[Dialogue] Emailing: US Army Blames Leaders Over Post-War Iraq - CommonDreams.org.htm
Harry Wainwright
h-wainwright at charter.net
Mon Jun 30 16:50:16 EDT 2008
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Published on Monday, June 30, 2008 by The Guardian/UK
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/30/iraq.usforeignpolicy>
US Army Blames Leaders Over Post-War Iraq
by Andrew Clark
The US army has told of errors, poor planning and complacency among its own
top commanders in a warts-and-all official history of the steep descent into
violence that followed the Iraq war.
<http://www.commondreams.org/archive/wp-content/photos/0630_07.jpg> 0630 07
In a 696-page account, army historians fault military and political leaders
for focusing excessively on toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003 without looking
towards a broader transition towards a stable society. Actions by the former
defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the top US commander during the Iraq
invasion, Tommy Franks, are singled out in the study, which was delayed for
six months to allow senior army figures to review drafts.
"The transition to a new campaign was not well thought out, planned for and
prepared for before it began," says the history, On Point II: Transition to
the New Campaign, published by an internal army thinktank called the
contemporary operations study team. "The assumptions about the nature of the
post-Saddam Iraq on which the transition was planned proved to be largely
incorrect."
It says Franks took senior colleagues by surprise by moving to a
slimmed-down, short-staffed headquarters shortly after the invasion of Iraq
was complete. He told his officers to be ready to cut back on forces in
preparation for "an abbreviated period of stability operations".
The study describes defence chiefs in Washington as ambivalent from the
start about a "ponderous, troop-heavy, logistics intensive and costly"
ongoing campaign to restore stability. "The [department of defence] did
commit resources to the planning of post-invasion operations," it says. "In
retrospect, however, the overall effort appears to have been disjointed and,
at times, poorly coordinated, perhaps reflecting the department's
ambivalence towards nation-building."
A hotly contested debate continues to rage over blame for Iraq's sustained
bloodletting. Britain's former chief of general staff, Sir Mike Jackson,
suggested in his memoirs last year that Rumsfeld's "intellectually bankrupt"
management undermined post-war planning by the state department.
Colleagues of Rumsfeld, such as his former under-secretary Douglas Feith,
have suggested that the Pentagon was let down by poor intelligence from the
CIA. Since standing down in 2006, Rumsfeld has been working on a book of his
own.
The blunt language used in the army's historical study is effectively
endorsed by the force's present chiefs. The document is based on 200
interviews with participants including the present chief of staff, General
George Casey.
Senior officers complain that their units were given little or no training
for so-called stability operations. Troops were not given plans for postwar
roles until the invasion was under way. There was an incorrect assumption
that Iraqi ministries would continue to operate even after the country's
leader was toppled.
Colonel Thomas Torrance, commander of an artillery division, told the
authors: "I can remember asking the question during our war gaming and the
development of the plan, 'OK, we are in Baghdad. What next?' No real good
answers came forth."
The army's then vice-chief of staff, Jack Keane, spoke of his misgivings
about the small scale of the force's headquarters in Iraq after George Bush
declared military victory in May 2003, describing the downsizing as "a
recipe for disaster".
William Wallace, head of the army's training and doctrine command, told the
authors: "We had the wrong assumptions and therefore we had the wrong plan
to put into play."
The Iraqi insurgency has led to soul-searching and changes of policy within
the US army. In February, the army published a new field manual placing more
emphasis on nation-building, peacekeeping and "unconventional" warfare.
C Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
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27 Comments so far
1.
Cedar June 30th, 2008 11:39 am
The first mistake was going in for EXXON and the rest of Cheney's
oily cabal. After that it's all down hill to the Bush Catastrophe. Will we
still have a country?
2.
mastershake June 30th, 2008 11:42 am
Al Qaeda is defeated. It's Iran's fault, I swear.
We're really running out of scapegoats here.
3.
Amused June 30th, 2008 11:47 am
Put away your toys, children . and clean up your mess. "Oh no,
there's post war consequences. Hadn't even thought of that."
4.
truthaddict June 30th, 2008 11:48 am
the problem is the war itself. not how it was fought.
5.
Mordechai Shiblikov June 30th, 2008 11:57 am
In other words, the people "leading" this nation (civilian and
military) are nothing more than a pack of towering fools and idiots. Puffed
up like a bag of marshmallows, they have made us all like the protagonist of
the film "D.O.A." - - - walking dead men. McCain will stride further and
further into the swamp of bloody and vainglorious failure as if it were the
swimming pool in the backyard of his desert mansion. Every other word from
his mouth will be "victory". Obama will do the same. There might be a small
voice in his head telling him, "Be smart, get out of it all . . . now" but
he will be surrounded by military, civilian and business death's heads,
lecturing, hectoring, poking him in the chest, yelling if necessary, getting
so far into his face he won't be able to tell the difference between them
and himself. And finally, the red hot ambition that made Obama want to be
president in the first place will compel him go along. The Paths of Glory
lead but to the grave.
