of the reports, according to a senior administration official familiar with the intelligence, was that the postwar period would be more "problematic" than the war to overthrow Hussein..
U.S. Army Chief of Staff Erik Shinseki said Feb. 25 that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed in Iraq following a war. However, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz contradicted that statement on Feb. 27, saying Shinseki's estimates were "wildly off the mark."
From the Washington Post (5/23/03): 'Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes (D-Md.) noted that Wolfowitz had said Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, was "wildly off the mark" when he predicted in February that several hundred thousand troops might be needed to occupy Iraq. Sarbanes asked if that comment was fair, considering that more than 160,000 U.S. soldiers could soon be in Iraq.'
Rumsfeld's response to Gen Shinseki's statement was: "Any idea that it's several hundred thousand over any sustained period is simply not the case."
Also see Wolfowitz Contradicts Shinseki over Iraqi Occupation at FreeRepublic.com
"Trying to eliminate Saddam...would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible.... We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq.... there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self- consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post- Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."
"Kay insisted that the blame for the failure to find any such weapons lay with the U.S. intelligence community, which, according to Kay, provided inaccurate assessments. The Kay remarks appear to be an attempt to spin potentially damaging data to the political advantage of President George W. Bush... The president's decision to create an "independent commission" to investigate this intelligence failure only reinforces this suspicion, since such a commission would only be given the mandate to examine intelligence data, and not the policies and decision-making processes that made use of that data... The fact, independent of the findings of any commission, is that not everyone was wrong... Bush's decision to limit the scope of any inquiry to intelligence matters, effectively blocking any critique of his administration's use - or abuse - of such intelligence, is absurd"
Most senior US military officers now believe the war on Iraq has turned into a disaster on an unprecedented scale..
Retired general Joseph Hoare, the former marine commandant and head
of US Central Command, told me: "The idea that this is going to go the
way these guys planned is ludicrous. There are no good options. We're
conducting a campaign as though it were being conducted in Iowa, no
sense of the realities on the ground. It's so unrealistic for anyone
who knows that part of the world. The priorities are just all wrong."
General Odom remarked that the tension between the Bush administration and the senior military officers over Iraqi was worse than any he has ever seen with any previous government, including Vietnam. "I've never seen it so bad between the office of the secretary of defence and the military. There's a significant majority [of military officers] believing this is a disaster. The two parties whose interests have been advanced have been the Iranians and al-Qaida. Bin Laden could argue with some cogency that our going into Iraq was the equivalent of the Germans in Stalingrad. They defeated themselves by pouring more in there. Tragic."
..the greatest threat America faces today does not stem from "rogue
states" but from weak ones and the terrorist groups and purveyors of
WMD that thrive within their borders. This has been clear to some of us
who have dealt with terrorism for a decade or more. After 9/11, the
fixation on enemy states as the most important threat to U.S. national
security can no longer be seen as just quaintly old-fashioned. It is
now a dangerous fixation.
..by attacking Iraq without sufficient preparations for creating a
functioning state, we have created precisely what the Bush
administration had identified as a major threat to world security: a
weak state unable to police its borders or to maintain a monopoly on
violence.
..the combination of the way the United States handled the run-up to
the war in Iraq, the occupation of that country and the Bush
administration's close identification with the government of Israeli
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon compromises Washington's ability to manage
its relations with the Arab world -- and has contributed to
unprecedented anti-Americanism throughout the region...
When it comes to the Middle East, those at the policymaking level of
the Bush administration seem to have strong views about the region, but
they have precious little grasp of its politics, history and
culture... Washington seems to believe that a sheer demonstration
of strength will bring the Arabs along. It has not happened, and it is
not likely to happen...
It is not only in relation to Iraq that there has been a distinct
lack of shura (consultation), a concept that is critically important in
Arab political culture but also on the issue of greatest importance to
Arabs: the Arab-Israeli conflict. As one Saudi official noted in
Riyadh, "Iraq is a minor irritant in comparison to the administration's
handling of the situation in Palestine."
