PhotoDude.com

Sun. Apr 11, 2004

Views of Iraq, Past and Present

The current mess in Iraq offers plenty of opportunities for 20/20 hindsight. It also allows a chance to assess how we got this far off track, one year after Saddam’s regime was toppled. And maybe we should look at how it was decided to go after al-Sadr at this time. You can take the view of a couple of long articles in the Washington Post, and then add to it the view of an Iraqi living in the middle of it all.

First some select quotes from the Washington Post about the longer view, “Series of U.S. Fumbles Blamed for Turmoil in Postwar Iraq”

The miscalculations were reflected in the period of confusion when the United States flip-flopped on which Americans and which Iraqis would run postwar Iraq—and how. The missed opportunities, the sources said, include the CPA’s failure to identify powerful Muslim clerics who might influence politics, from moderate Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani to the radical young militia leader Moqtada Sadr, whose insurgents have been fighting coalition forces in Baghdad and in cities across southern Iraq.

There were also mistakes that ignited Iraqi suspicions or fears about U.S. goals, such as appointing a Sunni former army colonel to be the mayor of Najaf, the holiest stronghold of Shiite Muslims who were once crushed by Hussein’s Sunni-led military. Two months later, the mayor was detained with 61 of his aides and charged with kidnapping and multiple counts of financial fraud, including stealing government funds.

Then there were ignored lessons from the past decade in the Balkans, Somalia and Haiti indicating that the United States and its allies might need a significantly larger force to stabilize postwar Iraq—the essential first step on which all subsequent efforts would depend. The earlier formula of success was 20 men per thousand inhabitants. Washington opted for just over six per thousand Iraqis.

“The administration has accomplished a lot and there are some positive stories, but if you don’t master security, everything else we’ve accomplished on other fronts gets washed away like sand castles on the beach,” said James Dobbins, a former ambassador and now a Rand Corp. analyst and author of “America’s Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq.”

The United States also did not move quickly or decisively enough after Hussein’s sudden loss of power to fill the vacuum, which Washington again should have anticipated in light of the pattern in Kosovo, Somalia and Afghanistan, Dobbins said.

“The original sin was not recognizing that we had this moment of opportunity, this moment of danger,” he said. “It was the most important failure because it allowed a resistance to emerge and organize itself to gain confidence and consolidate.”

The Pentagon’s insistence that it run the postwar effort also was a miscalculation, U.S. officials and experts said, because it lacked experience, sufficiently detailed plans and experts in nation-building. “The decision to transfer civilian aspects of reconstruction from the State Department to the Pentagon imposed immense costs as Defense had not handled anything like it for at least 50 years, while State had garnered considered experience over the previous decade,” Dobbins said. As a result, the coalition spent a long time getting organized “on the basis of an ad hoc, untried arrangement,” he said.

Former soldiers were also left with no alternative jobs and, initially, without pensions to which they had contributed, leaving about 400,000 disgruntled men who were armed and trained. “Historically in post-conflict situations, from feudal times to the end of the Ottoman Empire, the people who created the most trouble were demobilized troops. When you don’t find them new jobs, they do the only thing they know how to do: fight,” Barkey said.

For a look at the case of al-Sadr, and how we ending up fighting him and an insurgency in Fallujah at the same time, there’s a much longer article from the Washington Post, “U.S. Targeted Fiery Cleric In Risky Move.”

A month later, on March 28, Bremer ordered the weekly paper shut down. According to U.S. officials, Bremer believed that after months of waiting, the moment was right to pressure Sadr to capitulate to American demands to disband his growing militia, which had attacked American troops in the past.

But instead of relenting, Sadr and his supporters responded with protests, the seizure of government buildings and a spate of violent attacks. He unleashed a major revolt in Shiite-dominated parts of Baghdad and southern Iraq that has become the gravest challenge to the U.S. occupation.

Several American and Iraqi officials now regard Bremer’s move to close the newspaper as a profound miscalculation based on poor intelligence and inaccurate assumptions. Foremost among the errors, the officials said, was the lack of a military strategy to deal with Sadr if he chose to fight back, as he did.