6.
RichM June 30th, 2008 11:57 am
truthaddict (11:48) has said everything that needs to be said about
this article.
7.
curmudgeon99 June 30th, 2008 11:59 am
Does Carlin's oxymoron 'military intelligence' come to mind?
I can't remmember the source of the following quote:
'Ours is not to question why.
Ours is but to do or die.'
Certainly fits here.
8.
robinea June 30th, 2008 12:07 pm
The seemingly chaotic destruction of Iraqi civil and governmental
institutions was a deliberate policy of the US government and its military
with advice and support from the Israelis in order to dismember Iraq into
three primitive ethnicly-cleansed, tribal client states submitting to the
interests of a US-UK-Israeli Middle East Co-Prosperity Sphere. To achieve
this - all advanced institutions in Iraq had to be destroyed, all leaders -
both civilian, military, intellectual, scientific, trade union, artistic and
government - had to be assassinated, arrested, deprived of their jobs and
positions or driven into exile. There was never any plan to govern a
post-conquest Iraq so it would remain one unified republic when 'democratic
elections could be held'. Imperialism and colonialism use 'divide and
conquer' as its principle method of rule after a military conquest. No
question - the market bombings, the 'death squads', the systematic
disruption of normal, civilized life in as sophisticated a country as the
secular Republic of Iraq were all part of cynical, brutal social engineering
project on the part of the US military, the State Department, the British
government and the Israeli government and probably certain leaders in the
United Nations. The goal.was to destroy any modern, secular, sophisticated
Arab nation in the Middle East, which might opposed Israel's growing
hegemony through ethnic cleansing and population transfer.
So.the US military now blames the Bush Adminisration for the mess. What
hypocrites and imbeciles these be-medaled puppet generals are! They are
racists who will forever express clueless surprise that brown people, the
untermenschen below their contempt, whether Arab Iraqis or Vietnamese
nationalists, are capable of sustained, bloody resistance spanning
generations.
Viewed from this perspective.the role of oil and the oil multinationals
appear small indeed.
9.
Maplefudge June 30th, 2008 12:08 pm
Please stop calling it a war. It is an INVASION and BURGLARY and a
MASS MURDER.
10.
robinea June 30th, 2008 12:23 pm
One more thing.the smoking ruins of Iraq and the degradation and
agony of its people were supposed to serve as a 'lesson' to the rest of the
resource-rich, Third World, of what can happen to an entire people, their
culture and institutions, when their leaders nationalize and socialize the
national wealth in order to modernize their country and develop its capacity
to resist the dictates of empire. It was a kind of Israeli collective
punishment by bull-dozing an entire Palestinian neighborhood and arrest all
its men, writ large.
It has had the opposite effect of driving potential current and future
victims of the US to sign pacts and trade agreements with US imperial
competitors. The success of the Iraqi resistance has become an inspiration
to the world. The Iraqi resistance with their infinite capacity to sacrifice
and halt the US Empire have taken on the kind of image that the Russian
people and Red Army had in their unimaginable resistance to Hitler'
Wehrmacht and eventual victory over fascism.
11.
mastershake June 30th, 2008 12:29 pm
robinea June 30th, 2008 12:23 pm
Nonsense. Iraq is a great victory, and at very little cost. Both in
economic, political, and human terms. It's been a tremendous success. Only
about 600-700 billion of taxpayer dollars financed, to reap 30-40 trillion
at least for the foreign direct investors. The taxpayers never see a dime
though of course.
The leaders in charge also have to be laughing and happy with how
apathetic the masses are, and how easily influenced and manipulated they
are.
They're very happy with the outcome of Iraq thus far.
12.
scottstlouis June 30th, 2008 12:44 pm
Re:curmudgeon
I think it's from a Tennyson poem, "Charge of the Light Brigade"
13.
curmudgeon99 June 30th, 2008 1:03 pm
Thank you, Scottslewis
14.
bakunin June 30th, 2008 1:05 pm
If Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Feith, Bolton, and the rest of the
lying neo-con cabal aren't put on trial and convicted of treason, the
mistakes of Iraq will be repeated yet again, just as the mistakes of Vietnam
were repeated in Iraq. It is also essential that what went on in Cheney's
Energy Task Force meetings in 2000 finally be made public. That will confirm
that we went into Iraq to control the oil reserves and to set up permanent
bases. Bush/Cheney has been the administration of the Big Lie par
excellence. They long ago stepped over the line into criminality and proved
themselves to be a sort of mafia.
