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Thu. Jan 15, 2004

Blind Into Baghdad

Blind Into Baghdad – The January issue of The Atlantic has a couple of long detailed articles that are well worth reading. The one that seems to be getting the most attention is from Kenneth Pollack, “Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong”: “How could we have been so far off in our estimates of Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs? A leading Iraq expert and intelligence analyst in the Clinton Administration—whose book The Threatening Storm proved deeply influential in the run-up to the war—gives a detailed account of how and why we erred.”

As a member of the National Security Council in 1995-1996 and 1999-2001, Pollack was “in the know,” so to speak, and was one of the True Believers when it came to Iraq’s WMD programs. And as he points out, so was the Clinton Administration, Jacques Chirac, Germany (“the German Federal Intelligence Service held the bleakest view of all”), and many others in the West. He gives his educated suppositions as to why everyone got it so wrong.

But there’s another article getting less attention, which does a similar detailed analysis of why we got the “post war planning” so horribly wrong. “Blind Into Baghdad,” by James Fallows: “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.” [Later: the article has been taken offline at The Atlantic, but can still be found here, and here]

The phrase “historic failure” may seem like hyperbole. But I don’t think it is, as this article makes it clear those responsible for planning this war at the strategic level (i.e., well above Gen. Tommy Franks) ignored all the precedents of history, and all the advice of the Pentagon’s “own expert agencies.”

“Almost everything, good and bad, that has happened in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime was the subject of extensive pre-war discussion and analysis. This is particularly true of what have proved to be the harshest realities for the United States since the fall of Baghdad: that occupying the country is much more difficult than conquering it; that a breakdown in public order can jeopardize every other goal; that the ambition of patiently nurturing a new democracy is at odds with the desire to turn control over to the Iraqis quickly and get U.S. troops out; that the Sunni center of the country is the main security problem; that with each passing day Americans risk being seen less as liberators and more as occupiers, and targets.”

“All this, and much more, was laid out in detail and in writing long before the U.S. government made the final decision to attack [...] The Administration will be admired in retrospect for how much knowledge it created about the challenge it was taking on. U.S. government predictions about postwar Iraq’s problems have proved as accurate as the assessments of pre-war Iraq’s strategic threat have proved flawed.”

“But the Administration will be condemned for what it did with what was known. The problems the United States has encountered are precisely the ones its own expert agencies warned against.”

“By the end of the month the War College team had assembled a draft of its report, called ‘Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges, and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario.’ It was not classified, and can be found through the Army War College’s Web site [...] The last and most distinctive part of the War College report is its ‘Mission Matrix’�a 135-item checklist of what tasks would have to be done right after the war and by whom. About a quarter of these were ‘critical tasks’ for which the military would have to be prepared long before it reached Baghdad [...] According to the standard military model, warfare unfolds through four phases: ‘deterrence and engagement,’ ‘seize the initiative,’ ‘decisive operations,’ and ‘post-conflict.’ Reality is never divided quite that neatly, of course, but the War College report stressed that Phase IV ‘post-conflict’ planning absolutely had to start as early as possible, well before Phase III ‘decisive operations’�the war itself.”

And as we’ve seen from the 3rd ID’s After Action Report, at the divisional level (i.e., the guys who’d be doing the job), there was no Phase IV ... just a big blank page: “Higher headquarters did not provide the Third Infantry Division (Mechanized) with a plan for Phase IV. As a result, Third Infantry Division transitioned into Phase IV in the absence of guidance.”

As I said then, “The phrase ‘unconscionable malpractice’ comes to mind, but it wasn’t committed by the 3rd ID, that’s for sure.” Phil Carter points the finger: “The tragedy here is that the Pentagon had the wisdom in its own house—and ignored it. The Army War College is like an official think tank for the Army, along with the FFRDCs (e.g. RAND and IDA) that support the Defense Department. Its libraries, students and professors are the repository for centuries of military wisdom. They are precisely the ones who can provide the Pentagon with out-of-the-box analysis. And they did. Dr. Crane’s study told the Pentagon precisely what it would take to win the peace in Iraq, and now Dr. Record has another study telling the Pentagon why it should have listened to the earlier studies. But the folks in OSD don’t want to hear it, and they don’t even want to read it.”

Phil says “the folks in OSD,” but lets be clear. OSD is the Office of the Secretary of Defense. “The folks” is Donald Rumsfeld. And there’s a host of generals, and even a Secretary of the Army who can attest that if you don’t toe Rummy’s company line, you’re quickly ejected from the company.

You can stick to “the buck stops here” philosophy, and it is true that Bush gave Rumsfeld nearly full discretionary power to plan and run the invasion and the occupation. But Rumsfeld took the reins hard, and bulled through a lot of good advice that has since proven quite prophetic.

This lengthy article details what I mean by “unconscionable malpractice” in an excruciating manner. It wasn’t a “moment,” it was a year of deliberate actions. And in my opinion, history will judge that the “unconscionable malpractice” was orchestrated and performed by Rumsfeld.