Here's what I want to know about Iraq.

[chieftain]

Who set things in motion that led to a long term occupation of Iraq? I have just read 4 books that cover most of the aspects of the debacle that is Iraq War II and after all that reading I still have no answer to that basic question.
Tommy Franks was telling his people after the capture of Baghdad that we would draw down to something like 30,000 troops in country very quickly. This seems to have been Jay Garner's understanding as well.
Then Bremer shows up and instead of a decapitation strategy where only the top layers of Iraqis are disenfranchised, the CPA fires even teachers and civil servants who had only nominal affiliation with the Baathist Party. Then for good measure, he disbands the army. With thousands of soldiers, teachers and minor functionaries without jobs and a livelihood, Bremer imports a cast of Republican politicos, greedy contractors and no bid multi national companies who loot the treasury while displaying incredible incompetence at their stated mission.
So I remain baffled as to the decision making process that led to a 180 degree turn from a quick withdrawal to an open ended nation building exercise.
I thought the invasion to be immoral and likely to lead to the enhancement of Iran's power in the region and in the world. But I thought the Neo cons would get away with it with a minimum of political damage because Rove would understand that the American people would eventually turn on an indefinite period of inconclusive warfare in a far away land.But for what ever reason, they are in a quagmire that may well sink the GOP the way Vietnam neutered the Democrats.

[Earth_First]

1. PNAC, Carlyle & Bilderberg had major influence on events...

[unblock]

2. who says it was a plan?

i think bremer planned on it being an exploitation, as you well describe.

the fact that the logical aftermath would be an occupation they can't really get themselves out of isn't necessarily something that they planned. maybe the lure of looting was just too strong, they didn't care what the outcome was.

on the other hand, the domestic oil producers certainly have to be loving the long-term disruption of a competitor's supply....

[chieftain]

4. I take your point about the fact that there did not have to be

a plan. As a matter of fact, I think that there were various plans some of which were complementary to each other and some that were antithetical.
Rummy's plan to make the military lighter and quicker was well served by a lightning war but not helped by a drawn out occupation.
Rove's political agenda was well served by "Mission Accomplished" not so much by a civil war.
The Neo-Con theorists wanted a laboratory where they could show that their discredited economic and social ideas had validity. They got their showcase and it has backfired on them
In a WH where the head guy is as disengaged as doofus is, I think it entirely possible that many actors were pushing their own views with no coordination and/or oversight. At least one of the authors suggests that the boy president was not even briefed on Bremer's change of direction before the announcements of the debaathification orders were made.
That I think is the likeliest explanation of how we are where we are. But if this theory is correct, my questions remain. Who were the backers of the plan that won out. Are they still in government or have they been shipped off to faraway posts like the World Bank?
I know that W is ultimately responsible for this mess but I crave some more detailed reporting on how Bremer came to issue his orders and on whose say so were they given.

[unblock]

7. follow the money

much of what happened under bremer's order stinks of patronage and payoffs for political support.

someone who wheels and deals in that sort of thing had to at least green light it.

my guess is that those in the want went to bremer with the exploitation plan, and bremer went to shrub, and shrub said ok in exchange for campaign contributions, etc. i think that's shrub's primary role, after all.

[TayTay]

12. I think these people also believed in their own lies

i think they genuinely thought they could invade Iraq and that the country would be grateful to the US. We don't believe that and any rational reading of the situation in IRaq would not have led to this conclusion. But I do think the neocons believed their own lies.

It is also possible that there were no actual plans because the ones doing the planning hadn't really bothered to come up with them. (Weren't the post-invasion plans at State? Cheney and Rumsfeld were engaged in a running battle to discredit State and to make the Defense Department in charge of what State should have been in charge of.)

You may be looking for an answer that doesn't exist because it is looking for logic in a plan that produces little of it. There may have been a total screwup because the people who could have done cogent planning were retired or put in out of the way offices so they couldn't interfere with the neocon grand plan for Iraq. There may be no 'there' there my friend. Just total incompetence.

[Donna Zen]

3. Several problems

They don't do nation building...so once they were "in" there was no plan. Garner had no plan, and Bremer should definately be in jail. Also, because they didn't want an insurgency...they refused to plan for one, or do anything about it.

This is much worse than Vietnam in terms of the long-term damage to our nation. The handwriting was on the wall before the invasion started, and while it would have taken a miracle for the US to come out any where near a positive position, there were many people who warned of everything that we see today. This is a failed, and bound to fail, policy.

