1. Invasion of Iraq was a relative success.
Slide
The first three phrases of the military operation,
-- the military buildup,
-- initial preparatory actions (largely by covert teams),
-- and main air-ground thrust, were relatively successful (the war began on March 19, 2003)
However, several problems have been reported here too (especially in the Thomas Ricks reading):
Poorly equipped (no GPS) and poorly trained troops
Inadequate ground combat capability.
The Army went in arrogantly (based on successes in Panama, Kuwait, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan)
General Tommy Franks: didn’t think strategically – the focus was on how to win battle over Baghdad) rather than a war.
Another focus was on WMD.
NOT PROJECTING A MAJOR FIGHT IN SOUTHERN IRAQ
As American-led forces prepared to invade Iraq in March 2003, American intelligence was not projecting a major fight in southern Iraq.
Almost from the start, however, the troops found themselves fighting the Fedayeen and Baath Party paramilitary forces.
The Fedayeen had been formed in the mid-1990's to suppress any Shiite revolts.
Equipped with rocket-propelled grenades and small arms, they wore civilian dress and were positioned in southern Iraq.
The unexpected tenacity of the Fedayeen in the battles for Nasiriya, Samawa, Najaf and other towns on the road to Baghdad was an early indication that the adversary was not merely the Republican Guard.
The paramilitary Fedayeen were numerous, well-armed, dispersed throughout the country, and determined to fight to the death.
But while many officers in the field assessed the Fedayeen as a dogged foe, General Franks and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld saw them as little more than speed bumps on the way to Baghdad.
A United States Marines intelligence officer warned after the bloody battle at Nasiriya, the first major fight of the war, that the Fedayeen would continue to mount attacks after the fall of Baghdad since many of the enemy fighters were being bypassed in the race to the capital.
The coalition forces that toppled the regime:
Mostly American soldiers and Marines
+ 20,000 British and a smaller contingent of Australians, and NATO countries (including from CEE, Romania, Poland).
Post-conflict stabilization mission:
Regime change: Slide
If you destroy the totalitarian regime what do you replace it with?
You destroy the government;
Dismember the military and police units, security forces;
No functioning political institutions;
No legal framework (constitution);
How to impose the rule of law?
The requirements for setting up elections: census, electoral laws (Up to two years according to experts).
How do you maintain stability, avoid being regarded as an occupier, and wait out this period? TOUGH.
In other words:
You create a power vacuum.
Who gets to fill this power vacuum.
It has been reported that Powell told Bush: “You invade the country, you own it.”
You need to provide interim police function.
Provide security in large urban areas.
Restore and maintain social order.
Resolve (political) questions such as:
Whom to include in the interim government? (exiles vs. inside local leaders)
Whom to get rid of the in the civil administration of the country? (how deep do you want to go in getting rid od the people who played an important role in the previous regime)
Do you create a unitary state or a federation?
What should be the role of the central government? (defense, foreign affairs, trade, financial policy)
How wide is the autonomy of the regions?
A region could not issue its own currency but it could decide that personal status issues such as marriage, divorce, inheritance, and more broadly the position of women will be governed exclusively by sharia.
You have to provide electricity, clean water.
You have to give people positive signals soon.
Otherwise you get guerilla fighters, suicide bombers and snipers in return.
Resolve questions related to economic policies
Most of the country’s 192 state-owned enterprises were operating at a loss, with a direct cost to the government of about a billion dollars a year.
What do you do with those state-owned enterprises?
Should let idle state enterprises sink but these enterprises employed over a half million Iraqis and unemployment was already over 50%. (and large unemployment creates enemies)
Under the Baathist command economy, with state monopolies controlling distribution of cooking gas and gasoline, subsidized prices were kept artificially low,
What to do about subsidies?
2. What followed (the so called phase IV) was one of the most incompetently planned occupations. (Thomas Ricks documents it so well)
The post-invasion phase of the Iraq mission has been the least well-planned American military
mission since Somalia in 1993,
if not Lebanon in 1983,
and Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s.
The U.S. armed forces were not prepared for the core task that the United States was to perform when it destroyed Iraq’s existing government — to provide security, always the first responsibility of any sovereign government or occupier.
Majority of Iraqis feel less secure because of the occupation.
The United Nations estimates (11/06) that 120 Iraqis die each day, while some 100,000 flee the country every month.
At least 30,000 Iraqi civilians have died in 2006 only
So far some studies put the toll over 100,000.
over 100 journalists have been killed (42 in 2007 only);
The collapse of Iraq had created a refugee crisis, and that crisis was threatening to precipitate the collapse of the region.
