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Thu. Jun 26, 2003

Another Asks, Where Was The Plan?

Another Asks, Where Was The Plan?- From Thomas Friedman: “President Bush is sure lucky no weapons of mass destruction have been found yet in Iraq.”

“Because had we found these weapons our entire focus today would be on the real issue: why the Bush team – which wanted this war so badly and had telegraphed it for so long – was so poorly prepared for postwar Iraq.”

Indeed, I wrote over a month ago asking “Where Was The Plan,” as it was already apparent “The Plan” was inadequate, by about a factor of ten: “Let’s all be thankful the invasion itself wasn’t run at this level of efficiency [...] It’s almost as if once the main invasion wave went through and the war was won, they expected to simply guide a self healing process of some type.”

I’m not sure whether that was due to incompetence, naivety, stinginess, or simple wishful thinking. But even common folks like me knew before the war that the aftermath would bring a lot of expensive hard work, requiring a huge infusion of manpower and resources. These same common folks can look at what is happening in Iraq now, and say … “that’s not cutting it, what were you thinking?”

And Thomas Friedman points out, even less than common folks within the Bush administration had to know it, simply from recent experience: “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.”

Which echoes what I said in May, “...we also all knew that, as soon as that war was over, Iraq was going to need massive humanitarian aid and a nearly complete civil overhaul. We knew that, above and beyond the invasion forces, it would take a lot of people, some of them with guns (known as ‘police’). And another plan of a complexity almost equal to the invasion plan.”

Well, as we now all know, the plan they had when they went into this war (a plan they had many months to work on) was tossed about three weeks in, along with Gen. Gardner and Barbara Bodine, the initial Top Two. They now appear to be making it up as they go along. This points to a stunning lack of insight prior to the war about the most basic problems in the aftermath.

Here we are 11 weeks after the fall of Baghdad, yet we still have so many unanswered questions. I’ve been a proponent of patience on these questions, and still have a reservoir of it. But the question where I’m most lacking patience is, “why haven’t we found Saddam, or any Husseins?” My patience on that issue is morbidly chipped away by each death of a U.S. soldier. Deaths that almost always come, not in the Kurdish north or the Shia south, but in the Saddam dominated Sunni center of Iraq. It seems clear these attacks come from those who do not want to see the coalition succeed, and since they are almost all within Sunni – Ba’athist – Saddam dominated areas, well, the math is simple.

Once Saddam is publicly made into toast, by whatever means, the core of that resistance will wilt in hours. His continuing freedom is the only thing that fuels the concept that the Ba’athists may yet return to power. So I say to hell with finding weapons of mass destruction, Priority One should be tearing up the center of the country in search of Saddam. To my way of thinking, his continuing freedom is the direct cause of the loss of American lives, as we reach the point where an average of one U.S. soldier per day is being killed in Iraq.

What could be more important than that? What act will contribute more to the immediate future of Iraq than definitively cutting off the head of its ugly past?

I still have patience on the question of weapons of mass destruction, especially as we find scientists ordered to bury ghastly treasure in their gardens. But Freidman seems to be losing his: “As for the missing W.M.D., Bush officials keep saying that Iraq is the size of California and hard to search. True, but Saddam’s inner circle is the size of an N.F.L. team and we’ve captured more than half of them. I find it incomprehensible that none of them have had anything revealing to say, one way or another, about the missing W.M.D. A tarot card reader could have discovered more from these people than the Pentagon has so far.”

“A successful U.S. rebuilding of Iraq is the key to America’s standing in the world right now. But Mssrs. Bush and Rumsfeld seem to be treating it like some lab test in which they can see how much nation-building they can buy with as little investment as possible.”

The Bush administration doesn’t seem to realize that a successful rebuilding of Iraq is also key to their own reelection. As I said before, Bush must now show he can fix the economy of two countries; the U.S., and Iraq.

As far as the “rebuilding of Iraq,” on their First Quarter report card, I’d give them a D minus, adding a stern note that a lack of improvement will result in their expulsion. There, and here.

I wonder when they will wake up to that?