Losing physical control of Iraq

In Iraq, the army's planning and operations structures worked, but they were overridden by Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks. The Army predicted the insurgency, and when the insurgency began, the Army recognized the problem. Everyone who tried to do anything about it was overridden, browbeaten, and sidelined or threatened with firing.

Before the war started, the Army chief of staff recommended having several hundred thousand more troops. Here is the argument from the the army's point of view:

Shinseki of the Army drew not only on his experience in the Balkans, trying to administer a fractious region postwar. [He also drew from] all the corpus of evidence that had been produced by the Army War College, by every other group that looked into this, to say that there was a crucial moment just after the fall of a regime when the potential for disorder was enormous. So there would be ripple effects for years to come, depending on what happened in those first days or weeks when the regime went [down] ….

The Army War College study had worked out a very detailed checklist for how the military, and the Army in particular, should start thinking about the postwar, well before it actually went to war. One of their conclusions was that it was best to go in heavier than you actually needed to be, so that at the beginning of the postwar period your presence would be so intimidating that nobody would dare challenge you. You'd set a tone that would allow you then to draw down the forces very rapidly. So it was better to go in heavy and then draw down, than the reverse.

So military planning had anticipated the rise of an insurgency. Shinseki spoke this way:

"It takes a significant ground force presence to maintain a safe and secure environment, to ensure that people are fed, that water is [distributed], all the normal responsibilities that go along with administering a situation like this."

As everyone knows, Shinseki was overruled, replaced, and subject to behavior that went a fair bit beyond boorish.

Mr Rumsfeld publicly repudiated him, saying he was "far off the mark". In semi-private, the Pentagon's civilian leadership was far more scathing. A "senior administration official" told the Village Voice newspaper that Gen Shinseki's remark was "bullshit from a Clintonite enamoured of using the army for peacekeeping and not winning wars".

That is how the Bush Gang treated the command and control structure that the American people have paid for, so that our country won't make big stupid mistakes.

When the Army went into Iraq, commanders in the field recognized the loss of control and responded. For trying to respond to the problem as it developed, generals were threatened with firing

The war was barely a week old when General Tommy Franks threatened to fire the Army's V Corps commander....

General William "Scott" Wallace, who was leading the army troops towards Baghdad, had told two reporters that his soldiers needed to delay their advance on the Iraqi capital to suppress the Fedayeen threat in the rear.

Soon after, Gen Franks telephoned Lieutenant-General David McKiernan, the head of all allied land forces, to warn that he might relieve Gen Wallace....

At Gen Franks' headquarters in Qatar the next day, Gen McKiernan and others made the case against removing Gen Wallace. He survived, but the strategy debate was far from over.....

Rumsfeld followed up by canceling a division that was planned to police the area where the insurgency was taking shape.

"Don Rumsfeld did in fact make the decision to off-ramp the 1st Cavalry Division," Gen Franks said in a 2004 interview.

Three years later, with thousands of lives lost in the tumult of Iraq, senior officers say that cancelling the division was a major mistake, one that reduced the number of American forces just as the Fedayeen, former soldiers and Arab Jihadists were beginning to organise into an insurgency.

"The Ba'athist insurgency surprised us and we had not developed a comprehensive option for dealing with this possibility, one that would have included more military police, civil affairs units, interrogators, interpreters, and Special Operations Forces," said retired army general Jack Keane, who served as the acting chief of staff during the summer of 2003.

"If we had planned for an insurgency, we probably would have deployed the 1st Cavalry Division and it would have assisted greatly with the initial occupation. This was not just an intelligence community failure, but also our failure as senior military leaders."

"our failure as senior military leaders" - quite an amazing statement, since the army did in fact plan for the insurgency and recognize the problem when it developed. These senior military leaders, who failed, are the ones who decided to go along with the program. They have shown the highest devotion to civilian control of the military, and in return for that, they are ashamed of themselves. Under normal circumstances, they would have been getting their orders from Shinseki and the Army War College. They would have fed the Iraqis, given them clean water and security, and by now they would be feeling at least somewhat proud. But they are not the victims of this war. Most of them probably voted for Bush, and if they were heroes they would have stood with General Shinseki. Instead, they were loyal to their places in the system, and the system has been taken over by a criminal gang. We're seeing a lot of this in America - let's call it "the fate of the brownies".

The developing insurgency centered in Fallujah. By March, 2004, insurgents had better control of the city than the occupation did. They demonstrated this by ambushing 4 contractors, and hanging their bodies from the bridge. At this point, the judgement of the local commander was overruled not once but twice:

Marine Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, who commanded U.S. forces in western Iraq, told reporters that he opposed the decision to attack Fallujah in April and then – after committing Marines to the battle – he objected to the follow-up order to cease offensive operations and pull back, a decision that effectively ceded the city to insurgents as a “no-go” zone for American troops.

...Conway said he favored using targeted operations against armed enemy forces while collaborating with local officials to rebuild the city and ease tensions.

Instead, Bush administration officials in Washington second-guessed the commander and demanded a full-scale assault on Fallujah.

...The assault proved disastrous, however. Six Marines were killed along with hundreds of people in Fallujah, many of them civilians who died under a U.S. bombardment including 500-pound bombs dropped on the city and cannon fire that raked the city's streets. There were so many dead that the soccer field was turned into a mass grave.

...The negative publicity appears to have given Bush’s White House second thoughts. Three days into the attack, the Marines were suddenly ordered to cease offensive operations and to negotiate a withdrawal of U.S. forces. Gen. Conway said he opposed this reversal but was overruled again.

“When you order elements of a Marine division to attack a city, you really need to understand what the consequences of that are going to be and not perhaps vacillate in the middle of something like that,” Conway said.

At this point the insurgency had defeated the U.S. Marine Corps in a pitched battle. That is the story of how America lost physical control of Iraq. But there is another, deeper question for understanding this disaster - how did we lose moral control?

posted by no impunity at 12:20 AM