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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