Quote:
Originally Posted by risky91
they had an entire nation of people ready to be Americanized. literally begging to be Americans. how do you mess something up like that? the insurgency began when the most basic, fundamental needs to live weren't being provided. like food, water, electricity, sewage. how difficult is that to provide?
moreover, why is it in the coalition's interests for Iraq to be stable so quickly? what do they stand to gain from a stable Iraq? lower oil prices?
*note: i know i don't know what its like in Iraq. this is just from what i do know. :P
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During the postwar period, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) headed by Paul Bremer, governed Iraq with direct input from the key policy-makers at the Pentagon and the White House. The flawed decisions and mistakes made by those key players not only destabilized Iraq's security situation, but that it directly contributed in fueling the insurgency. U.S. mission in Iraq was doomed from the start by a failure of prewar planning. Key policy-makers at the White House and Pentagon were so blinded by ideology and disregarded the historic lessons of nation-building and adopted a false set of assumptions about Iraq and its people. The disconnect between civilian policy-makers and the military on the ground in Iraq over de-Baathification and the dissolution of the Iraqi Army are some of the mulitple mistakes that further aggravated the difficult post-conflict recontruction mission to the point where it's now nearly impossible to recover from.
The first big order of the Coalition Provisional Authority was CPA Order No. 1 which was de-Baathification.
de-Baathification drove 40,000 to 45,000 Baathists underground and wouldn't be able to bring back the government in a functional capability, because all the talent was in those first three or four levels of the Baath Party. The Baath Party members comprised most of the bureaucrats and civil servants in Iraq. You remove that amount of talent that had knowledge and experience in running the country, most everything else goes including the most basic services like electricity runs and traffic lights.
CPA Order No. 2 was dissolving the Iraqi army.
Bremmer's decision in dissolving the Iraqi army was the another huge blunder. State Dept wanted to keep as much of the Iraqi army intact as possible. The Iraqi army was about 400,000. State Dept wanted to bring between 150,000 and 250,000 back. State Dept and US military liason officers on the ground had contacts with Iraqi commanders who were waiting on our orders to immediately reconstitute their units. We wanted to keep them in their unit structures, because they had already had a command-and-control system. They had vehicles or what was left of them. They knew how to take orders, and they had the basic skill sets to do the things you need to do in early reconstruction of a country. So they were a labor force, and they provide a certain amount of security, like guarding static locations such as guarding buildings, guarding ammo dumps or displaced ammunition, etc...
By May 15, 2003, we had a large number of Iraqi army located that were ready to be reconstituted at a moments notice and the Treasury guys were ready to pay them. Another consequence for an order to dissolve the Iraqi army, you suddenly tell somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 soldiers that they're out of jobs, and they're all still armed. Now, you have a situation where they could become insurgents or terrorists. Another positive reason for reconsituting the Iraqi army is that we never had a force level high enough to provide the amount of security that we needed. Keeping part of the Iraqi army intact would have solved a number of problems we faced during the early days after we took Baghdad.
I think we should have started the constitutional process right away, and we should have shaped that constitutional process. Instead, we shifted from the Iraqi perception of us being liberators to the Iraqi perception of us being occupiers.
The civilian personnel at the CPA were also another major problem. At the beginning, one of Bremmer's deputies asked large executive headhunting firms to come to the Pentagon and help identify promising candidates to go to Baghdad. When the White House liaison office to the Pentagon found out about this, they freaked, and they ordered those guys to pack up and leave that same day. Bremer's deputy interceded and managed to keep the headhunters around, but their jobs were relegated to sort of vetting people's résumés. The actual decisions of who's going to be brought in, that all rested with the White House and the White House's people at the Pentagon, and with people like Paul Wolfowitz and Don Rumsfeld. As a result, many of the civilian personnel were young 20-something Republican loyalists who had no knowledge or experience in what were needed in the reconstruction and stabilization of the new Iraq. Instead of hiring people with knowledge of Arabic, knowledge of the Middle East, knowledge of post-conflict reconstruction, they went after the political loyalists and conservative think tanks and other places where they knew they would find people who would be unfailingly loyal to the president and to the president's mission in Iraq. They didn't know what they were supposed to be doing or who they were supposed to be working for. There were problems from the most basic duties like filling out forms to knowledge in how to establish law enforcement agecies and how to train police officers to knowing the mechanisms in building political parties and procedures in getting electricity back on. Many were totally unsuited for what they were doing and had no relevant experience.
Furthermore, the fact that life in the Green Zone being walled off from the rest of Iraq didn't help either. In the rest of Iraq, electricity is intermittent at best, sewage problems, dusty, dirty, potholes. Inside the Green Zone is relatively calm and quiet. These civilians working for the CPA had an incredible disconnect from the reality outside of the Green Zone. Outside, Iraq was in a fair degree of postwar chaos. There wasn't much electricity. There was a beginning of rampant crime on the streets, traffic jams. Nobody was working. Anarchy was beginning to take hold.
"they had an entire nation of people ready to be Americanized.
literally begging to be Americans. how do you mess something up like that?"
Very easy to mess up if you have no real plans for post-conflict reconstruction and stabilization. The problem is further aggravated when key policy-makers know little to almost nothing about the history and culture of Iraq. For example, when you have a situation where key policy-makers have no clue what the term, Sunni and Shiite, refers to, it makes an already difficult mission nearly impossible.
"the insurgency began when the most basic, fundamental needs to live weren't being provided. like food, water, electricity, sewage. how difficult is that to provide?"
I agree with you. It shouldn't have been difficult in providing them with those basic necessities. However, the lack of security on the ground since the actions of the CPA have created extremely difficult if not impossible situation to have reliable basic services due to constant sabotage/attacks to by Al Quada insurgents, sectarian groups and ordinary criminals activities involving theft. Even Iraq's oil production is way below pre-invasion production levels as a result of the constant sabotage to pipelines and oil well drilling operations. Although it's been over 3 yrs after the invasion of Iraq, they currently still face unreliable electrical services and shortages in many regions, shortages for gas with lines blocks long and so many other basic services.
Those are a few random thoughts to your questions, but there's so much more to this mess that historians will be discussing this event long into the future much like the history of the Vietnam War.