The administration's [Israel aligned] approach to Arab-Israeli peace
brings the larger and more fundamental problem of current U.S. Middle
East policy into sharp relief: lack of credibility. The yawning gap
between the principles that ostensibly guide the United States in the
world -- freedom, justice, decency and national self-determination --
and objective reality produces outrage among Arabs. The recent
revelations of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison
further reinforce the image of the United States not as a liberator,
but as yet another repressive colonial power.
Bush's failed strategy in the war on terrorism has spawned more
al-Qaidas -- and they're funded by the booming heroin traffic in
Afghanistan.
..according to [State Department's counterterrorism coordinator, J.
Cofer] Black, "a new cadre of leaders" and "relatively untested
terrorists" has started to emerge. "Al-Qaida's ideology is spreading
well beyond the Middle East" and "has been picked up by a number of
Islamic extremist movements which exist around the globe." Black also
said that "Some groups have gravitated to al-Qaida in recent years,
where before such linkages did not exist" -- something that "greatly
complicates our task in stamping out al-Qaida".
...According to Black's testimony, "Jihadists view Iraq as a new
training ground to build their extremist credentials and hone the
skills of the terrorist." In short, the war in Afghanistan struck a
severe blow to terrorism, but the war in Iraq may have resuscitated it.
The U.S. military is stretched to the breaking point—and one more
crisis could break it... The basic problem is that an ever leaner,
numerically smaller military is being asked to patrol an ever larger
part of the world
"Unanticipated U.S. ground force requirements in postwar Iraq," a report
for the Army War College noted late last year, "have stressed the U.S.
Army to the breaking point," with more than a third of the Army's total
"end strength" committed in and around Iraq. "Operation Iraqi Freedom
and its aftermath argue strongly," the report said, "for an
across-the-board reassessment"—that is, for an increase of U.S. force
levels.
An overworked military can function very well for a while, as ours
has—but not indefinitely if it relies on volunteers. "We are in serious
danger of breaking the human-capital equation of the Army," Thomas
White, a retired general and a former Secretary of the Army, told me
last year. "Once you break it, it takes a long time to put it back
together. It took us over twenty years after Vietnam."
America has so many troops tied down in so many places that, for all
its power, it is strangely hamstrung. Despite our level of spending and
our apparent status as the world's mono-power, the United States has
few unused reserves of military strength. Sending troops in a hurry to
the Korean DMZ—or to Iran, or the Taiwan Strait—would mean removing
them in a hurry from some other place where, according to U.S. policy,
they are also needed.
The U.S. Army faces a gathering threat that is more dangerous to its
long-run capability than Saddam Hussein ever was. That danger,
according to military strategists, lies in a foreign and military
policy that is stretching the force to the breaking point, leaving it
unable to execute its mission...
"There's never been anything close to this much demand on the
all-volunteer military in its 30-year history," says Michael O'Hanlon,
a military expert at the Brookings Institution. "Even in wartime, with
conscription, we didn't send people overseas on two tours of duty.
Certainly in Vietnam, if you did your one tour, you were done."
"The family members that I've talked to basically have said that
when Tom, Dick or Mary comes out [finishes their tour of duty with the
military], they're going to stay out," says Rep. Ellen Tauscher,
D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee. "The high
personnel tempo, the high 'op-tempo' alone, is grinding down the
military. The fact that we are breaking our promises, the fact that we
are not being straight with people, naturally is going to cause
problems not only with recruiting but with retention."
"The real question is: What business is the U.S. military in?" says
the Lexington Institute's Goure. "Is it in the war-winning business and
counterterrorism and preemption and all those things? Is it in the
occupation and nation-building business? Because at the present time,
with the kind of money we want to spend, you can do one or the other.
You can't do both. Because you can either spend the money on equipment,
transformation, all those words, or you can spend it on people."
Rumsfeld and Bush want to spend it on equipment, including "Star Wars"
missile defense and an F-22 fighter aircraft that looks an awful lot
like it was designed to take on the next-generation Soviet jet that is
never coming.
