Iraq

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• Iraq National Security

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Background/History
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Background/History
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Background/History
The Texas Governor's Mansion
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Background/History
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A Post-9/11 World

• "We will pursue nations that provide aid or safe
  haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every
  region, now has a decision to make. Either you
  are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From
  this day forward, any nation that continues to
  harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by
  the United States as a hostile regime."

                             
President George W. Bush addressing a Joint Session of Congress  
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well
or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any
burden, meet any hardship, support any friend,
oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival
and the success of liberty.  This much we
pledgeand more. JOHN F. KENNEDY, Inaugural
Address, January 20, 1961
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Source David Unger, 25 Key Questions on Iraq,
New York Times (March 15, 2006).

• 10 Questions that Should Have Been Asked
• Before the Invasion!!

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• 1.) What would Iraq look like without Saddam
  Hussein?
• Saddam Hussein was a tyrant, but he was also just
  about the only thing holding Iraq together. The
  people planning this war should have foreseen
  that once the repressive lid of Baathist rule was
  lifted, just about everything would be up for
  grabs in Iraq, including national unity and the
  balance of power among Sunni Arabs, Shiites and
  Kurds.
• Mr. Hussein had spent much of the preceding 35
  years systematically reshaping Iraq and its
  institutions around his personal will. No one
  who had bothered to look at and understood that
  history could have seriously imagined that things
  would have fallen simply and peacefully into
  place by merely removing him and dissolving his
  army.

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• 2.) Regime change or nation-building?
• President Bush often disparaged nation-building,
  but given Iraqs fragility, it should have been
  clear that mere regime changeremoving Mr.
  Hussein and his family but leaving the basic
  structures of public order intactwas not a
  realistic possibility. Once American forces
  invaded Iraq, it was obvious that Washington
  would find itself hip-deep in some pretty arduous
  and long-term nation-building. Obvious, that is,
  to everyone but the Pentagon
• (groupthink a la Bay of Pigs/NASA)
• When Baghdad fell, Gen. Jay Garner was dispatched
  to organize a quick, simple regime change and
  American military exit. Only one week later,
  General Garners mission lay in ruins and the
  White House had completed reversed field. Within
  a few months, General Garners replacement, L.
  Paul Bremer, started issuing ambitious plans for
  a 5-year phased political transition. But by
  then such plans seemed wholly unrealistic because
  Iraqis had already lost confidence in American
  competence and staying power. Mr. Bremer himself
  recognized that salvaging the situation would
  require many additional American troops,
  something that the Pentagon, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz
  and the President were never willing to consider.

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• 3.) How many American troops would be needed,
  and for how long?
• The best time to have asked this questions was
  before the invasion, the timing of which was
  completely a matter of Washingtons choice. If
  the administration had asked the right questions
  (the wisdom of diverse, independent, aggregated,
  non-hierarchical crowds), it would have
  understood that defeating Husseins army was only
  the beginning of the mission, to be followed by
  an extended period of peacekeeping and rebuilding
  political institutions.
• There was at least one person who was asking the
  right questions at the right timethe Armys
  chief of staff, General Erick Shinseki. Based on
  the armys experiences in the Balkans and
  elsewhere, he publicly called for sending
  several hundred thousand troops into Iraq. But
  this view faced sharp opposition from highers-up,
  notably Rumsfeld, who had rejected an initial war
  plan that called for using 380,000 troops. Gen.
  Shinseki was publicly slapped down by Wolfowitz
  and was encouraged to retire early. He did
  so in 2003.
• The Pentagon sent a force about half the size of
  what people like Gen. Shinseki were asking for.
  It was enough, as it turned out, to win the first
  phase of the war, but NOT NEARLY enough to secure
  the peace. Iraq, America and the Army have been
  paying for that failure to think things through
  ever since. More troops from the start could
  have prevented those first weeks of anarchy when
  Iraqis came to doubt the competence and the
  strength of the occupiers and the insurgency got
  its crucial first wind.

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• 4.) What about safeguarding Iraqi weapons
  arsenals?
• The main justification offered for the invasion
  was the danger that Saddam Hussein would make
  weapons, especially the weapons of mass
  destruction Washington CLAIMED he possessed,
  available to terrorists. Fortunately, those
  unconventional weapons turned out not to exist,
  but just about every other weapon in the Iraqi
  armys arsenal did seem to make its way into the
  hands of insurgents and terrorists.
• For a war that was supposed to be about weapons,
  it is remarkable how little planning went into
  locking down Iraqi arsenals. But such a lockdown
  would have required not only better planning, but
  MORE TROOPS!