[FrenchieCat]

5. According to Wes Clark, it was an effort started long ago by PNAC

that didn't turn out the way that they had envisioned (5 year campaign, starting with Iraq-establish bases there and move to other countries in the ME)...and so now, we're kind of stuck there....cause we've opened Pandora's box....and if we leave, it explodes.....and if we stay, we and the Iraqis keep dying.

EXCERPTS FROM HARDBALL INTERVIEW 12/17/04

CLARK: ...I think, you know, a guy like Bill Kristol, what he sees is that Secretary Rumsfeld‘s plan is not unfolding the way that the neocons thought it should unfold in the Middle East. This was supposed to be like a scaffold. You know, you just go in there and carve out Saddam Hussein, boom, the people are liberated. And they‘re all democratic. And then the Syrians jump on board and say, hey, by golly, come and save us too. And then the Iranians and the Lebanese.

It hasn‘t worked that way, because what the neocons didn‘t understand is, that you don‘t get the kind of Democratic reform you want in the Middle East at the barrel of a gun. And they‘re holding Rumsfeld responsible for that. But really, it‘s a flawed conception.

MATTHEWS: That‘s interesting. You‘re the first person I‘ve heard say that, general. Because a lot of people look at it much more narrowly and they say the reason we‘re getting criticism of the general is there aren‘t enough troops there. He said he had enough troops, when really in reality, it was the conception that justified the low troop level. Is that your point? That you did not need a lot of troops, because you weren‘t going to face much of an insurgency.

CLARK: .....One is the point of the neocons, which is not military at all. It is the point of the operation and the fact that you could sort of go in there and lance the boil of Saddam Hussein, get him out of there and everything would turn out OK. And it hasn‘t."
http://securingamerica.com/node/60

[MichiganVote]

6. For a full and concise expl. read Fiasco/Tom Hicks

He lays it all out in its glory.

[FrenchieCat]

8. So what did he conclude.......?

without us having to read the book....although I plan on it.

[MichiganVote]

14. He concluded; (I haven't finished it yet)

Tommy Franks had no strategic ability and did no after occupation planning. That after the invasion he removed himself from the eventual insurgency and basically abandoned his command. Neither CIA or CPA had done any planning either leading to things like the looting, troops staying in and vandalizing the Hussein palaces, abuse and dereliction of duty.

The admin. was and is split between two ideological points of view and rather than assume leadership, Bush has allowed both sets to be pursued leading to confusion and chaos. Picture two parents who are raising one child, one harsh, the other indulgent....add in a culture that has existed for thousands of years....you get the idea.

That Paul Bremer was dogmatic and uncompromising, that Sanchez is the same and attemtped to micromanage to his detriment, that no one in the admin. understood the basics about Sunni's vs. Shites etc. That intelligence is and was available but is ignored by Rumsfeld and Bush.

In short:Incompetence+Ideology+Israel+Indigence= Idiots

[chieftain]

9. I just finished the book and as good as much of it is,

Ricks glosses over the Bremer decisions. He leaves open the question as to whether Bremer was acting on his own or taking orders from someone in the WH. I was also quite disappointed in his last chapter where he seems to come out in favor of staying to keep the lid on the violence until the Iraqis can handle the situation themselves. Ricks thinks that the military is in the process of getting their tactics right and even though W's crew has messed things up royal General Casey may be able to pull our fat out of the fire. I don't buy his current assessment at all, even though he does a great job of laying out the failures of the Neo Cons.

[MichiganVote]

13. Yes, I thought Hicks's was vague w/ regard to Bremer too. Galbraith

on the other hand, makes it very plain that Bremer was both taking orders out of the WH AND so cocksure of himself no one could tell him different. Bremer had no experience in the ocuntry of Iraq, had never held a post like this and had two weeks to "come up with a plan". I think that's Bushspeak for no plan myself. The fact that no one can pinpoint where directives come from in thsi administration makes it clear that Bush is not the decider he purports to be.

[chieftain]

15. I think you are right about W not being the decider he plays

on television.It has been a running question throughout his regime as to what the degree of involvement the boy president has in setting policy.I have always thought that the notion that he was totally programmed by Cheney, Rummy and Rove was not likely to be true especially since most of what these thugs have done dovetails with what I would have thought W would have wanted anyway. Over time I have changed my mind, though, and have come to the conclusion that he is nothing more that the front man for a ring of thieves.

[MichiganVote]

17. Bush is a pretender. His idea of management is the same as any

silverspoon headed kid....hire the maid, delegate the cleaning to the maid...don't look too closely at what the maid is or is not cleaning....and deny the dirt when others see it. He is not a bright man and he doesn't care whether others find him intellgent or not. Afterall, his survival is guaranteed.

All the strut and tough stuff is just BS and he knows it. He really is not afraid of anyone or anything other than assassination or impeachment.