"The defense budget has taken no sacrifice whatsoever, including a
number of weapons systems that are Cold War relics and that are not
attuned to what everyone acknowledges is the new asymmetric threat,"
Rep. Tauscher says. "Even if we just slow-walked national missile
defense, we could take $1.6 billion out of this year and we could buy
10,000 Army troops." ...
A remarkable briefing yesterday by Ahmed S. Hashim, a Naval War
College professor and sometime adviser to the U.S. occupation regime in
Iraq, painted in broad outlines the potentially catastrophic situation
that the Bush administration faces in Iraq over the next few months.
With polls showing that just two percent of Iraqis view the United
States as “liberators,” Hashim’s report was sobering indeed. “We went
into Iraq with ideological lenses,” he said. “If you start with a rosy
scenario and work backward, you’re in a world of shit. And that’s where
we are.”
The subject of Hashim’s report was the evolving resistance in Iraq.
He’s just returned from traveling throughout Iraq, and he showed slides
of himself dressed in battle fatigues, wearing sunglasses, a
bulletproof vest and carrying a weapon as part of the Commander’s
Advisory Group to CENTCOM. [You can also read a 2003 report by Hashim
on the Sunni insurgency in Iraq by clicking here .]
The resistance, he reports, in highly organized. “They have web sites,
both the Baathists and the Islamists. It’s an incredibly sophisticated
outreach program.” The organizational infrastructure for the resistance
is not visible to U.S. counterinsurgency teams. Why? It’s in the
mosques. “The mosques are organizational centers.” Across Iraq, people
are reverting to the mosque for leadership, and a country that was
heavily secular for decades is drifting deeply into the religious,
Islamic fundamentalist camp—both Sunni and Shia.
In Fallujah and Ramadi, strongholds of former Saddam loyalists and
Sunnis, former Iraqi army officers are increasingly reverting to the
Islamic camp, abandoning their secular, pro-Baathist ways. “They’ve
gone back to religion,” said Hashim. At the same time, they’ve held on
to the fierce Iraqi nationalism that they’ve imbibed over the past 30
years.
Hashim predicted the growth of what he calls a “complex warfare
pattern” over the next few months. The insurgency will grow. Iraqi
organized crime is expanding by leaps and bounds, tied to drug lords in
Iran and Afghanistan. “They’ve coalesced into a kind of Iraqi mafia.”
Communal tensions between Sunni and Shia will get worse, but Hashim
also predicted intra-communal warfare among various factions of Kurds,
Sunni and Shia. “The idea that the Kurds, or the Sunni, or the Shia are
monolithic is absurd,” he said. Even sheer greed plays a role, said
Hashim: The sabotage and disruptions of pipelines throughout Iraq is
being caused by tribal militias who were paid by Saddam’s government
for oil security, and were then cut off by the U.S. forces—and are so
taking their revenge.
So, he expects things to get worse, with ethnic cleansing in some
areas, the spread of what he calls “incipient civil war,” and the
looming threat of “massive national resistance.”
THUS FAR, THE COST FOR INVADING AND OCCUPYING IRAQ (not counting
lives lost) is approximately $166 billion. The President has just asked
for an extra $25 billion on top of his FY2005 defense appropriations
request -- and most expect another $25 billion request during the next
fiscal year, bringing the conservative estimate of accumulated Iraq
related costs to approximately $216 billion.
When one considers that there are 14.38 million working age Iraqis, the
per capita working age costs thus far amount to $11,548.00 -- and will
soon rise to $15,026.00 after this next year's expenditures.
In a country where per capita GDP is $1,600.00 (and this is an
overstatement since the broad swath of non-elite Iraqi society that
lives closer to the $500 per year level), the amount spent just in
defense dollars is staggering, nearly ten times the per capita income
levels. If any significant portion of these defense resources were
leaking out to average citizens and improving lives and choices,
support levels for America would be far better. What is going on?
