If you listen to the latest howls from the left, we are in
another quagmire, and incompetent to deal with it. Sound familiar?
It should. During the Iraq campaign, when Gen. William Wallace
famously asserted we were in an “operational pause” many on the
left instantly became hysterical in their rush to proclaim the war
plan a failure. We were stuck, beaten, and out of everything we
needed to win. We’d take thousands of casualties if we even tried
to enter Baghdad. These same people now insist that the fighting
and dying continue long after the President’s assertion that major
combat operations were over is proof positive that our plan for
post-war Iraq is a failure. Prepare for shouts of glee that the
Pentagon agrees with them.
But that’s not what Rowan Scarborough’s report in the
Washington Times said. Scarborough reported that the draft
Pentagon study entitled “Operation Iraqi Freedom Strategic Lessons
Learned” says the Pentagon believes we rushed the planning for the
post-war governance of Iraq and put too many demands on our forces
to do too many things at once. Along with this news comes the
newest Zogby poll which puts Mr. Bush’s approval/disapproval
numbers at their worst so far, with 45% positive and 54% negative.
From these reports, Mr. Bush’s foes claim that the lessons learned
are those being preached by the Deanieboppers. That is wrong. But
we made — and are making — mistakes as we learn the business of
nation-building.
The first and probably biggest mistake — which is outside of
the scope of the DoD study — is not that we didn’t plan well
enough for post-war Iraq, but that we chose the wrong plan.
The critics who first said the war plan was wrong now say the
plan for peace was amateurish. They suffer from short-term memory
loss. In fact, we planned very well — maybe over-planned — for
post-Saddam Iraq. In fact, the President was presented with two
conflicting plans, and he decided on the wrong one. Several of us
were advocating — long, hard, and continuously — that before
Baghdad fell there should be established an Iraqi provisional
government comprising the more than 60 groups that had met in
London late last year. Among them were the people who could have
taken control of government ministries, established a security
force, and begun the rebuilding of the Iraqi economy. There was a
DoD plan to do just that, and it was the subject of an intense
battle in the White House.
Opposing the DoD plan were the State Department and the CIA.
Their opposition was largely based on their dislike of Ahmad
Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, an umbrella group
that rallied most of the free Iraqi nationalist groups under one
banner. Chalabi and his INC managed to get the Kurds, Shia (the
non-clerical Shia, which posed a major deficiency in the INC) and
the Sunni to agree on a framework for setting up a provisional
government. They were working closely with DoD to ready the
implementation of the plan right up to the time Baghdad fell. But
State and CIA had been at war with Chalabi for years, distrusting
him and everything to which he was attached. State went so far as
to withhold millions of dollars for the INC that Congress had
directed to help the free Iraqis prepare for what was coming.
The State/CIA plan was to put DoD in charge of Iraq, in a
military occupation for an extended period while the newly-freed
Iraqis choose and develop a government from among themselves, under
American guard and tutelage. This may succeed eventually, but this
plan extends America’s role in Iraq by years, and frankly costs
more American lives. Because Mr. Bush inherently trusts the
military, he chose to have it run Iraq even though Big Dog and the
military didn’t want to.
If the DoD plan had been implemented and a provisional
government declared before the campaign began — or even during it
— Iraqis could now be governing Iraq, subject to some small level
of Coalition control. They could have done months ago what we are
doing now: creating the Iraqi security forces to take over basic
security that our troops are now compelled to do.
The second mistake is that we planned on rebuilding, not
building. When Gen. Jay Garner took over as the first American
governor of the freed Iraq, he found something he was completely
unprepared for: an Iraqi infrastructure that wasn’t severely
damaged by war and in need of reconstruction. There simply was very
little infrastructure at all.
When the lights went out in Baghdad, Gen. Myers took to the
podium to say that we hadn’t put them out. Like the water systems,
the electrical system in Iraq is little different from the 1960s
when it was built. So the infrastructure is being built almost from
scratch. Which takes much more time and vastly more money.
The third mistake was in the assessment of the foreign terrorist
fighters coming into Iraq. As we heard time and again from the
front-line reporters such as Ollie North, hundreds of them were
coming in from Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Sudan, and a
dozen other places. Neither DoD nor CIA apparently took this
invasion of what amounts to a second army of opposition seriously
enough. Neither predicted the guerrilla war the terrorists —
apparently now in alliance with the remaining Ba’athists loyal to
Saddam — are conducting. Now Amb. Bremer and Big Dog are left to
rattle sabers in the direction of Iran and Syria (the two principal
sources) without result. So the terrorists still come to a nation
that is one big arms depot. There are huge stashes of weapons and
explosives still almost unguarded, like the “RPG farm” found last
weekend.
Though our military has done a superb job, and we now appear
ready to turn more authority over to Iraqis, we are — like it or
not — in the nation-building business. We need to free our troops
to hunt Saddam and his remnant forces, search for the WMD, and turn
the local governance and security over to Iraqis. A military
government of Christians in a Muslim country, with troops who don’t
speak the language or know the culture, will be an irritant not a
salve.
To the unserious — such as Howard Fonda McGovern Dean — the
growing cost in blood and treasure means we should never go to war
without the help and backing of the U.N. He — like Lil’ Billy —
is dedicated to the idea that our national security should be
entrusted to those who mean us harm. He and the rest are very
impressed with the U.N.’s successes in nation-building in places
such as Somalia. For the serious — those who fought and are still
fighting the Iraq campaign and will have to fight the next one —
it is a matter of learning the job of nation-building, and
assigning that task where it belongs, which is not the Defense
Department.
We are — make no mistake — in the nation-building business in
Iraq. It is likely that we will have to be in several other places,
such as Syria and Iran, and possibly even in Saudi Arabia. We are
not colonialists. We’ve never been a nation that seizes others for
our own profit. We have gone to war to protect our interests, and
to free others from the slavery of tyrants. But this is different,
and it requires different skills. If the State Department isn’t up
to the job — and for the money it absorbs it damned well ought to
be — it should be transformed into an agency that is.