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• 5.) And what about sealing the borders?
• If anybody in Washington was really worried about
  Al Qaeda getting its hands on Iraqi weapons, a
  top military priority should have been sealing
  Iraqs borders with Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia,
  and Iran.
• Sealing those borders would have helped prevent
  the infiltration of Al Qaeda into chaotic
  post-war Iraq.
• This TOO would have required MORE American troops!

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• 6.) Would Iraq hold together as a unified state?
• Baghdad is an ancient city, but Iraq is a modern
  invention. Its historical roots as a unified
  nation are the work of extremely shallow British
  colonial mapmakers who assembled Iraq in 1920 out
  of three quite different provinces of the
  defeated Ottoman EmpireBaghdad, Basra, and
  Mosul. In doing so, they created one of the Arab
  worlds least homogenous countries, with large
  numbers of Sunni Arabs, Shiites and Kurds.
  Planting the seeds for later trouble, Britain
  installed a foreign king from the Sunni Arab
  minority, and surrounded him with a Sunni
  political elite and a Sunni-dominated army. That
  army quickly became the most powerful political
  force in the land. Shiites and Kurds were
  relegated to 2nd class citizenship long before
  Saddam Hussein was born or the Baath Party was
  created.
• For decades before the American invasion, the
  ONLY GLUE holding Iraqs three pieces together
  seemed to be Baathist terror. Saddam ruthlessly
  persecuted the millions of Shiites and Kurds who
  opposed his rule, while co-opting the few who
  were willing to do his bidding. To the extent
  that any real Iraqi national identity emerged
  during those decades, it did so under Baathist
  tutelage. In contrast, among those Kurds and
  Shiites who resisted Saddam, separatist regional
  and sectarian identities grew stronger. None of
  this was exactly a secret. It should have been
  easy to foresee that once the Baathist regime was
  gone, demands for regional autonomy would surge
  forth.

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• 7.) What could the British experience have
  taught us?
• Some of the parallels between the puncturing of
  Britains delusions about Iraq in the 1920s and
  the rude shocks encountered by America eight
  decades later are so uncanny its hard to believe
  nobody (not even the British) managed to learn
  anything useful from that earlier experience. An
  article in the 2006 March-April issue of Foreign
  Affairs by Joel Rayburn, an American military
  historian, recounts the essential elements of the
  story
• Back in 1917, British military commander, Maj.
  Gen. Stanley Maude stormed into Baghdad from the
  south proclaiming that his armies do not come
  into your cities and lands as conquerors, or
  enemies, but as liberators. Whether he realized
  it or not, Bush used almost identical language
  when he addressed American troops preparing for
  war in 2003, telling them, youll be fighting
  not to conquer anybody but to liberate people.
• But as both occupations wore on, large numbers of
  Iraqis came to see it differently. By 1920
  Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds were all in armed
  revolt against the British. Britain used air
  power and other state-of-the-art weaponry to
  shock and awe the rebels into submission. That
  didnt work out quite as well as the British
  hoped. Rising casualties on both sides turned
  British opinion against the war, and British
  officials started churning out deliberately
  over-optimistic reports boasting of progress in
  political development, stability and training of
  Iraqi security forces that became increasingly
  detached from the disappointing realities.
• All this certainly sounds familiar. Either
  Washington didnt bother studying the British
  experience, or somehow could not imagine the same
  things could happen to the U.S. Clearly, it
  could happen and it did.

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• 8.) How do we get and keep the Iraqi people on
  our side?
• The best insurance against repeating Britains
  unhappy experience would have been a serious
  strategy for showing Iraqis that the American
  presence would improve their lives.
• This should not have been impossible. Hussein
  was widely and wildly unpopular. Twelve years of
  punishing economic sanctions had reduced the
  Iraqi middle class to misery. After years of
  dictatorship and suffering, popular expectations
  were fairly modest safe streets, longer hours of
  electricity (currently only 6 hours of
  electricity exist a day in Baghdad, forget the
  rest of the country), and a reviving economy,
  helped along by new jobs for former soldiers and
  the idle young men of the slums, could have gone
  a long way.
• Instead, Washington simply assumed that Iraqis
  would be so grateful for the end of Husseins
  rule that they would rally around their American
  liberators, even if their lives did not get
  better in all the other ways that matter (see
  Katrina for proof that this is not true,
  anarchy happens)

