.Rebuilding Iraq, a monument to incompetence
WASHINGTON -- An official history on the rebuilding of Iraq now circulating around town and on the Internet concludes that like so many other things in this impulsively launched and incompetently managed war that effort has been a miserable failure at great expense to the American taxpayers. So what's new?
The utter incompetence of the Pentagon's civilian managers during the preparation, launching and early stages of the war and reconstruction has been obvious almost from the start. That wrong headedness was compounded by President George W. Bush's refusal to remove Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputies after the first year and by the appointment of an unqualified L. Paul Bremer as the U.S. czar on the ground in Baghdad whose lack of understanding of the culture was exceeded only by his arrogance. Almost too late, Bush got the message and turned to a winner, Robert Gates, to straighten out the mess.
If the president in his first term had had any military savvy whatsoever, which he clearly did not, the first tip that something was amiss would have come when Rumsfeld forced out of action Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki for telling Congress that it would require several hundred thousand U.S. troops, not to win the war but to maintain the peace and reconstruct the nation. At that point a wiser man might have called in both the secretary and the general and said tell me about this.
The proof of Shinseki's assessment lies in the success of the so-called surge in curtailing the violence in Iraq. Shinseki finally has been absolved of the sin of being too publicly correct. He has been picked to serve as the head of Veterans Affairs in President-elect Barack Obama's Cabinet. It couldn't have been a better choice nor come at a better time for tens of thousands of American soldiers, many of them maimed emotionally or physically for life, returning from the desert. They obviously need someone with his basic understanding of combat veterans during the measured withdrawal from Iraq over the next 18 months.
According to excerpts from the federal report "Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience," the restoration of basic services in Iraq, including water, electricity and even the Iraqi security forces, has been hamstrung by Pentagon opposition, turf wars, violence and a variety of other debilitating problems. Basic needs still remain below the prewar level despite billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars. Facing a challenge larger than any since the Marshall Plan, the Bush administration mainly through the Pentagon, provided a textbook study of ineptness punctuated by a lack of enthusiasm for the job. Under the circumstances this country just wasn't up to the task.
The report says that in order to cover up its failings in the critical area of rebuilding Iraqi security forces after Bremer foolishly disbanded the Iraqi Army, the Pentagon merely invented recruiting success. It quotes former Secretary of State Colin Powell as saying that the phony number of forces put out by the Defense Department "would jump 20,000 a week."
Well, that's just wonderful. So from 2003 to now, the major claim we can legitimately make is that we took care of Saddam Hussein. Of course those who still support the decision to invade also note that we have tied up al Qaeda and its terrorist offshoots and have convinced the world we won't cut and run. But lest we forget, Hussein turned out to be far less a threat than was portrayed, and even Bush regrets now publicly that he was misled about the weapons of mass destruction.
So now here we are, given new evidence that we have messed up significantly in a war that fewer and fewer Americans are concerned about in the face of their own mounting economic woes. Obama has sworn to get us completely free of the Iraq nightmare by 2010 or so. But what about Afghanistan where pressures are mounting?
As the old order moves out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in five weeks there is only one unanswered question: "Who were these guys?"
SeattlePI
The utter incompetence of the Pentagon's civilian managers during the preparation, launching and early stages of the war and reconstruction has been obvious almost from the start. That wrong headedness was compounded by President George W. Bush's refusal to remove Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputies after the first year and by the appointment of an unqualified L. Paul Bremer as the U.S. czar on the ground in Baghdad whose lack of understanding of the culture was exceeded only by his arrogance. Almost too late, Bush got the message and turned to a winner, Robert Gates, to straighten out the mess.
If the president in his first term had had any military savvy whatsoever, which he clearly did not, the first tip that something was amiss would have come when Rumsfeld forced out of action Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki for telling Congress that it would require several hundred thousand U.S. troops, not to win the war but to maintain the peace and reconstruct the nation. At that point a wiser man might have called in both the secretary and the general and said tell me about this.
The proof of Shinseki's assessment lies in the success of the so-called surge in curtailing the violence in Iraq. Shinseki finally has been absolved of the sin of being too publicly correct. He has been picked to serve as the head of Veterans Affairs in President-elect Barack Obama's Cabinet. It couldn't have been a better choice nor come at a better time for tens of thousands of American soldiers, many of them maimed emotionally or physically for life, returning from the desert. They obviously need someone with his basic understanding of combat veterans during the measured withdrawal from Iraq over the next 18 months.
According to excerpts from the federal report "Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience," the restoration of basic services in Iraq, including water, electricity and even the Iraqi security forces, has been hamstrung by Pentagon opposition, turf wars, violence and a variety of other debilitating problems. Basic needs still remain below the prewar level despite billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars. Facing a challenge larger than any since the Marshall Plan, the Bush administration mainly through the Pentagon, provided a textbook study of ineptness punctuated by a lack of enthusiasm for the job. Under the circumstances this country just wasn't up to the task.
The report says that in order to cover up its failings in the critical area of rebuilding Iraqi security forces after Bremer foolishly disbanded the Iraqi Army, the Pentagon merely invented recruiting success. It quotes former Secretary of State Colin Powell as saying that the phony number of forces put out by the Defense Department "would jump 20,000 a week."
Well, that's just wonderful. So from 2003 to now, the major claim we can legitimately make is that we took care of Saddam Hussein. Of course those who still support the decision to invade also note that we have tied up al Qaeda and its terrorist offshoots and have convinced the world we won't cut and run. But lest we forget, Hussein turned out to be far less a threat than was portrayed, and even Bush regrets now publicly that he was misled about the weapons of mass destruction.
So now here we are, given new evidence that we have messed up significantly in a war that fewer and fewer Americans are concerned about in the face of their own mounting economic woes. Obama has sworn to get us completely free of the Iraq nightmare by 2010 or so. But what about Afghanistan where pressures are mounting?
As the old order moves out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in five weeks there is only one unanswered question: "Who were these guys?"
SeattlePI
posted by madtom at 11:01 PM
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