Iraq: Six Ways to Flub a War
By Ahmad Faruqui, PhD
Dansville, CA

In late April, more than a thousand anti-war activists prevented President Bush from visiting the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University, home campus of Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State. This was quite a come down from three years earlier, when Bush had declared to thunderous applause from hundreds of US sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln that the US had successfully implemented regime change in Iraq. Above him stood a banner: “Mission Accomplished.”
Now, a humbled Bush is trying to play up the installation of Iraq’s new prime minister in the hope that this will bring stability to Iraq, allowing the US to extricate itself from what has surely become a quagmire not unlike Vietnam. But no one is buying the proposition that this spells the end to America’s woes in Iraq.
Support for the Iraq War has evaporated in America. Even Richard Perle, the doyen of the hawks, has conceded that the US got the war right and the postwar operation wrong. Conservative author William F. Buckley, Jr. says that the war has failed to fulfill its objectives.
One of the staunchest advocates of the war, Francis Fukuyama, argues in his new book that the occupation of Iraq has contributed to radical terrorism in the Muslim world, a point that is acknowledged in a recent report from the US State Department. Fukuyama says that America’s image has been tarnished since people are more likely to associate it with prisoner abuse than with the Statue of Liberty.
Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, another war proponent, says, “We may have passed the tipping point. We no longer have the credibility with the Iraqis, or the American public, to make this succeed.” At the time of the invasion, 68 percent of Americans were in favor of the war. In a recent Gallup poll, 60 percent think it was a mistake.
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is faced with an insurgency on the home front. Six retired US generals have called for his resignation, which is unprecedented in American history. Perhaps the most prominent voice is that of retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, who joined the US military in 1961. He fought in Vietnam and was head of the US Central Command when he retired. Afterwards, Bush sent him as a presidential envoy to the Israelis and the Palestinians. Zinni resigned from that job just prior to the Iraq war, because of differences with the administration.
Zinni spoke recently at the World Affairs Council in San Francisco to an audience of about 500 in the swank Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill. The audience, which included several junior military officers, gave him a standing ovation at the end.
The straight-shooting Zinni, who was considered outspoken to a fault by some of his military superiors, spent most of the hour critiquing the war in Iraq. He painted the picture of a war that had no chance of succeeding from Day 1.
The first blunder was going to war. After 1998, Saddam did not pose a clear and present danger to his neighbors, let alone to the US.
The second blunder was going to war with an insufficient force. In Zinni’s opinion, the US needed more than two to three times the number of troops than the 165,000 with which it invested Iraq. The rapid advance of US forces toward Baghdad created “black holes” that became centers of insurgency in the weeks after the overthrow of Saddam’s regime.
The third blunder was the failure to hold a surrender ceremony in Baghdad. He said the US should have brought some senior Iraqi figures for a well-publicized ceremony signaling the end of Baathist oppression. The failure to create such a “momentum moment” would prove disastrous in the months to come.
The fourth blunder was to take a phased approach to the campaign, with the first phase being the overthrow of Saddam’s regime and the second phase being reconstruction. In Zinni’s opinion, the war and reconstruction activities should have been done in parallel. The first boots that stepped on the ground to fight should also have begun the reconstruction effort.
The fifth blunder was the US administrator’s decision to disband the Iraqi military. This guaranteed that a power vacuum would be created and the country would plummet into anarchy.
The final blunder was to raise an Iraqi army based entirely of Shias and Kurds. The army has 50 Iraqi battalions but not one of them is ethnically blended. This force is carrying out vendettas and reprisals against the Sunni population, thereby fanning the flames of an incipient civil war.
He said the situation in Iraq today was very grim, marked by a “witches brew” of insurgents, terrorists and street criminals. The enemy, he said, was not a single ideology-driven nationalist group, like the Viet Cong. Rumsfeld’s appointees had failed to correctly identify the enemy. Initially, they blamed the roadside explosions on Baathist dead-enders. Then they blamed the kidnappings and beheadings on foreign terrorists headed by Al Zarqawi. Now they have added militias who simply want an end to the US occupation to the list of enemies.
Zinni made a radical proposal: legitimize the militias and co-opt them by converting them into Territorial Guards. There job would be to restore law and order and carry out various humanitarian and developmental tasks, with the national army providing backup support.
Stepping back from Iraq, Zinni said a recurring problem with US foreign policy actions in the Middle East has been a failure to anticipate their consequences. He said, for every action the administration carried out, it failed to answer the question, “And then what?”
This “shoot first, ask later” approach is most visible in the talk about attacking Iran. Zinni said the US can bomb all known Iranian nuclear sites but any such action would unite the Iranian population behind Ahmedinajad. He would feel compelled to launch ballistic missiles against shipping vessels and oil facilities in the Gulf and “light up” terrorist cells throughout the region, causing global mayhem.
As the evening came a to close, it was hard not to admire this four-star general who was working for world peace as actively in retirement as he had when he wore the uniform. In his new book, “The Battle for Peace,” he argues that political instability, not radical Islam, is the number one threat to the West, a message that is unlikely to sit well with the neocon ideologues who want to bomb Tehran.

 

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Editor: Akhtar M. Faruqui
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