The numbers dwarfed anything that the Middle East had seen since the dislocations brought on by the establishment of Israel in 1948.
In Syria, there were estimated to be 1.2 million Iraqi refugees.
750,000 in Jordan,
100,000 in Egypt,
54,000 in Iran,
40,000 in Lebanon and
10,000 in Turkey.
Many of Iraq’s neighbors initially welcomed the refugees. These countries were motivated by self-interest as well as by generosity.
The well-to-do early refugees — those who could meet Jordan’s requirement of $100,000 in the bank to qualify for a residency permit, for example — brought much-needed capital.
But the numbers and the welcome became unsustainable: Jordan and Egypt have made it very difficult for Iraqis to enter.
Even Syria, with a long history of welcoming refugees, has passed regulations, like restrictions on the purchase of property and on access to free health care, that are intended to ensure that Iraqi refugees are only temporary residents.
From the Iraqi perspective, the greatest loss has been the flight of the professional class, the people whose resources and skills might once have combined to build a post-Saddam Iraq.
The intellectuals and artists are gone.
The overall estimate for the number of Iraqis who had fled Iraq was put at two million. The number of displaced Iraqis still inside Iraq’s borders was given as 1.9 million.
Most of this movement has occurred in the last two years. An outflow began after the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.
Given the history of Western colonialism in the region and other factors, it was bound to be difficult for any coalition of Western countries to invade, occupy, and help rebuild Iraq.
Why did the Bush administration fail to recognize that overthrowing Saddam could shatter Iraq’s security institutions and thus leave responsibility for maintaining civil order in the hands of the American-led coalition?
The explanation includes the following:
the administration’s desire to portray the war as a relatively easy thing to do in order to assure domestic and international support,
the administration’s disdain for nation-building, (Pentagon officials were criticizing reconstruction efforts known as nation building. In a speech on Feb. 14, 2003, Mr. Rumsfeld warned that international peacekeeping operations could create "a culture of dependence" and that a long-term foreign presence in a country "can be unnatural.")
and the Pentagon leadership’s unrealistic hope that Ahmed Chalabi and the rather small and weak Iraqi National Congress might somehow assume control of the country after Saddam fell.
But it is harder to understand why the American military effectively went along with this set of assumptions.
Many people outside the Pentagon did recognize and emphasize the centrality of the post-Saddam security mission.
Some were at the State Department.
Then a study published in February 2003 by the Army War College.
That underscored the importance of providing security but also of taking full advantage of the first few months of the post-Saddam period when Iraqi goodwill would be at its greatest.
These think tank studies did not develop estimates of how many troops would be needed to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq or lay out detailed rules of engagement for restoring security.
But General Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, provided Congress some clear advice on the former point when he estimated that “several hundred thousand” troops might be needed for the overall operation.
And formal planning mechanisms were available for such purposes, notably the large planning staff at Central Command in Tampa, Florida, if only they had been properly instructed to develop detailed plans. Previous centcom plans for overthrowing Saddam had indeed given attention to this issue.
They were not perfect, but they were a solid base.
Instead, they were effectively discarded.
According to General Tommy Franks, while planners spent many hours in discussions about Phase iv, and while Franks himself always cautioned that this stage of the operation could take years, it was ultimately assumed
that much of the regular Iraqi army would survive and be available to play a large role in keeping postwar order.
Wolfowitz’s idealism.
Rumsfeld’s idea of a light-weight military
“Phase IV.” As is clear from the slides, it was the least defined part of the strategy.
General Franks had told his officers that it was his supposition that the State Department would have the primary responsibility for rebuilding Iraq’s political institutions.
“D.O.S. will promote creation of a broad-based, credible provisional government — prior to D-Day, (the day of invasion) noted a slide on “key planning assumptions.”
The Bush administration put aside the idea of establishing a prewar provisional government for fear it would marginalize Iraqi leaders who had not gone into exile.
War planners did not begin to get a sense of what the postwar arrangements would be until Jay Garner,
a retired three-star general, was invited by the Bush administration in January 2003 to serve as the first civilian administrator in postwar Iraq.
Another assumption in the PowerPoint presentation was that “co-opted” Iraqi Army units would heed the American appeals to stay in their garrisons and later help United States to secure the country.
Based on this and other hopeful suppositions, the command’s planners projected what the
American occupation of Iraq might look like.
