by hilzoy
Last night I wrote about the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction's draft report. The NYT has put the draft online here. I'm still reading through it, but here's a bit from p. 65. The scene is an interagency conference on reconstruction about a month before we invaded:
"Ambassador George Ward, head of ORHA's humanitarian pillar, asked, "How am I going to protect humanitarian convoys, humanitarian staging areas, humanitarian distribution points?" A flag officer who had flown in from CENTCOM said, "Hire war lords." "Wait a minute," Ward thought, "folks don't understand this. There are warlords in Afghanistan, not in Iraq. There were no warlords to rent." "At that point," Ward says, "I thought this was going to fail because no one is paying serious attention to civilian security.""
A month before the invasion, and people still didn't understand absolutely basic facts about the country they were planning to invade.
It's not news, but every new instance of this kind of basic ignorance about a country whose government we were proposing to topple, and which we were proposing to rebuild, still takes my breath away.
Its gripping all right. And I'm only on page ten.
aimai
Posted by: AIMAI | December 14, 2008 at 10:54 AM
I suspect that by 2050 or so, we'll see a lot of US foreign policy from Gulf War I on as post-Cold-War "rebound." I.e., we'd been constrained from 1947 to 1990 by what The Other Side or its allies r proxies did or might do. After 1990 we were "the indispensable power, the sole superpower, etc. ("New World Order," before it became a catchphrase for black-helicopter paranoia, was a straight-faced GHWBushism for hopes prompted by the coalition against Iraq.)
So one way of reading many of the dumb moves of the last twenty years is "how we learned that the collapse of the USSR, in and of itself, wouldn't make it all that much easier to mold the world closer to our hearts' desire."
Posted by: Monte Davis | December 14, 2008 at 10:58 AM
A flag officer who had flown in from CENTCOM said, "Hire war lords."
Good to know that we have an endless supply of money to throw at these sorts of projects.
Posted by: ed | December 14, 2008 at 11:01 AM
But we were all supposed to pray! If you didn't pray you can't blame Bush and his people!!! You didn't ask Jesus nice enough!
Posted by: Tim | December 14, 2008 at 11:06 AM
I anticipated in 2002 that it would be extraordinarly difficult to pull off a successful transformation of Iraq into a pro-America, pro-Israel(!!!) Middle Eastern democracy when just about everything about Iraq - the culture, the predominant religion, its traditions - were so drastically different from our own.
As it turned out, the Bush administration didn't think it necessary to know anything about Iraq and Iraqis. That criminal fool John Bolton said that if he had his way, we'd knock off Saddam, hand them a copy of the Constitution, and leave.
Maybe next time we should listen to the dirty fucking hippies before we go around the world changing regimes.
Posted by: r€nato | December 14, 2008 at 11:22 AM
Nobody could have predicted that an administration headed by a dry drunk sociopath who had failed at everything he'd ever tried would fail to plan for the occupation of a country they'd invaded. Nobody.
Posted by: blogenfreude | December 14, 2008 at 11:45 AM
You flatten the country and then you flatten the tax.
Case closed.
Someday, the party of Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist, Randy Cunningham and Larry Kudlow and Dick Cheney will colonize a distant planet in another galaxy. As they figure how to NOT learn the language, and how to screw as many of the females as possible (boys, too, but let's keep things simple), they'll rework the alien tax code and incentivize useless financial chicanery.
Not many of us know that beings from other planetary civilizations have film industries as well and their own sci-fi and alien invasion themes.
Their fictional invaders aren't made of pus and jelly and acid, have no tentacles, and don't snap triple-threat jaws.
Nope, they are bald-headed male Americans wearing pin-striped suits, brandishing scissors and a cross with a saint nailed to it, their poorly-crafted dental work snapping out "Give it a' me, it's mine!!!" as they chase the peaceful inhabitants up and down spaceship gangways and air vents, looking for the maps to the newly conquered planet's resource caches.
Occasionally, for fun, we invaders wheel out the Ann Coulter robots to give the inhabitants a good tongue-lashing and put them in their racial and religious places.