15.
NMBill June 30th, 2008 1:46 pm
What! The Iraqis didn't roll over after shock and awe?
The Project for the New American Century didn't predict that to
happen.
I believe that they honestly thought their plan would work, greedy
bastards!
--
This article is an attempt to write history with a twist to save
face.
16.
grigor <http://commondreams.org> June 30th, 2008 1:59 pm
All militarism is a perversion.
17.
Stephen V. Riley June 30th, 2008 2:06 pm
Andrew Clark says: "Colleagues of Rumsfeld, such as his former
under-secretary Douglas Feith, have suggested that the Pentagon was let down
by poor intelligence from the CIA"
What a crock of B.S.! The neocon likes of Doug Feith forced the CIA
to distort its' own intellignence to ram the war down the throat of the
Pentagon.
The Pentagon does not need a 696 page report on what went wrong.
What the Pentagon needs is a a mandetory sebatical to be educated on our
democratic form of government and the U.S. Constitution.
The Pentagon was totally irresponsible in not recognizing that the
balance of power between the legislative and executive brach of government
was most seriously out of wack. The Pentagon should have stonewalled orders
from an administration that had obviously gone mad until the truth could be
made evident to the Congress.
18.
KEM PATRICK June 30th, 2008 2:12 pm
It actually was all Iran's fault Bush now says and they're gonna get
it.
19.
zaz June 30th, 2008 2:12 pm
robineau 12:07 You nailed it, and the empire has plans more victims.
20.
Juliann June 30th, 2008 3:04 pm
It's not worth saying but I'm bustin' to say it: If Bill Clinton
were in the White House right now - and for the past 7 years - the right
would be throttling the doors to the white house to hang him, Sean Hannity
and his ilk leading the charge.
HOW DO GWB, CHENEY ET AL GET AWAY WITH THIS?????????
21.
fanman June 30th, 2008 3:22 pm
Juliann-
EASY - Clinton did not benifit from a 9/11 whereby he could proclaim himself
DICTATOR. er. make that Unitary Decider.
22.
Bernice June 30th, 2008 3:50 pm
The military could have saved themselves a lot of time by just
acknowledging that the reason we invaded AND STAYED is the oil promised to
Friends of Dick and George. Our illegal and immoral occupation and all the
death and destruction associated with it are what the writers of this report
should be screaming about.
23.
NancyH June 30th, 2008 4:22 pm
Democrats secretly colluding with Republicans and devoting millions
in covert operations to destabliize Iran. Is China going to pay for that
too? This country is finished - finished, thanks to our government's
PNAC/Joint Vision 2020 mentality to control the world.
24.
motamanx June 30th, 2008 4:25 pm
Read truthaddict again. End of story.
25.
John F. Butterfield <http://www.JohnFButterfield.com> June 30th,
2008 4:29 pm
http://poetry.eserver.org/light-brigade.html
"Their's but to do and die:"
is the usually misquoted line from
The Charge of the Light Brigade by
Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
26.
urthsong June 30th, 2008 4:36 pm
Consider the numbers of Penatagon generals, etal who have had to
resign because they disagreed with the Bush administration. They have spoken
out singly and in groups. The attrition of competent Pentagon leadership
goes right back to the Commander-In-Chief and his agents of change.
27.
citizenblog <http://www.citizensnews.org> June 30th, 2008 4:45 pm
Caravan of Love
Are you ready for the time of your life
It's time to stand up and fight
It's alright It's alright
It's alright It's alright
Hand in hand we'll take a caravan
To the motherland
One by one we're gonna stand with the pride
One that can't be denied
Stand up, stand up, stand up, stand up
>From the highest mountain, and valley low
We'll join together, with hearts of gold
Now the children of the world can see
There's a better way for us to be
The place where mankind was born
Is so neglected and torn. torn apart
Every woman, every man
Join the caravan of love
Stand up, stand up, stand up
Everybody take a stand
Join the caravan of love
I'm your brother
I'm your brother, don't you know
I'm your brother
I'm your brother, don't you know
We'll be living in a world of peace
In a day when everyone is free
We'll bring the young and the old
Won't you let your love flow from your heart
Every woman, every man
Join the caravan of love
Stand up, stand up, stand up
Everybody take a stand
Join the caravan of love
I'm your brother
I'm your brother, don't you know
Isley Brothers
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