“We punched a big black bear in the eye and got him angry as hell but had no immediate plan to disable him, so of course he struck back in a very vicious way,” said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who has been serving as a senior adviser to the U.S.-led occupation authority in Baghdad. “Sadr basically implemented plans he had all along to launch a revolutionary campaign to seize power. The mistake we made tactically was in not moving swiftly and all at once against every aspect of his operation.”

With the planned handover of sovereignty less than 100 days away, political officers within the occupation authority called for more aggressive efforts to disband Sadr’s militia on the grounds that the continued existence of the Mahdi Army was preventing other Shiite militias from disarming. If the Americans failed to demobilize Iraq’s disparate militias before ending the occupation, it likely would impede the country’s democratic transition, the political officers had warned.

That last part is the most amazing to me. They decided to wait until there were only 100 days left to try and disarm the tens of thousands Iraqis in various militias. Their existence has been at the very least tolerated, if not actually approved, for nearly a year. And they expected to suddenly be able to pull a 180 and disband them in the last 100 days, with no trouble.

Gee, ya think they should have started a little earlier on that particular project?

Those who think the Bush administration can do no wrong in Iraq probably haven’t read this far, and likely ignore such articles in the Washington Post. Which means they miss the other point; the Bush administration botched the post-war occupation in many ways, but in many ways the Iraqis are beset by other problems, both from outside, and from within. Zeyad can tell you:

It is becoming increasingly evident from all the violence we have witnessed over the last year, that a proxy war is being waged against the US on Iraqi soil by several countries and powers with Iraqis as the fuel and the fire, just like Lebanon was during the late seventies and eighties. The majority of Arab regimes have a huge interest in this situation continuing, not to mention Iran, and Al-Qaeda. I am not trying, of course, to lift the blame from Iraqis, because if Iraqis were not so divided the way they are, these powers would have never succeeded. I never thought that Iraqis would be so self-destructive, I thought that they had enough of that. But with each new day I am more and more convinced that we need our own civil war to sort it all out. It might take another 5, 10, or even 20 years, and hundreds of thousands more dead Iraqis but I believe it would be inevitable. Yugoslavia, South Africa, Lebanon, Algiers, and Sudan did not achieve the relative peace and stability they now enjoy if it weren’t for their long years of civil war. If the ‘resistance’ succeeded and ‘liberated’ Iraq, the country would immediately be torn into 3, 4, 5 or more parts with each faction, militia, or army struggling to control Baghdad, Kirkuk, Najaf, Karbala, and the oil fields. It will not be a sectarian war as many would imagine, it would be a war between militias. We already have up to 5 official militias, not to mention the various religious groups and armies.

Up to 5 official militias. Word is that al-Sadr’s is the smallest (though that may no longer be true). To think you could wait until the last 100 days to disband them is mind boggling to me. And for those who think the problem is the US, and the only solution is to incorporate international bodies, Zeyad has an answer: “It is the most foolish and selfish thing to say ‘pull the troops out’, or ‘replace them with the UN or NATO’. Someone has to see us through this mess to the end. Only a deluded utopian (or an idiot peace activist) would believe that Iraqis would all cosily sit down and settle down their endless disputes without AK-47’s, RPG’s, or mortars in the event of coalition troops abandoning Iraq.”

The two articles in the Washington Post talk of the past, and you might think it’s just 20/20 hindsight, but much of it isn’t news. I know for a fact one little weblogger has been writing about our lack of commitment in post-war Iraq off and on for 11 months (Where Was The Plan? – May 19, 2003; Another Asks, Where Was The Plan? – June 26, 2003; Reassessing Commitment – August 24, 2003; A Commitment Crunch – September 4, 2003; A Commitment Crunch, Part Two – September 4, 2003; A Commitment Crunch, Part Three – September 5, 2003; Phase IV, AWOL – November 5, 2003; Blind Into Baghdad – January 15, 2004).

But it is the past. As for the present, and the future, I’m inclined to listen most closely to those in Iraq, like Zeyad. Because all the evidence shows, we’re not too clued in here in our cushy lives in America.

On the left or the right.