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• 9.) Once a post-Baathist Iraq took shape, how
  would it fit
• into the map of the Middle East?
• Iraq straddles some of the most volatile ethnic
  and religious fault lines in the entire Middle
  East, some of which have been fought over
  repeatedly through the centuries. Turkey, the
  country with the worlds largest Kurdish
  minority, has long opposed anything smacking of
  full autonomy or independence for Iraqi Kurds.
• Iran, the regions only Shiite-rule country,
  considers itself a big brother to Iraqs
  long-persecuted Shiites. And for a long time
  after Irans 1979 revolution, Jordan, Saudi
  Arabia and the other Sunni Arab-ruled states of
  the Arabian Peninsula viewed a military strong,
  Baathist-ruled Iraq as an essential bulwark
  against the Shiite revolutionaries in Iran.
• Washington should have understood that any
  significant change in the political complexion of
  Iraq would inevitably send shockwaves through the
  region, and it should have been better prepared
  to deal with it.

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• 10.) More specifically, would invading Iraq make
  Iran more or less of a regional threat?
• Some Bush administration hawks once gleefully
  imagined that the presence of American troops on
  Irans eastern flank, in Afghanistan, and its
  western flank, in Iraq, would greatly reinforce
  Americas quarter-century effort to contain
  Tehrans adventurist clerical regime. The
  reality has been just the opposite.
• Iran has benefited enormously from Americas
  military intervention in Iraq and continues to do
  so. The Shiite fundamentalist parties that
  America helped bring to power in Baghdad are
  deeply indebted to Iran for the years of
  sanctuary, training and aid they received there
  during Husseins dictatorship. Now those parties
  are well positioned to repay those debts, while
  America, with much of its military tied down and
  its multilateral credibility in tatters, is
  poorly positioned to thwart Irans advancing
  drive to arm itself with nuclear weapons.
• It was never any secret that Hussein was Irans
  most feared enemy. Nor was it any secret that
  Iraqs two main Shiite partiesthe Supreme
  Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and
  the Dawa Partywere Iranian-sponsored. The only
  mystery is why Washington never bothered to put
  two and two together and figure out before the
  war how to keep Iran from becoming the biggest
  beneficiary of American intervention.

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Source David Unger, 25 Key Questions on Iraq,
New York Times (March 15, 2006).

• 10 Questions that Should Have Been Asked
• Since the Invasion!!

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• 1.) Where were the flowers?
• V.P. Dick Cheney predicted on television before
  the war that American troops in Iraq will be
  greeted as liberators. Kanan Makiya, an
  expatriate intellectual, personally told Pres.
  Bush that American soldiers would be welcomed
  with sweets and flowers.
• But within just a few weeks of the invasion, it
  was becoming clear that many Iraqis were less
  than delighted with the presence of a foreign
  occupying army.
• That ought to have prompted a hard look at the
  military plans that had been drawn up on the
  basis of those over-optimistic assumptions. It
  was time to recognize that the occupation was
  going to involve a LOT more than victory parades,
  smiling children, and toppled statues. It was
  time to think about ways to make American forces
  simultaneously less conspicuous and more
  numerically matched to these more demanding
  conditions. It was time to think about
  strategies for winning the hearts and minds that
  had been wrongly assumed to be already on
  Americas side.

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• 2.) Where were the Chalabi voters?
• Pentagon neoconservatives believed the secular
  Iraqi exile Ahmand Chalabi when he assured them
  that Iraqis of all persuasions would rally to him
  as the democratic leader of a new Iraq. But the
  smooth talking Mr. Chalabi, who had last lived in
  Iraq in 1958, proved badly out of touch with
  contemporary Iraqi reality. He attracted little
  political support after returning to Baghdad on
  the heels of the American invasion. Another
  secular exile favored by Washington, Ayad Allawi,
  also never won as large a following as his
  American backers expected.
• The only exile politicians who succeeded in
  winning a large following were those associated
  with the two disciplined Shiite fundamentalist
  parties that spent the Hussein era based in
  IranS.C.I.R.I. and Dawa. Besides Iranian money
  and arms, they benefited from the support of
  powerful party militias and backing from Iraqs
  leading Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Ali Sistani. By
  failing to recognize much earlier that first
  Chalabi and then Allawi were not the political
  champions they claimed to be, Washington made it
  that much easier for the Iranian-backed
  fundamentalist parties to win dominant positions
  in the constitution-writing assembly and the
  current elected parliament.

