The Scum at the Top
Commentary on the Rats in Washington
Thanks to Donald Rumsfeld, Iraq is still America's to lose
By Joseph L. Galloway
Pioneer Press
© Sunday, December 21, 2003
The good news is that Saddam Hussein was yanked out of
his rat hole and put behind barbed wire where he isn't a
threat to anyone. The better news is that the U.S.
military cannot be defeated in Iraq, not by terrorist
car bombs, booby traps and snipers.
The bad news is that Iraq is still America's to lose,
or America's to throw away.
If it goes south, it will be due to the extraordinary
interagency bickering, bureaucratic constipation,
self-imposed isolation and misguided personnel policies
of the Coalition Provisional Authority that runs civil
administration and nation-building in a place where
everything is broken.
In short, America could still bleed to death from
self-inflicted wounds that date to well before the
signal was given to invade Iraq.
Secretary of State Colin Powell was the only top official
in the Bush administration who thought there was a need
for postwar planning and postwar action. Powell's people
prepared a detailed study of what might be needed after
the war was. They wrote a plan thick as a big city phone
book.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his key aides, however,
ordered the director of the Office of Reconstruction and
Humanitarian Aid, Lt. Gen. (retired) Jay Garner, to ignore
State's report and recommendations - and also told him he
was forbidden to hire 32 of the best experts on Iraq.
Rumsfeld and Co. believed what they were told by the Iraqi
exiles led by Ahmed Chalabi: There was no need for postwar
planning because the Iraqi army would surrender in place,
be sanitized of the worst of Saddam's butchers and then be
put to work on America's behalf. Security wouldn't be a
problem in any case, they said, because the Iraqi people
would shower the invaders with rose petals.
With the wrong idea of what was needed, they prepared for
a massive humanitarian relief effort to feed thousands of
refugees who never materialized. Without adequate staff,
without even a secure communication link, Garner and ORHA
foundered.
Exit Garner. Enter Ambassador Paul Bremer and the newly
christened Coalition Provisional Authority, still firmly
under Rumsfeld's thumb. Only now did the administration
begin to organize for reconstruction and nation-building.
Eight months were lost while the original mistakes were
compounded.
One of Bremer's first actions was to dissolve the Iraqi
army, offering no hope to a bunch of newly unemployed
soldiers, armed, trained and angry.
An Iraqi Governing Council was installed without
sufficient representation of the Sunni Arab minority,
a quarter of Iraq's 24 million people. The false
impression that the Sunni members of Saddam's Baath
Party would be purged from public life down to the
least member took hold because the CPA's strategic
communications plan to communicate with the Iraqi
people was broken. It remains broken.
Meantime, the CPA took on administrators and officials
who serve only 90 days in Iraq before rotating home,
severely limiting their ability to make three-month
tours while American soldiers do a year.
The CPA and Bremer, hunkered down in Saddam's main marble
palace and isolated behind the heavily fortified and
guarded Green Zone, walled off from those they would
govern and help, report only to the Department of
Defense - at Rumsfeld's insistence. Though they work
for DOD and Rumsfeld, they take an arm's-length attitude
toward the American troops and commanders in Iraq.
The CPA, which has billions in reconstruction aid, has
little or no ability to identify and fund vital
reconstruction projects in the insecure areas of the
country. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army units occupying those
dangerous places are without the money to fund local
and regional projects that might offer hope to the
locals and some reason not to take up the gun.
While auditors and inspectors general and congressional
committees pick away at the smell of scandal in all the
outsourced contracts - cost-plus, of course - for supplying
wildly overpriced gasoline and kerosene and for building
and running all those Army facilities, Iraqis grow angrier
as they wait in lines five miles long and two cars wide
for a chance to buy a tank of gasoline.
Secretary Rumsfeld must have the date July 1, 2004, circled
in red on his calendar. No matter how big a mess his people
make of reconstructing a nation, on that date the CPA will
become a U.S. embassy with a thousand officials and employees.
The mess then will be handed over to Colin Powell and
the State Department, the very people Rumsfeld has frozen
out of the process.
Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight
Ridder Newspapers. Readers may write to him at:
Knight Ridder Washington Bureau,
700 National Press Building,
Washington, DC 20045.
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Last Modified:
January 13, 2007