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 process inside the office of the secretary of defense... Functional isolation of the professional corps... Cross-agency cliques... staff officers being told not to contact their counterparts at State or the National Security Council... The result of groupthink is the elevation of opinion into a kind of accepted "fact," and uncritical acceptance of extremely narrow and isolated points of view."
[This idea that Bush administration has been interested in invading Iraq from early on is dramatically described by Paul O'Neill in Ron Suskind's book, The Price of Loyalty]
...Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, and a small band of conservative ideologues had begun making the case for an American invasion of Iraq as early as 1997 - nearly four years before the Sept. 11 attacks... the most hawkish members of the Bush administration, who are clearly in the driver's seat, have ties to PNAC [Project for the New American Century]. Their ideas about the aggressive use of American clout and military force arose more than a decade ago, in the wake of the collapse of communism and victory in the Persian Gulf War... that America, as the world's lone superpower, should be putting that power to use...
[In 1992, then deputy defense secretary Wolfowitz proposed a defense policy that] urged the United States to "establish and protect a new order" that accounts "sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership," while at the same time maintaining a military dominance capable of "deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." The draft caused an outcry and was not adopted by Cheney and Wolfowitz.
...the heady years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall gave rise to the notion that the removal of Saddam and the establishment of an Arab-run, pro-American democracy might have a kind of "domino effect" in the Middle East, influencing neighbors like Saudi Arabia or Syria.
| Wolfowitz: | "There are a lot of things that are different now, and one that has gone by almost unnoticed--but it's huge--is that by complete mutual agreement between the U.S. and the Saudi government we can now remove almost all of our forces from Saudi Arabia. Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government." |
| Vanity Fair: | "Was that one of the arguments that was raised early on by you and others that Iraq actually does connect... the relationship between Saudi Arabia, our troops being there, and bin Laden's rage about that, which he's built on so many years, also connects the World Trade Center attacks, that there's a logic of motive or something like that? Or does that read too much into..." |
| Wolfowitz: | "No, I think it happens to be correct." |
"...how can we reconcile the White House's unequivocal statements with
the fact that they (WMD's) may not exist? There are two main
possibilities. One that something is seriously wrong within the Bush
White House's national security operations. That seems difficult to
believe. The other is that the President has deliberately misled the
nation, and the world... Manipulation
or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven,
could be 'a high crime' under the Constitution's impeachment clause. Also see MoveOn.org's call for censure.
...What I found, in critically examining Bush's evidence, is not pretty. The African uranium matter is merely indicative of larger problems, and troubling questions of potential and widespread criminality when taking the nation to war. It appears that not only the Niger uranium hoax, but most everything else that Bush said about Saddam Hussein's weapons was false, fabricated, exaggerated, or phony....
So egregious and serious are Bush's misrepresentations that they appear to be a deliberate effort to mislead Congress and the public. So arrogant and secretive is the Bush White House that only a special prosecutor can effectively answer and address these troubling matters. Since the Independent Counsel statute has expired, the burden is on President Bush to appoint a special prosecutor - and if he fails to do so, he should be held accountable by Congress and the public.
"The specter of the Iran-Contra affair is haunting Washington. Some of the people and countries are the same, and so are the methods -- particularly the pursuit by a network of well-placed individuals of a covert, parallel foreign policy that is at odds with official policy... Boiled down to its essentials, the Iran-Contra affair was about a small group of officials based in the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that ran an "off-the-books" operation to secretly sell arms to Iran in exchange for hostages. The picture being painted by various insider sources in the media suggests a similar but far more ambitious scheme at work (in the Iraq war)."
"Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war... These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance."
Leaders of the House intelligence committee have criticized the U.S. intelligence community for using largely outdated, "circumstantial" and "fragmentary" information with "too many uncertainties" to conclude that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda...
[Note, this article was one of the first to point out problems with the
rationale for the 2nd Iraq war]
"...the decision to confront Hussein at this time emerged in an ad hoc
fashion. Often, the process circumvented traditional policymaking
channels as longtime advocates of ousting Hussein pushed Iraq to the
top
of the agenda by connecting their cause to the war on terrorism."
Arms inspector David Kay is conveniently blaming his failure to find
WMD on U.S. intelligence, but the real villains are the Bush neocons
who cooked data and twisted arms to get the "evidence" they needed for
war...
The neocons hoped democracy in Iraq would spread like a fever in the Mideast, even among our double-dealing friends like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
An article about how the "kick down the doors" mentality is still prevalent in the Bush administration. "the Bush administration is moving away from work with insurgents and favoring more direct-action strikes... A top-secret report by the Defense Intelligence Agency that began circulating in November for senior executives in the intelligence community points out that a "hearts and minds" campaign may have more benefits, particularly in Iraq, than the [kick down the doors] approach now being followed."
"Anyone familiar with NATO operations in Bosnia and Kosovo should have
understood that we needed two armies for this invasion. The first was
the fighting force that would kill Saddam's regime, and the second,
following right behind it, a force of military police, civilian affairs
officers, aid groups and public affairs teams to get our message
across.
The Pentagon brilliantly prepared the first force, but not the second"
"What has become tragically clear is that the United States has no strong plan for turning Iraq over to the Iraqi people and is quickly losing even its ability to maintain order. The administration is stumbling through the dark, hoping by luck to find the lighted path to peace and stability... The inability of the United States to secure the peace in Iraq virtually guarantees al Qaeda a fertile field of new recruits... We must work with other countries to forge what we cannot achieve alone: a lasting peace for Iraq..."
A erudite and scathing criticsm of the 2nd Iraq war. "Presently our loyal military personnel continue their mission of diligently searching for WMD. They have so far turned up only fertilizer, vacuum cleaners, conventional weapons, and the occasional buried swimming pool. They are misused on such a mission and they continue to be at grave risk. But, the Bush team's extensive hype of WMD in Iraq as justification for a preemptive invasion has become more than embarrassing. It has raised serious questions about prevarication and the reckless use of power."
"The administration wasn't matching its deeds to its words in the war on terrorism. They're making us less secure, not more secure... Counterterrorism is like a team sport. The game is deadly. There has to be offense and defense... The Bush administration is primarily offense, and not into teamwork... The difficult, long-term issues both at home and abroad have been avoided, neglected or shortchanged and generally underfunded... The focus on Iraq has robbed domestic security of manpower, brainpower and money... Iraq was an ill-conceived and poorly executed strategy... I continue to be puzzled by it (the Iraq invasion)... the evidence (for WMD's) was pretty qualified, if you listened carefully... the war in Afghanistan was a job begun, then abandoned... ".