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• 3.) What can stop the looting?
• (and the accompanied erosion of American
  credibility)?
• Nothing more fatally undermined American
  reconstruction and transition plans than the
  weeks of unchecked looting that followed the
  toppling of the Baathist regime. Iraqis, who were
  used to an all-powerful police state, watched in
  horrified amazement as vandals stripped
  everything of value from hospitals, schools,
  museums and ministries and destroyed the critical
  infrastructure that brought water and electricity
  into homes and oil to foreign and domestic
  markets.
• Rumsfeld dismissively declared at the time that
  freedom was untidy and that stuff happens.
  That sent PRECISELY the wrong message to Iraqis,
  who were starting to conclude that the American
  authorities were not all that powerful or
  competentand that their lives had gotten worse
  since the invasion. Halting the looting should
  have been a top priority for the Pentagon. But
  that would have required sending more troops.
• The unchecked looting was not the sole reason for
  the insurgency. Baathist diehards and radical
  Islamists might have risen up anyway. But they
  would not have attracted anywhere near the level
  of popular sympathy and support that they did
  after those appalling weeks of American policy
  paralysis.

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• 4.) Once Plan A for political transition
  collapsed amid the
• looting and growing Iraqi ill-will, what
  might have been
• a more realistic Plan B?
• Plan A was the ill-fated Jay Garner plan for a
  fast-paced hand-over to Iraqi administrators and
  an early America withdrawal. That strategy was
  in ruins by May 2003, and the White House
  dispatched L. Paul Bremer to take over and
  organize a new transition. But while the Garner
  timetable had been unrealistically short, and not
  backed up by enough troops, the timetable that
  Mr. Bremer produced in July 2003 was
  unrealistically long and backed up by too few
  American troops.
• In the abstract, a staged 5-year transition to
  elected Iraqi government, might have been long
  enough to allow the creation of real national
  institutions and a democratic political culture.
  By the fall of 2003, however, neither the Iraqis
  nor Washington had the patience for that long a
  period of American military and political
  oversight. The White House abruptly insisted on
  a much shorter timetable. What resulted
  sometimes seemed to resemble the worst of both
  possible worldsa half-baked political transition
  combined with an indefinite American military
  presence.

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• 5.) Whats more important
• on-time elections or inclusive elections?
• Once the new electoral timetable was announced,
  based more on Washington politics than Iraqi
  preparedness, it quickly became untouchable.
  Firm deadlines can sometimes be helpful at
  forcing compromise. But as Iraqs first free
  elections approached, in January 2005, the only
  hope for coaxing estranged Sunni Arab parties and
  voters to take part would have required reaching
  a consensus agreement between all groups, and
  that the only realistic chance for achieving this
  would have involved delaying the vote for a few
  months.
• Washington stood firm against any delay. The
  result was a badly skewed constitutional assembly
  and a badly skewed constitution that has
  contributed to the alarming drift toward civil
  war. Iraqis had waited all their lives for free
  elections. Why was Washington so unwilling to
  think about waiting a few months more for
  elections that were not only free, but inclusive
  enough to build a nation around.

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• 6.) Who are Americas natural allies in Iraq?
• Faced with a political map as complicated as
  Iraqs, Washington should have tried to figure
  out early on which Iraqi constituencies had a
  self-interest in building an inclusive, secular
  democracy. Washington early on allied itself
  with the Shiites and the Kurds, who suffered most
  at the hands of Hussein. But the main Shiite
  parties turned out to be far more interested in
  imposing fundamentalism and carrying out
  vendettas against their former oppressors than in
  building a free and united nation. And the
  Kurdish parties have so far shown themselves to
  be almost exclusively interest in autonomy for
  the Kurdish northeast and almost indifferent to
  what goes on in the Arab areas of Iraq.
• Obviously, Washington should not have turned its
  back on the Shiites and Kurds, who together
  constitute more than three quarters of the Iraqi
  population. But it could have done a better job,
  early, of convincing Sunni Arabs that they could
  benefit from American protection against Shiite
  vengeance. Washington could also have handled
  the Kurds better ,reminding them that in return
  for the American support they had come to count
  on, Washington expected them to play a more
  constructive role in Iraqi nation-building.
  These are precisely the messages that Americas
  current ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad,
  has begun deliver over the past few months. But
  it is now awfully late in the day and the threat
  of civil war has become awfully real.

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• 7.) What would it take to get more international
  support?
• Incredibly, the White House, the State Department
  and the Pentagon seemed to have assumed at first
  that Americas Western and Arab allies, and the
  U.N., would practically trip over each other to
  get right with the new order by sending
  peacekeeping troops and conferring international
  legitimacy on the political transition. By late
  2003, it was increasingly evident that wasnt
  about to happened. To those not hypnotized by
  blind self-righteousness, it was no surprise.
• Washington had spent much of the previous year
  generating international ill-will and undermining
  the U.N. by bypassing Security Council opposition
  and pulling the plug on international weapons
  inspectors. President Bushs harsh
  with-us-or-against-us rhetoric also created a
  poor climate for multinational cooperation.
• The administration might have attracted more
  nations to help with the hard work that lay ahead
  in Iraq by offering substantial political and
  economic concessions. But it never wavered from
  its insistence on controlling all political,
  military, and contracting decisions itself. In
  recent months, Bush as begun to talk more about
  the difficulty of going it alone, not just in
  Iraq, but in all of Americas dealings. But this
  represents a turnabout that comes very late in
  the day and that many find hard to fully believe.

