Iraqi Letters

In my last post, I outlined three contradictory views on the US post-invasion plans:

 Major Wilson, official historian of the campaign: "There was no Phase IV plan"…. "There was no adequate operational plan for stability operations and support operations."

 General Tommy Franks, chief of the Central Command: "I was confident in the Phase IV plan."

 Naomi Klein, activist-journalist: "…the blame rests with the plan itself, and the extraordinarily violent ideology upon which it is based.”

To add more confusion to all this… in trying to research the subject, only two days ago I came across an excellent article by Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution. It offers a no-conspiracy-theory assessment of this very matter. O’Hanlon reaches a conclusion that there was a plan… but it was a bad one: “The war plan was seriously flawed and incomplete.”

I have already stated that all this can be rather confusing. Can anyone call any of these people a liar or even incompetent? In honesty, I don't think that any responsible person should! So? What if all these people are right? Is this possible? Consider the following:

Premises

1. There is no conspiracy. Neocon literature is out there in the open for anyone to read. They are in fact quite active in promoting their vision of America, of the world and of this century. They are not shy about it. They are fond of their “creative destruction” doctrine.

2. To put it mildly, neocons have considerable influence in the present administration, to the extent that the sober and influential “Economist” advised European governments not to take them lightly: “… demonising them will merely marginalise their critics.”

3. We also know that the neocons, since 2000, have almost total political control of the Department of Defense.

4. We also know that the State Department had been working hard on its own post-invasion plans. Numerous committees produced that 13-volume study. We also know that these plans were never seriously considered for implementation. They were simply ignored.


An attempt to make some sense of it all!

Based on the above premises, consider the following possible scenario. I must add that this is just a conjecture to try and make some sense out of things and explain events:

1. The army in the US, as everybody knows, does not directly initiate or has much of a say in "political or economic" plans.

2. They were given the task of invading and occupying Iraq – which they prepared for, and did, successfully.

3. There was a neocon post-invasion plan. We now know that there was. Evidently, that plan was fermented by people close to the supreme decision-making corner and was therefore not debated within other (hostile) echelons of power in Washington or elsewhere. Hence, the mystery.

4. The military people were given the task of securing the country in terms that would allow the "political and economic" plan to be implemented – which they did “unsuccessfully” because there was inherent incompatibility with the military objectives.

5. They were given only "need to know" guidelines. They acted within that fragment of a plan. The assumptions and premises of the plan were basically "civilian" (in this case, neocon). For some reason, army planners did not subject those premises to sufficient scrutiny! This certainly explains those post-invasion "militarily stupid" mistakes. The army people do what they are told, but they are not stupid.

What happened in Iraq after the invasion fits so well with the neocon doctrine and visions. If we do not assume incompetence to an unbelievably criminal degree, then that philosophy is the only thing that offers anything like a plausible explanation.

So, my own conclusions regarding these incompatibilities are…

 Naomi Klein is correct. All those ‘mistakes’ actually fit well within such a plan.

 General Franks was correct. He had an operational partial plan. He had a specific task… and planned for it. He was "blinded" to the "civilian" aspects of the plan and its “social” assumptions, or “accepted “ them (which doesn't really absolve him from responsibility for the loss of at least the America soldier blood).

 Major Wilson is right. There was no all-encompassing, comprehensive plan that he was looking for as an army historian.

Whether that disaster was intentional or due to faulty underlying assumptions or to unforeseen factors that were not considered… is another matter that may or may not be debated within the States. It certainly is being intensely debated in Iraq and elsewhere, and will be debated for a long time. [I feel exceptionally generous this morning. I am even accommodating conspiracy theorists here. You’re welcome]

The important conclusion is that the link between the military plan and the political-economic plan are the civilian (political) controllers at the Pentagon, chiefly: Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith. These people are to a large extent responsible, directly or indirectly, for much of the Iraqi and the American blood that was needlessly shed and is being shed since the "Mission Accomplished" announcement.


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Postscripts:

1. I am grateful to an anonymous comment poster for the following tip:
Intel-Dump, a blog by a former Army officer, journalist and a recent UCLA law student, links directly to Dr. Wilson's 64 page report. [which is an excellent piece of professional workmanship… although I would take issue with some of his assumptions regarding the “other side”.]
I am also grateful to “em dash” of LiberalStreetFighter.com for the link to an overview of neoconservatives in Wikipedia.


2. My arguments above cover events up to April 2004. I have come to believe that between April and May 2004 there was a shift of policy.


3. Michael O’Hanlon is a bit more “liberal” than I am in distributing the blame for the plan / fiasco under discussion. The following excerpts from his article may be of interest:

“The problem was simply this: The war plan was seriously flawed and incomplete. Invading another country with the intention of destroying its existing government yet without a serious strategy for providing security thereafter defies logic and falls short of proper professional military standards of competence. It was in fact unconscionable.

"Many basic tasks that should have been seen as necessary in Iraq—policing the streets, guarding huge weapons depots, protecting key infrastructure, maintaining public order—were simply not planned for. Instead, such planning as there was, conducted largely out of the office of Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, was reportedly unfocused, shallow, and too dependent on optimistic scenarios…

"Even as it became apparent that the initial assumptions were wrong, the Pentagon was unresponsive. The initial post-invasion chaos was famously attributed by Donald Rumsfeld to the fact that "freedom's untidy." In fact, only the U.S.-led coalition military forces were in a position to stabilize the anarchic conditions."

Whose responsibility?

The mistake here was primarily of the Bush administration's making. Indeed, much of the prevalent view within the uniformed military is that the Rumsfeld / Wolfowitz/ Cheney vision of modern warfare, as well as their strong preconceptions about how easy it would be to depose Saddam, deserve the blame for CENTCOM's lack of readiness to handle the challenges that began to present themselves in Iraq on April 9, 2003 when Saddam's statue fell in Baghdad. This perspective is mostly right. It is also too simple.

The uniformed military in fact shares some of the blame for the mistakes made in planning the Iraq stabilization mission. That is partly because General Tommy Franks in the end was the author of the plan. Even if he was under pressure from Secretary Rumsfeld to produce a certain concept, he had every opportunity to voice his objections. It is also because the joint chiefs of staff, with the apparent exception of Army Chief of Staff Shinseki, reportedly blessed the plan as well. It is also because no member of the armed forces of the United States went public with his objections or resigned in protest even though the plan was the military equivalent of medical malpractice.