[newspeak]

18. I'd say a view of *'s administration skills

could be seen while he was on the board of Carlyle--apathetic, easily distracted, telling off colored jokes. Basically, you have a group of paranoid, control freak power mongers, who probably don't trust each other. Probably one group pitting themselves against another group (Bush, Condi, Gonzales vs Cheney, Rumsfield?). Could be wrong. Powell and Armitage are seen as the more reasonable, moderate ones in this regime-and, now they're gone. It disturbs me that Armitage may be the one who leaked, but would he push Novak to expose Plame and the network so vociferously? I kind of doubt it. Afterall, Powell knew he was reading pure BS in front of the UN.

[Jacobin]

10. It was a bad idea from start to finish

Why does anyone think that the neo-con's vision of toppling Saddam and then la la land ensues?


That is the big mistake.

Saddam kept the crazy Shia under control with an iron fist. Once the fist was gone, bedlam ensued as everyone who knew anything about Iraq knew would happen

[Igel]

11. The military planned on decapitation.

Keep the lower and middle echelons in the bureaucracy, keep the army in place minus the top brass.

The fedayeen weren't in the playbook; nor the destruction of much of the bureaucracy's records. Suspicion was that some of the looting was planned; in any event, when 'national treasures' are looted, you have to assume that loyalty isn't to anything 'national'. Hint 1 (1a and 1b, actually) that things weren't going to go per plan. Nationalism turned out to be a hollow concept, contrary to all the predictions I heard.

Then the army vanished. They waited for it to show up. It didn't. A couple of weeks after issuing calls for the army to reform, for soldiers to report to their posts or barracks, they disbanded the thing; it seems the military was still expecting to be paid for having vanished. Loyalty was to tribe, self, and Saddam. Seems everybody focuses on the disbanding, not on the timing, or the fact that the disbanding didn't actually affect any troops. Second hint things were going to go badly. The 'up to 50,000 American casualties' for the invasion predicted at Huffington turned out to be a joke; even the more conservative 3,000 dead was far off the mark. Rummy never said 'cakewalk', and argued against it; but the invasion itself was one (the pundits labelled it such).

The army was probably a lost cause without a lot of work; but the bureaucracy maybe could have been saved.

Then the Shi'ites wanted revenge. Humiliation could be repaid only by humiliation. They couldn't submerge their lust for revenge to the needs of a nation, even provisionally. Hint #3 that things were going to go very badly. It's the one thing that Bremer *could* have done to help things: told them to be statesmen, not tribal leaders. But that would mean saying something undiplomatic. Bremer's a diplomat. Diplomats aren't leaders or governors; they're compromisers.

The Sunnis squealed. They were humiliating those that deserved humiliation; but the Sunnis' dignity was at stake, and they merited no humiliation. They decided they were displeased. When the army was called back into existence, the Sunnis didn't show.

Welcome to a tribal culture with weak loyalty to the idea of a cooperation-based state.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

16. Some realities:

Most likely the shrubco goal was always to have a long term sphere of influence in the Middle East with Iraq as the first stepping stone and base. This required occupation and bases, even though the stated goal was deposing Saddam Hussein. Their concept of waging this war included the benefits to shrub of increased political popularity and influence over congress and the people through whipping people into a warlike frenzy (remember where shrub was right before Iraq propaganda started, crap economy, corporate scandals), and money through oil, AND, apparently, funnneling a lot of taxpayer money both to Republican contractors and back to the party itself via contributions from those companies/people. Through war profiteering. (They've even done the same thing with Katrina).

Iraq was chosen because it was already weakened, we knew "how" to defeat it, and because the leader was a dictator easy to generate cartoon propaganda against.

Most of shrubco are corporate people and neophytes as far as military service and foreign policy. The advice of actual seasoned hands like Powell was disregarded. So the "planning" only went as far as the big rush to make sure the Iraq invasion happened while shrubco still held political power. The rest was just made up as they went along. I'm thinking they expected to be able to easily install a puppet government and control it and the country with a minimal occupation force (say 30K-ish).

This is what happens when you elect the guy who was proud to be a C student who probably always did his homework sloppily and at the last minute and was just barely able to pass and get his degree. Same kind of work as prez.

[newspeak]

19. yes, I agree

the neo-cons are following Machiavelli's "The Prince." Controlling us by perpetual war and gaining a foothold in the ME--his greedy buddies get to control the flow of the oil in Iraq--we know that they could care less about a democratic government, just look who are government has supported, including Saddam. This whole scenario is FUBAR--the American people will eventually pay the ultimate price (lives and debt) for being bamboozled by this administration and a complicit media.