After the main fighting was over,
there was to be a two- to three-month “stabilization” phase,
then an 18- to 24-month “recovery” phase,
That was to be followed by a 12- to 18-month “transition” phase.
General Franks issued a guidance to his commanders a week after the fall of Baghdad on April 9 that they should be prepared to reduce the American troops in Iraq to a little more than a division by September 2003 — some 30,000 troops.
At the end of this stage — 32 to 45 months after the invasion began — it was projected that the United States would have only 5,000 troops in Iraq.
Tommy R. Franks and his top officers gathered in August 2002 to review an invasion plan for Iraq.
The plan reflected a vision of what the country would look like four years after Saddam Hussein was ousted from power.
A broadly representative Iraqi government would be in place.
The Iraqi Army would be working to keep the peace.
And the United States would have as few as 5,000 troops in the country.
Compare that to the facts on the ground:
The United States currently has about 130,000 troops in Iraq after pulling out some 5 brigades that participated in the surge (about 30,000 additional troops)..
After 18 months of research, RAND submitted a report in the summer of 2005 called “Rebuilding Iraq.”
But the study’s wide-ranging critique of the White House,
the Defense Department and other government agencies was a concern for Army generals, and the Army has sought to keep the report under lock and key.
The report shows that it identified problems with nearly every organization that had a role in planning the war. That assessment parallels the verdicts of numerous former officials and independent analysts.
Army officials were concerned that the report would strain relations with a powerful defense secretary and become caught up in the political debate over the war.
“The Army leaders who were involved did not want to take the chance of increasing the friction with Secretary Rumsfeld,” said the official, who asked not to be identified because he did not want to alienate senior military officials.
Some of the main mistakes made during the occupation:
- Planning for the wrong contingency. The administration did not know what to anticipate (humanitarian crisis, refugees).
Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA): The administration wanted Jay there because Jay Garner had done such a good job at the humanitarian relief after the first [1991] Gulf War in the [Kurdish area in the] north.
The prewar assumption was that we would face similar kinds of humanitarian problems, on a much larger scale, after the invasion.
The assumptions were that ORHA would face large-scale
refugee movements,
humanitarian disasters,
sabotage on the oil wells.
Garner’s Initial responsibility:
to oversee repairs to vital war-damaged Iraqi infrastructure such as oil fields,
hospitals,
roads,
and telecommunications networks.
Another priority was averting starvation
(it turned out that Hussein had ordered before the war that all Iraqis be issued a three-moth supply of basic rations (flour, rice, beans, cooking oil, so famine was not an immediate threat) and epidemic.
Garner had been authorized to recruit about 300 administrators and experts.
They're trying to do whatever it takes to get things working: try to get some of these power plants running again;
figure out who works for these various ministries and get people back to work; trying to organize some Iraqis to protect buildings from looting.
Garner and his small team had neither a refugee crisis to resolve nor a willing workforce of Iraqi soldiers to employ.
All the government’s ministers, deputy ministers, and thousands of top Baathists had fled too.
Garner’s crews, like the Iraqis, figure more help is on the way. They are led to believe there's going to be a lot more military and civilian resources coming behind them to do things like turn on the lights.
2. There was no detailed political transition plan. (Rajiv Chandrasekaran: Imperial Life in the Emerald City)
One serious problem the RAND study described was the Bush administration’s assumption that the reconstruction requirements would be minimal.
There was also little incentive to challenge that assumption, the report said.
“Building public support for any pre-emptive or preventative war is inherently challenging, since by definition, action is being taken before the threat has fully manifested itself,” it said.
“Any serious discussion of the costs and challenges of reconstruction might undermine efforts to build that support.”
Another problem described was a general lack of coordination.
“There was never an attempt to develop a single national plan that integrated humanitarian assistance, reconstruction, governance, infrastructure development and postwar security,” the study said.
One result was that “the U.S. government did not provide strategic policy guidance for postwar Iraq until shortly before major combat operations commenced.”
General Franks’s command, the study asserted, also assumed that Iraq’s police and civil bureaucracy would stay on the job and had no fallback option in case that expectation proved wrong.
When Baghdad fell, the study said, American forces there “were largely mechanized or armored forces, well suited to waging major battles but not to restoring civil order.
That task would have been better carried out, ideally, by military police or, acceptably, by light infantry trained in urban combat.”
Jay Garner’ goal was to push the Iraqis toward an interim government, elections and a constitution quickly.
The people that Gen. Garner [were] talking to at that point was basically a very small, unrepresentative group of Iraqis, exiles, except for the two Kurdish leaders.