June
16, 2006
The Iraq War
By Dr Nayyer Ali
The latest outrage in Haditha,
where Marines are accused of murdering over twenty
Iraqi civilians, shows how out of control the
American war effort has become. For American soldiers,
it is a no-win situation that leaves them wondering
who will be the last soldier to die for an un-winnable
war. How did we get here?
The war began over three years ago in a search
for alleged weapons of mass destruction, which
turned out to be a lie. That lie is emblematic
of the entire war. I was taken in by that lie,
and believed that WMD would be found. I couldn’t
imagine that the administration was willing to
jump into such a huge gamble without extremely
solid evidence of what Iraq had and didn’t
have. It turned out that the political need to
believe that Iraq possessed these items overwhelmed
the objective analysis of the intelligence. The
President’s lame justification that the
intelligence services of other nations had the
same conclusion is pathetic. No other nation has
America’s intelligence resources, and no
other nation was contemplating of invading Iraq
and therefore needed an extremely solid answer
to this question. When the truth came out, Bush
changed his justification to a humanitarian one
of freeing the Iraqis from Saddam and transforming
the Middle East into a democratic liberal paradise.
The biggest mistake after starting this war was
anticipating and planning for the aftermath. There
was no question that the US Army would roll over
Saddam Hussein’s forces in quick order.
The war itself was a textbook advance over a few
weeks to an easy victory. Even the scale of destruction
inflicted on the Iraqis was modest in comparison
to historical standards of modern war.
But even though Bush only needed 150,000 troops
to win the war, he was unable to see that he needed
500,000 troops to win the peace. Actually that’s
not entirely true. Army General Eric Shinseki
told the Congress this in direct testimony a few
weeks before the war, and was dismissed for his
candor. The Army told the Bush administration
the truth, but Bush and Rumsfeld made it clear
that truth-telling would kill your career, so
the Army brass shut up and saluted.
Shinseki turned out to be right. From the initial
days of looting in Baghdad into the next several
months of the summer of 2003, the US could not
establish order in Iraq. It was in that crucial
time period that the various opponents of the
US chalked out their strategies and created the
basis of American defeat. The US was not able
to occupy and control all the towns and cities
in the Sunni triangle, nor were they able to prevent
the creation of the Shia militias on the ground.
Both the Badr Brigades of SCIRI and the Mahdi
Army allied to Moqteda Sadr became well-entrenched.
While the Shia leadership counseled restraint,
the Sunnis engaged in a widespread insurgency
that began targeting Americans, but gradually
became a war on the Shia. Meanwhile, the US refused
to insist that the Kurds disband their militias
and reintegrate into Iraq.
Other major errors include the fact that the US
administered the country directly for the first
two years rather than creating a real transitional
Iraqi government as they did in Afghanistan. The
US also failed in the reconstruction. This was
partly a failure of security but also there was
a major failure in administration of the money.
Tremendous corruption characterized the reconstruction.
Grandiose plans for water, sewage, medical care,
and education lie in ruin. Electricity and oil
production are less today than during Saddam.
The situation now is totally out of control. The
new government is hopelessly divided on communal
lines. There is no agreement on who should run
the army and the police and other security services,
so the Ministries of Defense and Interior have
no head. They remain rudderless, and are totally
infiltrated by militias. There is now an all-out
civil war between the Shia and Sunni, and almost
200,000 people have been ethnically cleansed by
the violence out of their homes. The Kurds have
essentially seceded in all but name, and are only
maintaining a fiction of a unified Iraq. Their
main goal is to get control of Kirkuk and the
oil fields beneath it.
Thousands have died and thousands more will die
in the pursuit of utopian thinking. I heard a
report on NPR yesterday. An Iraqi Shia was saying
that, hard as it is to believe, he thinks Iraq
was better off under Saddam. It is tragic that
it didn’t have to be so. Comments can reach
me at Nali@socal.rr.com.
