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Where do we go from here? (continued)




Lawrence Korb: Postpone the June 30 transfer of power

What went wrong? You had an administration with an ideological agenda. They tried to fit the facts to their vision, so anybody who disagreed with the prevailing view about the reasons for going to war was put aside. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was trying to prove his transformation worked, that you don’t need a lot of ground forces. And they listened to the Iraqi exiles. Ahmed Chalabi hadn’t been in Baghdad since the Dodgers were in Brooklyn! And Bush — I don’t know if it was because of his faith or what — assumed that our values are shared by all people throughout the world because they’re God’s gift to humanity, as he said, not the American people’s gift. We were just bringing God’s gift to the Iraqis, and assumed that they’d be thrilled to get it.

We have overwhelming conventional military power. Basically, if we want to, we can restore order any place that we want. The question is, then what? They can wear you down. Even though you’ve taken over, quote unquote, you’re still going to be suffering these casualties, and at some point people ask whether it’s worth the cost. For Israel, if you think people are out to get rid of your state, then you’ll pay any cost. But the Americans don’t see this as an existential threat, so they’re going to say, "How many more people are going to die? How much more money are we going to spend?" Remember the reaction to that $87 billion Iraq spending bill? People said, "What the hell’s going on? You’re closing firehouses here and you’re opening them in Baghdad?"

We didn’t have enough troops. If you look at the percentage in Bosnia or other occupations — Germany, Japan — you just don’t have enough troops. This is connected to Rumsfeld’s project and, I think, a desire to mask from the American people the difficulty of what was going on. When General Eric Shinseki, the Army’s chief of staff, said we might need several hundred thousand soldiers for the postwar occupation, Paul Wolfowitz said he was "wildly off the mark." People would have said, wait a second — it’s one thing to send 130,000; it’s another thing to send a quarter of a million people in.

We need to postpone the June 30 deadline. I think it’ll happen. Bush is incredible — he’s opposed to the 9/11 commission, he was opposed to creating the Department of Homeland Security — but whatever else you think about the guy, the guy’s a good politician. At some point he can say, "Well, it’s going to be contingent upon security and getting the situation under control." People don’t mind you changing your mind if you change it to do the right thing.

Lawrence Korb is a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Phillip Carter: An underwhelming troop presence doomed the mission from the start

I think the biggest mistake in Iraq was the first one made, and that was to not put enough resources into the mission. Initially this meant not putting enough planning resources into the mission for how to stabilize Iraq after the war, and that drove the decision to not deploy enough troops to Iraq to provide adequate security and stability immediately after the Hussein regime fell. The cascade effect of that decision has been with us ever since last spring. The US still has to establish security. It has to establish the environment that will allow law to develop, elections to flourish, a market economy of some sort to take root, and civil society to generally operate. We’ve learned in Bosnia and Kosovo and Haiti and Somalia and Afghanistan that the civilian population will not come out of their homes and interact with each other as a civil society until they feel safe.

We’ve created security in the past with an overwhelming troop presence at the outset, which essentially telegraphed the message to insurgents, "We’re the baddest guy on the block. If you do anything, we are going to respond with overwhelming force." But in Iraq, the model didn’t work that way. We came in with an underwhelming show of force, insurgents and looters took root quite quickly, and we’ve been struggling to eliminate them ever since. At this point, we still may need to make that overwhelming show of force, and only then, I think, can we back off from that posture to a more peaceful and friendly posture.

I think we should be wary of the desire to get out of Iraq very quickly and cut our losses because of the effects that may have down the road. We will essentially tell our enemies that if you behave like the Iraqi insurgents, then you too can be victorious against the United States. If you inflict enough casualties, you will destroy America’s political will to do anything in the world. I also think all of the unstated reasons for going to war, that is, stabilizing the Middle East, building some sort of nation regime in Iraq that upholds human rights and does the right thing in international affairs — all of those reasons will not be served by pulling out now. If we pull out now, the regime that takes root in Iraq is probably going to be as vicious and as destructive as the regime we sought to replace. If that happens, all of our work and all of our expenditures in blood and treasure will be for naught, and that would be a real tragedy.

Phillip Carter is a former Army officer who attends UCLA Law School and writes on military and legal affairs. He also created the blog "Intel Dump" (www.philcarter.blogspot.com), which provides analysis of the military strategies deployed in Iraq.

Craig Unger: The biggest mistake was not listening to Richard Clarke

The Bush administration put forward this vision of a democratic Iraq, with a modern market economy and modern democracy. To build those institutions is a three-, five-, 10-year proposition at the very best, which would require enormous numbers of American troops there. It’s an extraordinary investment. When the American people signed on for this war, I suspect they thought they were getting a replay of the Gulf War of ’91 — that it would be three weeks in and then out. President Bush’s "Mission Accomplished" display, which is nearly a year old, shows that that’s not going to be the case.

We’re in this war because the administration tried to conflate Saddam and Osama, and nothing could be more different. Saddam was far more secular — he was an enemy of Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden wanted to attack Saddam and Iraq, in fact, in 1990 and 1991 and to take the place of the Americans during the Gulf War. It is simply wrong to conflate the two, yet the administration has tried to do that again and again and again. We’ve seen now that there really is no evidence that Iraq was a clear threat to the United States whatsoever.

It’s important to remember that by the mid ’90s, the Clinton administration had understood the transnational nature of terrorism, a new kind of terrorism devised by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, and Richard Clarke began to create a fairly forceful and aggressive policy to fight it. They struck back quite forcefully in 1998, after Al Qaeda bombed the two American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya — and they were completely ridiculed at the time by the Republicans and the press with the "wag the dog" scenario because it was during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. As a result of that, the Clinton administration did not have the political capital to execute Clarke’s policies. But in October of 2000, Al Qaeda bombed the USS Cole. It was not definitively pinned on Al Qaeda until the presidential transition was taking place. During that time, the decision was made that it was not possible to attack Afghanistan and essentially start a war during the presidential transition. But by the time Bush took office, Clarke had an aggressive plan that was there in the White House, and former national-security adviser Sandy Berger and Clarke had thoroughly briefed Condi Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley, and they had this plan and it sat on their desk for eight months without them taking action. There was no response to the bombing of the USS Cole. In Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 commission, she said that to have responded tit for tat would have emboldened Al Qaeda. Well, I’m not sure — not responding is an aggressive move? I don’t understand her logic.

Craig Unger is author of House of Bush, House of Saud (Scribner, 2004).

page 3 

Issue Date: April 16 - 22, 2004
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