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Thu. Sep 16, 2004

Good War, Bad Occupation

In the past 5 days, over 200 people have been killed in Iraq. President Bush has been entirely vague (or entirely quiet) on the specifics of Iraq, and in that area, John Kerry has topped him.

Kerry’s pronouncements on the war in Iraq this year have been all over the place. His latest (as best I can reckon, though I hear he’s talking about it again today) says that he’ll get the majority of US troops out of Iraq in six months to four years. Well, I’d guess that’s a fairly safe bet no matter who is elected, but such vague pronouncements won’t get him elected. It will take something simpler and more direct.

In fact, he might take some lessons from Republican Senators Hagel and Lugar. And if not them, there’s a blogger (or two) with some advice better than what’s coming out of his campaign headquarters. For the rest of America (yes, you, Sparky), it is way past time for us to rub our eyes clear of these election year politics and admit, we’ve got a “bad occupation.”

Even Republicans in Congress can see it, and say it:

“It’s beyond pitiful, it’s beyond embarrassing, it’s now in the zone of dangerous,” said Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., referring to figures showing only about 6 percent of the reconstruction money approved by Congress last year has been spent.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee members vented their frustrations at a hearing during which State Department officials explained the administration’s request to divert $3.46 billion in reconstruction funds to security and economic development. The money was part of the $18.4 billion approved by Congress last year, mostly for public works projects.

Hagel, Committee Chairman Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and other committee members have long argued — even before the war — that administration plans for rebuilding Iraq were inadequate and based on overly optimistic assumptions that Americans would be greeted as liberators.

But the criticism from the panel’s top Republicans had an extra sting coming less than seven weeks before the U.S. presidential election in which Bush’s handling of the war is a top issue.

“Our committee heard blindly optimistic people from the administration prior to the war and people outside the administration — what I call the ‘dancing in the street crowd’ — that we just simply will be greeted with open arms,” Lugar said. “The nonsense of all of that is apparent. The lack of planning is apparent.”

ABCNEWS.com “Intel Officials Have Bleak View for Iraq”

Let’s not gloss over these big numbers, let’s break them down. To me, they are stunning, and damning. Nearly a year ago, Congress said, “hey, here’s $18.4 billion dollars, about $70 per American citizen. Go fix Iraq.” The Bush administration, via the inefficiency of the CPA, managed to spend six percent of it in the past year. At that rate, they will finish in 2019.

To date, they’ve spent about four bucks of that $70 you gave them, according to Republican members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And now they want to take away about $13 of the remaining $66 … over three times what they’ve spent so far … to increase security. To redouble efforts to rebuild the Iraqi police force … again (I believe we’ve “redoubled the effort” at least six times in the past 17 months).

Hagel is exactly right, it is “beyond pitiful, it’s beyond embarrassing, it’s now in the zone of dangerous.” Senator Hagel, a Republican from Nebraska was further quoted in a Kansas newspaper in an article headlined “Republicans scathe war planners”: “As for the original architects of the Iraq war, he added: ‘Maybe we ought to have a hearing with the inventors of this, have them come back up, all these smart guys that got us in there and said, ‘Don’t worry.’”

In short, two Republican Senators effectively laid more smack on Bush than Kerry has in weeks on the subject of Iraq. Partially because countless news cycles and pundit-hours have been eaten talking about the wrong war (you know, the one in Vietnam). Meanwhile, the Democratic side is allowing the President who declared that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea formed an Axis of Evil to get away with not talking about the specifics of any of those three countries on the campaign trail. Particularly the growing disaster they’ve made of security and stability in Iraq.

This is a topic I wore out long before the first primary (so you can pocket your partisan charges), starting in the first month after Saddam’s regime was toppled (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). All the evidence has been clear to me from very early on, and frankly, I stopped writing about it because no one seems to care.

Kerry should care. For purely selfish reasons, if nothing else. And because it could be so simple. The title of this article comes from Michael Totten. “Good War, Bad Occupation” are four simple words that could say a lot:

Yesterday Mark Poling said in my comments section that John Kerry could easily beat George W. Bush with a platform that looked something like this:

Good war, bad occupation, but I’ll make Iraq right, and I won’t make the same mistakes with our other enemies…

Yep.

You could reduce it even further, all the way down to four words:

Good war, bad occupation.

That’s it. Done. Some people would argue with that. But independents and swing voters wouldn’t.

It amazes me that neither Kerry nor any of his highly-paid advisors could come up with these four simple words.

I know, the partisan argument for Bush is along the lines of “would Iraqis be better off if Saddam was still in power”? Of course not. And, yes, I’ve read all the Good News from Iraq. Have you heard there are many places in Iraq where coalition forces fear to tread in anything other than large armored numbers? Have you read some of the views of other Westerners in Iraq? Have you heard that over 200 people were killed in the last five days in vicious attacks?

I’m all in favor of trumpeting the accomplishments we’ve made in Iraq (because I really want things to work), but I want a balanced view, not puffery, and I’m not alone in that thinking: “American optimism, if that is the goal, is more useful if it arises not from propaganda but from perspective.”