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• 8.) What could be done to minimize the damage of
  Abu Ghraib?
• Every top business executive learns about damage
  control strategies, and every good one learns
  that a successful strategy has to go beyond
  managing the bad news to managing the problem
  itself. Yet in the case of the Abu Ghraib
  scandal, Bush, the first business school graduate
  to occupy the White House, did just about
  everything WRONG.
• Although the Pentagon first learned about the
  abuses by early Nov. 2003, it took no serious
  steps to get out in front of the problem until
  graphic photos were published in the New Yorker
  nearly six months later, in its April 30, 2004
  issue. The president never demanded
  accountability from the cabinet official
  ultimately in chargeRumsfeldor from the senior
  commanders and officials responsible for the
  brutal interrogation policies at the prison.
  Instead, the administration kept repeating that
  all the blame belonged to a few bad apples, and
  only pursued court martials or serious
  punishments against low-ranking officers.
• That struck at the core principle of command
  responsibility on which the professionalism of
  any military force depends. It also encouraged
  Iraqis, and the rest of the world, to see the
  U.S. as a country that practiced and tolerated
  tortureand as all too similar to Hussein, the
  man who first made Abu Ghraib famous for
  torturing innocent Iraqis there.

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• 9.) What kind of Iraqi security forces should we
  be building?
• The theory of the current occupation is that the
  U.S. has to remain in place until the Iraqis
  develop the capacity to preserve order
  themselves. As early as 2003, the Pentagon was
  regularly reporting rapid progress in building
  the necessary Iraqi security forces. But anyone
  who looked at the details could see that the
  Pentagons numbers were puffed up by including
  security guards hired to protect building sites
  along with actual soldiers and police.
• Paul Bremers memoir makes clear that the
  Pentagon was flogging these inflated numbers to
  try to deflect his urgent pleas for more American
  troops. As it turned out, even the much smaller
  number of new Iraqi army recruits listed in the
  Pentagon totals was not entirely real. Most of
  these purported recruits later melted away when
  sent into battle against Iraqi insurgents.
• The Pentagon also managed to avoid the other key
  point about these recruitswhere they were coming
  from. As it turned out, many were members of
  sectarian and party militias, mainly Shiite
  fundamentalist enforcers or Kurdish former
  separatist guerillas incorporated wholesale into
  the new national force. The result was that
  instead of being a unifying nation-building
  institution, the Iraqi army and interior ministry
  police were themselves becoming a particularly
  acute source of divisions. The torture of Sunni
  prisoners in interior ministry prisons and the
  appalling refusal by Iraqi troops to protect
  Sunni neighborhoods and mosques from mob
  reprisals after last springs bombing of a sacred
  Shiite shrine fueled the dangerous drift toward
  civil war.

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• 10.) Again how many U.S. troops will be needed,
  and how long?
• First, American troops were supposed to be
  withdrawn within three months. Then, as the
  insurgency exploded, the target became early
  2005, as Iraqi forces became large enough and
  capable enough to take over. Then, American
  troops were temporarily increased for the spring
  2006 elections, with promises of significant
  withdrawals later this year.
• Clearly, what have been driving this timetable is
  American politics (notably the recent midterm
  elections, which saw the Democrats regain control
  of Congress after 14 year due primarily to public
  discontent with the situation in Iraq). Slightly
  more than two thirds of the American public
  believe that Bush does not have a clear plan for
  handling the situation in Iraq, an all-time high
  and getting worse. Meanwhile, Iraqi security
  forces now look less capable than ever of holding
  the country together. And American forces are
  still too thin on the ground, which forces them
  to put their own security first, and keeping
  Iraqi civilians out of the crossfire second.
• That is not a mission that can end happily. If
  American forces are to have any hope of building
  anything positive in Iraq, their numbers need to
  be increased and their mission reshaped. And
  they will only be granted enough time to try if
  Bush finally masters the essential task that has
  clearly eluded him for the past 3 years
  convincing the American people that his
  administration knows what it is doing in Iraq.
  Firing Rumsfeld was a start on this effort, but
  only the beginning