My own essay (11/13/03)
While Bush has waxed eloquent over the need for democracy in the
Arab world, his policies can only be described as a systematic campaign
of alienating and humiliating any Arabs who attempt to speak out on
behalf of the United States...
The problems with Bush’s approach to democratic reform in the region
run deeper than a lack of seriousness or poor execution. The core
problem lies in the administration’s clear contempt for Arab public
opinion, a contempt which is keenly felt by those Arab moderates who
actually share the goals of political, economic and cultural reform.
As of today the United States military appears committed to an
open-ended stay in a country where, with the exception of the Kurdish
north, patience with the foreign occupation is running out, and violent
opposition is spreading. Civil war and the breakup of Iraq are more
likely outcomes than a successful transition to a pluralistic
Western-style democracy.
Much of what went wrong was avoidable. Focused on winning the political
battle to start a war, the Bush administration failed to anticipate the
postwar chaos in Iraq. Administration strategy seems to have been based
on a hope that Iraq's bureaucrats and police would simply transfer
their loyalty to the new authorities, and the country's administration
would continue to function. All experience in Iraq suggested that the
collapse of civil authority was the most likely outcome, but there was
no credible planning for this contingency. In fact, the US effort to
remake Iraq never recovered from its confused start when it failed to
prevent the looting of Baghdad in the early days of the occupation.
Americans like to think that every problem has a solution, but that may no longer be true in Iraq...
President Bush, notorious for his lack of curiosity, seems never to
have asked even the most basic question: "What happens when we actually
get to Baghdad?" The failure to answer this question at the start
set back US efforts in Iraq in such a way that the US has not recovered
and may never do so.
The Bush administration's strategies in Iraq are failing for many
reasons. First, they are being made up as the administration goes
along, without benefit of planning, adequate knowledge of the country,
or the experience of comparable situations. Second, the administration
has been unwilling to sustain a commitment to a particular strategy.
But third, the strategies are all based on an idea of an Iraq that does
not exist...
In my view, Iraq is not salvageable as a unitary state. From my
experience in the Balkans, I feel strongly that it is impossible to
preserve the unity of a democratic state where people in a
geographically defined region almost unanimously do not want to be part
of that state. I have never met an Iraqi Kurd who preferred membership
in Iraq if independence were a realistic possibility.
But the problem of Iraq is that a breakup of the country is not a
realistic possibility for the present. Turkey, Iran, and Syria, all of
which have substantial Kurdish populations, fear the precedent that
would be set if Iraqi Kurdistan became independent. Both Sunni and
Shiite Arabs oppose the separation of Kurdistan. The Sunni Arabs do not
have the resources to support an independent state of their own.
(Iraq's largest oil fields are in the Shiite south or in the disputed
territory of Kirkuk.)...
The best hope for holding Iraq together—and thereby avoiding civil
war—is to let each of its major constituent communities have, to the
extent possible, the system each wants. This, too, suggests the only
policy that can get American forces out of Iraq...
The three-state solution would permit the United States to disengage
from security duties in most of Iraq. There are today fewer than three
hundred coalition troops in Kurdistan, which would, under the proposal
being made here, continue to be responsible for its own security. By
contrast, introducing an Iraqi army and security institutions into
Kurdistan, as the Bush administration says it still wants to do, would
require many more coalition troops—because the Iraqi forces are not up
to the job and because coalition troops will be needed to reassure a
nervous Kurdish population. If the United States wanted to stay
militarily in Iraq, Kurdistan is the place; Kurdish leaders have said
they would like to see permanent US bases in Kurdistan.
A self-governing Shiite republic could also run its own affairs and
provide for its own security. It is not likely to endorse Western
values, but if the coalition quickly disengages from the south, this
may mean the south would be less overtly anti-American.
See here for older articles that have been removed from this web page.
Last Modified:
To contact me, you can send email to PublicMailbox@benslade.com
with the number 030516 anywhere in the subject line. I will
respond back with my real email address. If you don't include
this number in the subject line, the mail may be deleted as junk mail.