In addition to the “Good News From Iraq,” I’ve also read large chunks of the Geneva Convention, including the parts that require an occupying force to quickly provide security and stability for the citizens of the country they occupy (please don’t argue the semantics of the word “occupy,” simply replace it with “liberate” and the Geneva Convention obligation is the same).

We’ve been in Iraq 17 months. This environment of “security and stability” allowed over 200 people to be killed in the last five days. Mostly in attacks on Iraqi police. We can’t even secure the “Green Zone” anymore. We have clearly failed in our most basic obligations, never mind the wonderful things we promised. And no matter who is going to win the coming election, those facts ought to be laid bare for all Americans to judge. The problem is not going away simply because so few are talking about it seriously. We deserve to hear from both candidates exactly how they intend to turn the situation around.

But we won’t. On one side, we won’t hear how they will turn things around because that would require them to admit they have failed. So far, we’ve gotten a grudging admission they “miscalculated,” but that’s about it. On the other side, we won’t hear how they will turn things around because it would require a specific unchanging plan. And Kerry does not seem capable of that.

Let me provide you with the view from the middle: it’s too late. Too late to undo the massive mistakes we made early on (like disbanding the Iraqi Army we’re now trying to reconstitute, and putting 400,000 armed and unemployed men on the streets), and too late to change the weak willed impressions we’ve left since then (like the nine lives of the man we vowed to kill or put in jail, Moqtada Al Sadr, who is neither dead nor in jail, and the vaunted “Fallujah Brigade,” who’ve since donated their AK-47’s, trucks and radios to the “insurgents”) It’s too late for the grandiose future many envisioned for post-war Iraq, and approaching too late to have a realistic influence on Iraq’s real future.

We laid out this fate long ago. In the first hours after Saddam’s statue was toppled. Because when the looting started in government ministries and other sites all over the country, we said “go ahead, we won’t stop you.” We were queasy with an idea that is far from uncommon in the history of our own country: “looters will be shot.” There’s likely a few pieces of plywood in Florida with those very words spray-painted on them right now. But it wasn’t good PR to kill Iraqi civilians back then, though we now seem to do it weekly as “collateral damage” in our efforts to root out insurgents/terrorists/whatever.

The message we sent from Day One, was “we’re not in control. You can do what you want.” That message was heard loud and clear, and reverberates every day 17 months later. If we’d simply given a quiet order to shoot at looters (i.e., don’t hit them, make them run), we would have at least set some minimal limits. We never did. It may not be the causative event, but it sent a message, and it is certainly representative of our policies ever since. The Pentagon has complained constantly about “foreign fighters” agitating the situation, but in the first year they never made any serious effort to seal Iraq’s borders. To me, that’s unconscionable malpractice.

And it is ongoing. Indeed, “It’s Worse Than You Think.”

Iraqis don’t shock easily these days, but eyewitnesses could only blink in disbelief as they recounted last Tuesday’s broad-daylight kidnappings in central Baghdad. At about 5 in the afternoon, on a quiet side street outside the Ibn Haitham hospital, a gang armed with pistols, AK-47s and pump-action shotguns raided a small house used by three Italian aid groups. The gunmen, none of them wearing masks, took orders from a smooth-shaven man in a gray suit; they called him “sir.” When they drove off, the gunmen had four hostages: two local NGO employees — one of them a woman who was dragged out of the house by her headscarf — and two 29-year-old Italians, Simona Pari and Simona Torretta, both members of the antiwar group A Bridge to Baghdad. The whole job took less than 10 minutes. Not a shot was fired.

Yet U.S. officials publicly insist that Iraq will somehow hold national elections before the end of January. The appointed council currently acting as Iraq’s government under interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is to be replaced by an elected constitutional assembly — if the vote takes place. “I presume the election will be delayed,” says the Iraqi Interior Ministry’s chief spokesman, Sabah Kadhim. A senior Iraqi official sees no chance of January elections: “I’m convinced that it’s not going to happen. It’s just not realistic. How is it going to happen?” Some Iraqis worry that America will stick to its schedule despite all obstacles. “The Americans have created a series of fictional dates and events in order to delude themselves,” says Ghassan Atiyya, director of the independent Iraq Foundation for Development and Democracy, who recently met with Allawi and American representatives to discuss the January agenda. “Badly prepared elections, rather than healing wounds, will open them.”

America has its own Election Day to worry about. For U.S. troops in Iraq, one especially sore point is the stateside public’s obsession with the candidates’ decades-old military service. “Stop talking about Vietnam,” says one U.S. official who has spent time in the Sunni Triangle. “People should be debating this war, not that one.” His point was not that America ought to walk away from Iraq. Hardly any U.S. personnel would call that a sane suggestion. But there’s widespread agreement that Washington needs to rethink its objectives, and quickly. “We’re dealing with a population that hovers between bare tolerance and outright hostility,” says a senior U.S. diplomat in Baghdad. “This idea of a functioning democracy here is crazy. We thought that there would be a reprieve after sovereignty, but all hell is breaking loose.”