Posted by: John Thullen | December 14, 2008 at 11:47 AM
Well, there's the whole problem right there. The Iraqis wouldn't even provide their own war lords, so we had to rent our own from Blackwater. And the dang Iraqis still haven't thanked us properly.
Posted by: Michael Bérubé | December 14, 2008 at 12:00 PM
Yes, nobody was paying attention. Which also explains why those truly responsible for 9/11 got away with it scot-free:
http://www.asecondlookatthesaudis.com
Posted by: Bill in Chicago | December 14, 2008 at 12:01 PM
If you invade a country, destroy its infrastructure, and leave it in a state of anarchy long enough, it'll grow its own warlords, and then you can hire them. Isn't that what the Anbar Awakening amounts to?
Posted by: Mike Schilling | December 14, 2008 at 12:36 PM
Read "JFK and The Unspeakable" BY James Douglass published by Orbis books. It explains everything.
Posted by: Jack Medoff | December 14, 2008 at 12:55 PM
Why do you hate America?
Why do you hate freedom?
-
Posted by: For old times' sake | December 14, 2008 at 01:08 PM
Thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq have become very wealthy because of the Pentagon's lousy post-invasion planning, in both cases.
Posted by: SteinL | December 14, 2008 at 01:38 PM
So much for a competent military:
A flag officer who had flown in from CENTCOM said, "Hire war lords."
Although, it was not just this numbnuts -- that was the plan from day one in Iraq since there were not enough troops on the ground to provide security. Militias were empowered as part of US policy in 2003-2004 in maintain some security.
If Afghanistan, the same warlords we would hire are running the opium trade, and insuring the future instability of the country.
Posted by: dmbeaster | December 14, 2008 at 01:44 PM
There were warlords to rent in Iraq. Some are the same fellas awakened in the Anbar Awakening. Others are called Sadrists. Just took a while to wake them up/drag them into the government.
Posted by: Model 62 | December 14, 2008 at 01:47 PM
A flag officer who had flown in from CENTCOM
Part of the Bush magic was being able to fly in just the right dumb and/or ideological brass hat to thumb the scales.
As ye sow . . .
-
Posted by: QuentinCompson | December 14, 2008 at 02:06 PM
How many times must one say it?
IT WAS NEVER THE PLAN FOR IRAQ TO GET BETTER. You attribute ignorance where you should attribute malice. The US wanted Iraq, and the US wanted Iraq to be chaotic so we could have justification for staying there forever. The civil problems of Iraq will never be solved by the US, because the US military is an occupying army.
This new report does not surprise me at all.
Posted by: Enoch Root | December 14, 2008 at 02:59 PM
The thing that really gets me is that conservative policy choices (neo-con nation building, free-market fundamentalism) were *supposed* to have been permanently discredited. "Bush tried them, they failed, now we know they don't work". But the policies were implemented so incompetently that we don't really have a clear answer. If, for example, we had been properly prepared, would nation building have worked in Iraq? Etc., etc.
Posted by: asterisk | December 14, 2008 at 03:13 PM
So one way of reading many of the dumb moves of the last twenty years is "how we learned that the collapse of the USSR, in and of itself, wouldn't make it all that much easier to mold the world closer to our hearts' desire."
Have we learned that? I'm not sure everyone got the memo.
Thanks -
Posted by: russell | December 14, 2008 at 06:47 PM
To understand why BushCo did what they did after illegally invading Iraq in March 2003, one has to compare this war with how George H.W. Bush/Powell/Schwarzkopf handled the first Gulf War and how Afghanistan operations were conducted after 9/11...with one glaring difference being evident between the three.
The expelling of Iraqi forces out of Kuwait during the first Gulf War (months), and the routing of Taliban and al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan following 9/11 (months), took a relatively short time when compared to how long our forces have been in Iraq (years).
In the first Gulf War and in Afghanistan, therefore, there was no opportunity for the war profiteers to make a financial killing because these operations were over so quick, while the second Gulf War launched by BushCo made it possible for the war profiteers to make enormous, obscene profits over the past five and a half years, especially with BushCo bypassing federal bidding guidelines and awarding so many no-bid contracts to their right-wing crony pals and companies.
