Some inside perspectives from an Iraqi leader. link Insider: Missteps soured Iraqis on U.S. By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent Mon Apr 9, 2:08 AM ET NEW YORK - In a rueful reflection on what might have been, an Iraqi government insider details in 500 pages the U.S. occupation's "shocking" mismanagement of his country — a performance so bad, he writes, that by 2007 Iraqis had "turned their backs on their would-be liberators." ADVERTISEMENT "The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order," Ali A. Allawi concludes in "The Occupation of Iraq," newly published by Yale University Press. Allawi writes with authority as a member of that "new order," having served as Iraq's trade, defense and finance minister at various times since 2003. As a former academic, at Oxford University before the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, he also writes with unusual detachment. The U.S.- and British-educated engineer and financier is the first senior Iraqi official to look back at book length on his country's four-year ordeal. It's an unsparing look at failures both American and Iraqi, an account in which the word "ignorance" crops up repeatedly. First came the "monumental ignorance" of those in Washington pushing for war in 2002 without "the faintest idea" of Iraq's realities. "More perceptive people knew instinctively that the invasion of Iraq would open up the great fissures in Iraqi society," he writes. What followed was the "rank amateurism and swaggering arrogance" of the occupation, under L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which took big steps with little consultation with Iraqis, steps Allawi and many others see as blunders: • The Americans disbanded Iraq's army, which Allawi said could have helped quell a rising insurgency in 2003. Instead, hundreds of thousands of demobilized, angry men became a recruiting pool for the resistance. • Purging tens of thousands of members of toppled President Saddam Hussein's Baath party — from government, school faculties and elsewhere — left Iraq short on experienced hands at a crucial time. • An order consolidating decentralized bank accounts at the Finance Ministry bogged down operations of Iraq's many state-owned enterprises. • The CPA's focus on private enterprise allowed the "commercial gangs" of Saddam's day to monopolize business. • Its free-trade policy allowed looted Iraqi capital equipment to be spirited away across borders. • The CPA perpetuated Saddam's fuel subsidies, selling gasoline at giveaway prices and draining the budget. In his 2006 memoir of the occupation, Bremer wrote that senior U.S. generals wanted to recall elements of the old Iraqi army in 2003, but were rebuffed by the Bush administration. Bremer complained generally that his authority was undermined by Washington's "micromanagement." Although Allawi, a cousin of Ayad Allawi, Iraq's prime minister in 2004, is a member of a secularist Shiite Muslim political grouping, his well-researched book betrays little partisanship. On U.S. reconstruction failures — in electricity, health care and other areas documented by Washington's own auditors — Allawi writes that the Americans' "insipid retelling of `success' stories" merely hid "the huge black hole that lay underneath." For their part, U.S. officials have often largely blamed Iraq's explosive violence for the failures of reconstruction and poor governance. The author has been instrumental since 2005 in publicizing extensive corruption within Iraq's "new order," including an $800-million Defense Ministry scandal. Under Saddam, he writes, the secret police kept would-be plunderers in check better than the U.S. occupiers have done. As 2007 began, Allawi concludes, "America's only allies in Iraq were those who sought to manipulate the great power to their narrow advantage. It might have been otherwise."
The funny thing is that the USA knows better, or at least should know better. When we took over Germany, we let former Nazis take part in government and in policing of the new country. And it was a much smoother transition, not letting the Iraqi military or the Baath party participate early on was a monumental mistake that should never have happened, if ANYONE in our military or government actually bothered to study history. SHEESH !!!
A couple of these points are iffy at best, e.g. blaming the US for disbanding Baath government officials -- everyone knows that there's no way they could've convinced the Shiites to buy into any sort of democratic structure with these guys still in charge of key elements of government. But overall this is just a rehash of what we already know. The Bush administration failed to do its homework in Iraq, and that's why we have what we have now. Rumsfeld was probably the biggest culprit in all of this -- the commanders/administrators he put in place and the "reconstruction" plan -- it was an entirely inept operation that was doomed from the start. The man is merely a war hawk: his utter ineptitude at actually rebuilding what he had destroyed was exposed. I was one of those people that was definitely in favor of overthrowing Saddam. But this administration has absolutely failed at developing and implementing a reconstruction strategy for Iraq, and they have failed both the American and the Iraqi people in this regard. Today they're paying a heavy price for it in political capital. Who knows, maybe there's still hope. The trend of violence seems to be gradually reversing. But time is running out rather quickly.
God told me to invade Iraq. President George Bush has claimed he was told by God to invade Iraq and attack Osama bin Laden's stronghold of Afghanistan as part of a divine mission to bring peace to the Middle East, security for Israel, and a state for the Palestinians. The President made the assertion during his first meeting with Palestinian leaders in June 2003, according to a BBC series which will be broadcast this month. The revelation comes after Mr Bush launched an impassioned attack yesterday in Washington on Islamic militants, likening their ideology to that of Communism, and accusing them of seeking to "enslave whole nations" and set up a radical Islamic empire "that spans from Spain to Indonesia". In the programmeElusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, which starts on Monday, the former Palestinian foreign minister Nabil Shaath says Mr Bush told him and Mahmoud Abbas, former prime minister and now Palestinian President: "I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, 'George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.' And I did, and then God would tell me, 'George go and end the tyranny in Iraq,' and I did." And "now again", Mr Bush is quoted as telling the two, "I feel God's words coming to me: 'Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East.' And by God, I'm gonna do it." Mr Abbas remembers how the US President told him he had a "moral and religious obligation" to act. The White House has refused to comment on what it terms a private conversation. But the BBC account is anything but implausible, given how throughout his presidency Mr Bush, a born-again Christian, has never hidden the importance of his faith. http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article317805.ece
"This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while." -- George W Bush, using a loaded term which recalls the Christians' Medieval wars against Muslims in the so-called Holy Land, after stepping off the presidential helicopter on Sunday, September 16, 2001.
