Focusing on one example to symbolize the stunning failure of the Bush administration's plan for a post-Saddam Iraq is like lancing a single boil on a leper. Still, we all have our favorites. Mine is the following.
Sometime in 2003, it occurred to the CPA proconsul Paul Bremer that however much the Kurds had aided the toppling of the Ba'ath and any American-led effort to rebuild Iraq, they were not going to be allowed to maintain a standing "sectarian" militia of their own. This meant that the peshmerga, the well-armed and well-trained Kurdish army, would have to go. Bremer appointed a consultant from the RAND Corporation to negotiate its disbandment with Masour Barzani of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Irbil. (Masour is son of Kurdistani Democratic Party's leader Masoud Barzani, whose father was to the idea of an independent Kurdistan what George Washington was to America.)
"Look, we'll let you have mountain rangers, a rapid reaction force and a counterterrorism strike force, but no Kurdish army," said the RAND consultant, proceeding to explain the problems of martial division in a federated democracy to a man who'd helped hold together the only democratic polity Iraq had ever known up to then.
Keep in mind that the peshmerga were for twelve years, along with the U.S. and British fighter jets patrolling the No Fly Zone, the only line of defense between the Kurds and Saddam's forces of genocide. After a few seconds' deliberation, Barzani agreed. Hand-shakes and wiped brows all around. But just as the RAND consultant was boarding the plane that would shuttle him back to the Green Zone, it occurred to him to ask what the Kurdish translation of "mountain rangers, rapid reaction force and counterrorism strike force" might be. With a wry grin on his face, Barzani replied: "peshmerga."
This story is recounted by Peter Galbraith in his excellent book The End of Iraq to illustrate the incompetence, arrogance and cynicism of the American custodians of Iraq, who not only failed to earn the confidence of the Iraqi people but wasted no opportunity to alienate our staunchest allies among them. (Keep in mind also betraying the Kurds is something of a Washington specialty — "peshmerga" means "those who face death," just to give an indication of the grim stoicism required of this people — and so asking them to lay down their arms just as they'd be freed from fascism was an especially nice insult.)
Ken Pollack has a readable potted history of the reconstruction and its discontents at the Brookings Institution, most of it a retreading of old arguments and second thoughts that now have become third and fourth thoughts. But the later paragraphs reflect current events:
In conventional warfare, the goal is to go on the offensive, take the fight to the enemy, focus on killing "bad guys," and put the enemy on the defensive. In unconventional warfare–including counterinsurgency and stability operations–the only way to win is to do the exact opposite: remain mostly on the defensive, focus on protecting "good guys," and create safe spaces in which political and economic reform/reconstruction can take place–thereby undermining popular support for the "bad guys." The U.S. military, and particularly the U.S. Army, has never liked unconventional warfare. The small number of officers who understood it were typically relegated to the special forces and rarely ever rose to prominent command positions. Those who did rise to the top were those steeped in the principles of conventional warfare, which Army ideology insisted was universally applicable, including in unconventional operations, even when centuries of history made it abundantly clear that this was not the case.
[…]
To make matters worse, not until 2006 did the U.S. military even acknowledge that their strategic concept–and tactics–in Iraq were not working. Despite numerous criticisms from both inside and outside the armed forces arguing that a conventional approach to the unconventional mission of securing Iraq was bound to fail–and was manifestly failing–the military refused to give up its strategy. Only at the start of 2006, when Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli arrived in Baghdad to take over the corps command there, did the U.S. military command in Baghdad devise a true counterinsurgency/stability operations approach to dealing with the security problems of the country. This effort began with what became known as "the Baghdad Security Plan," which was designed to concentrate large numbers of Iraqi and Coalition troops in Baghdad and employed the proper tactics to secure the capital and allow political and economic reconstruction efforts to begin to take hold there. It was a brilliant plan, the first that could have actually accomplished what it set out to, but when it was finally approved in the summer of 2006, Chiarelli was given only about 70,000 mostly Iraqi troops–and then mostly Iraqi police, the worst of their security services–not the roughly 125,000 that he would have needed (and reportedly requested). Moreover, Chiarelli's plan called for a fully integrated military and civilian chain of command with adequate numbers of civilian personnel to match their American military and Iraqi civilian counterparts–two more things sorely lacking in Iraq from the very beginning–but none of this was forthcoming. As of this writing, the Baghdad security plan appeared to be enjoying some real success in those pockets of Baghdad where mixed formations of Iraqi and American units were present, but accomplishing little everywhere else. It too seems likely to fail as a result of the too little, too late approach Washington has taken toward the reconstruction of Iraq from start to finish.
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