So, just as BushCo invaded Iraq in March 2003 on behalf of western oil companies who wanted to regain control over Iraq's vast oil reserves which they'd lost control of thirty years ago, BushCo also invaded Iraq so BushCo could throw taxpayer money at conservative companies and individuals, turning Iraq into one huge Republican Cash Cow, but only if the second Iraq War lasted much longer than the first one and Afghanistan. Mission Accomplished!!!
This insane desire for a "long war" in Iraq by BushCo, with right-wing war profiteers making huge profits, is the only thing I can think of that explains why BushCo has done what they've done over the past eight years.
Why would BushCo listen to former Gen. Shinseki, who advised that several hundred thousand U.S. troops would be required to secure Iraq's "street" in post-invasion Iraq, when BushCo already had plans to contract out Iraq's security to private, for-profit Republican-owned security firms like Blackwater?
Why would BushCo heed pre-invasion reports and warnings about what would happen inside Iraq once Saddam Hussein and the Baathists were removed from power?
Why would BushCo let the looters run loose in Baghdad while U.S. forces stood guarding the Iraqi Oil Ministry building, watching the looters ransack the city?
Why would BushCo can Gen. Jay Garner, the person initially charged with guiding Iraq's reconstruction, replacing him with L. Paul Bremer III (a right-wing war profiteer) and the Coalition Provisional Authority (staffed with a bunch of right-wing war profiteers) who were charged with directing as much U.S. taxpayer money as possible to right-wing companies and individuals who rushed to post-invasion Iraq as if it had become the new Alaskan gold fields?
Why would BushCo limit domestic war-equipment production to a few, select right-wing-owned war-supply manufacturers, leading to shortages in body armor and up-armored vehicles for our regular and reservist military forces inside Iraq, even as these same right-wing-owned domestic war-supply manufacturers sold private contractors in Iraq whatever they wanted or needed?
A short war, like the first Gulf War and the initial "police action" in Afghanistan would not have meant as much profit for all the crazed Republicans intent upon turning a profit off war...which in my view is the biggest war crime BushCo faces and should be held accountable for, besides all the other war crimes committed by these absolutely greedy, in-human right-wing individuals.
Posted by: The Oracle | December 15, 2008 at 12:01 AM
I remember back in early 2002 when the Junta first started talking seriously about invading Iraq. I suddenly realized that we had a real candidate for the worst presidential administration ever. So much water under the bridge since the. One thing about Bush--he has exceeded even my expectations.
Hey MB! I think I'll drop by the Hungarian and ask Logan his opinion of this whole mess. I haven't paid court for a few years.
Posted by: DoktorN | December 15, 2008 at 09:46 AM
In hindsight could the Iraqis have done any worse than Bush and Cheney if the US had knocked off Saddam, handed them a copy of the Constitution, and left?
I'm sure the majority of Iraqis would think a lot better of Bush if he'd only gone that far. What's the worst that could have happened? Chaos and civil war in Iraq worse than 2003-2007? Invasion and occupation by Iran to fill the vacuum? Iran spending $10 billion a month having their soldiers riding around waiting to get blown up while the rest of world sanctions the hell out of them would have been a neocon's dream.
From a wingnut's point of view Bush would have been better off going with Bolton on that one. Of course Bolton never advocated any such strategy in 2002. It was only after the cluster was truly fucked that he threw out that little offhand comment.
Posted by: markg8 | December 15, 2008 at 10:24 AM
I still see so many what ifs when it comes to Iraq2. The big one for me is the dismemberment of the Bath Party. The easiest thing to do would have been to keep the structure in place and simply make sure the politiburo, the top 12 guys, would collaborate with the American Army.
How the shi'ites (Iranian agents?) convinced the Pentagon to disban the Bath Party is one of the great questions going forward. You have to wonder if Ahmed Chalabi is the greatest Iranian secret agent of all time.
Posted by: Northern Observer | December 15, 2008 at 10:46 AM