MSNBC: “It’s Worse Than You Think”

So the next time someone tries to sell you “The Good News From Iraq,” remember this: “‘The insurgency can certainly sustain what it’s doing for a while,’ says a senior U.S. military official. Many educated Iraqis aren’t waiting to find out. Applicants mobbed the courtyard of the Baghdad passport office last week, desperate for a chance to escape. Police fired shots in the air, trying to control the crowd.”

And if you don’t trust the surely liberal media, how about a National Intelligence Estimate prepared for the President? “The estimate outlines three possibilities for Iraq through the end of 2005, with the worst case being developments that could lead to civil war, the officials said. The most favorable outcome described is an Iraq whose stability would remain tenuous in political, economic and security terms. ‘There’s a significant amount of pessimism,’ said one government official who has read the document, which runs about 50 pages [...] Its pessimistic conclusions were reached even before the recent worsening of the security situation in Iraq, which has included a sharp increase in attacks on American troops and in deaths of Iraqi civilians as well as resistance fighters.”

Our leaders won’t talk about it, or admit it, but we’ve got a long way to go on some of the most basic services. Areas where we should have been best prepared. But the reality is indicative of the shortcomings we’ve displayed.

In the long, frustrating campaign to rebuild this country, perhaps no task has been more difficult than turning on the lights.

The trouble restoring Iraq’s electrical system exemplifies the failures of a larger reconstruction process still marked by tainted water supplies, limited sewage treatment and curtailed construction of public buildings. An effort that was supposed to provide jobs, stability and democracy has instead produced a deep reservoir of confusion and anger that feeds the country’s deadly insurgency.

Although electricity was the foundation of the rebuilding campaign, State and Defense department planners vastly underestimated the time, money and effort needed to restore the country’s power grid, which had deteriorated far beyond their expectations under 12 years of U.N. sanctions.

The progress has been slowed by intrusive and haphazard U.S. oversight, sources say. U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad placed enormous pressure on their underlings, setting such high goals that engineers sometimes skipped maintenance, ran generators harder than normal and gambled on untried techniques to raise output.

At the same time, work in Iraq was roiled by constantly changing leadership, vision and emphasis. Since rebuilding began in April 2003, seven people have overseen the electricity project — the equivalent of a new CEO every 2 1/2 months for one of the most complicated and expensive tasks in Iraq.

Even today, the U.S. has not reached the goal set by L. Paul Bremer III, the former head of the U.S.-led occupation authority, to produce 6,000 megawatts of power a day by June 1. By comparison, California has about 50% more people than Iraq but produces up to eight times as much electricity, about 45,000 megawatts at peak summer demand.

The money that soon came pouring in was ample evidence of how badly war planners had shortchanged the initial reconstruction effort. USAID had set aside only $229 million of a $680-million contract with Bechtel to rebuild the power system. By November, Congress had increased the funding to $5.6 billion — not only for rehabilitating old plants but also for building new ones.

LA Times: “Iraq Power Grid Shows U.S. Flaws”

But as we’ve seen for a year now, you can appropriate all the damn money you want, but that doesn’t fix the problem. Somewhere, there’s about 15 billion appropriated dollars waiting to be spent on reconstruction. Adding to that dusty pile doesn’t budge a thing in Iraq.

You’ve got to have sensible and realistic policies and procedures in Iraq, and we have lacked them from the beginning. We appear to have put one one-hundredth of the effort, planning, and resources that we put into the invasion plan, when they needed to be equal efforts. We think it’s fine to rotate critical personnel in and out like baseball pitchers, but the results are clear. We ramped up a massive organization of such policies and practices, the CPA. But it turns out that stood for “Can’t Purchase Anything,” as they were born, lived, and completely disbanded without spending 95% of their budget.

Here in the US, such a feat by a government agency might be cause for taxpayer celebration. In Iraq, it’s unconscionable malpractice.

And in this election year environment, it faces little prospect of a realistic fix. Because that would require an honest unbiased assessment of where we are (and in many areas, an admission we need to start over). Such a thing is simply not possible prior to November 2. And even if we woke up from our partisan slumber and faced reality on Nov. 3, we’d have a little over two months to prepare for planned elections in Iraq in January.

Given the current state of things, do you think the odds of areas like Fallujah returning to civil order in the next four months are any better than they have been for the past four months? If they forge ahead and elections are held … in parts of Iraq … the farce will be complete.

Then some President can say, “time to go!” And we can all pretend we did the things we said we were going to do.

Remember how the trauma of Vietnam crippled this country’s approach to foreign affairs, “hard” diplomacy, and military matters in general? For a couple of decades, when it came to the use of military force, we suffered a strange sort of national insecurity. Not physically, but mentally (“if you put troops on the ground in [Country X], it will soon be another Vietnam”). Until it was “overthrown” by the Powell Doctrine, and an overwhelming military victory in the First Gulf War.

In that respect, Iraq is the new Vietnam. Because, for decades, this ugly experience will impact every major foreign policy decision we make.

No matter who is President in January, 2005.