LAST EDITED ON 10-08-04 AT 02:50 PM (EST)Skiver, I disagree. Big surprise, right?
Iraq is a huge mess, and it's that way because of two things that Bush did.
1. He invaded.
I completely disagree with this. It's funny; I was in a work meeting yesterday where the subject turned to the Presidential race, and I was asked whether, knowing what we know today, I would have invaded. I answered yes, based on the fact that Saddam was openly claiming to defy the cease-fire from the end of the 1991 war -- and how could we know he was lying unless we actually enforced the violation? Even if our intelligence had told us that Saddam had zero WMD, we couldn't not react to his public defiance of the cease-fire.
The status quo in Iraq was completely unstable at the time of the Iraq War. Saddam was bribing French politicians, as we now know, and the French were simply not going to side with any action against Iraq. At the same time, Iraq was becoming a huge humanitarian crisis, which Saddam and his friends in the West were blaming on the U.S. sanctions (although the real root cause appears to be Saddam's siphoning of the Oil-for-Food profits). Even the U.N. officials who administered Oil-for-Food ... and who we now know were receiving kickbacks from Saddam ... were urging us to loosen the sanctions.
Proving that he had learned SOMETHING from the sad example of British PM/moron Neville Chamberlain, Bush refused. And, when Saddam refused to take actions to show that he intended to comply with the cease-fire from now on, Bush did the only thing you can do against a party that insists on ignoring its obligations under international agreements.
In this regard, I generally agree with Mickey Kaus (except for the parenthetical):
http://www.slate.com/id/2107823/
Kausfiles is Stupid! I don't understand things everyone else seems to understand! For example:
1) If a man says he has a gun, acts like he has a gun, and convinces everyone around him he has a gun, and starts waving it around and behaving recklessly, the police are justified in shooting him (even if it turns out later he just had a black bar of soap). Similarly, according to the Duelfer report, Saddam seems to have intentionally convinced other countries, and his own generals, that he had WMDs. He also convinced much of the U.S. government. If we reacted accordingly and he turns out not to have had WMDs, whose fault is that? Why doesn't Bush make that argument--talking about Saddam's actions in the years before the U.S. invasion instead of Saddam's "intent" to have WMDs at some point in the future? (It wouldn't necessarily make the Iraq war prudent, but it would make Americans feel more comfortable about it than what Bush has been telling them.)
I must admit that I love how Kerry insists that we sign more international agreements without even wanting to enforce the existing ones. I guess Kerry thinks (IF he thinks) that international law is only binding on the U.S.
2. He went in with too few troops, having discarded and ignored all of the State Department's planning (the 'Future of Iraq' project, that among other things warned about the possibility of lawlessness and looting), and allowed Rumsfeld to gut the Army 'TPFDD' (a detailed deployment plan) for the Iraq operation - an unprecedented action by a secretary of defense.
Well, the justification for this was that we were going to use Iraqi troops once we won the war. But that decision became a major screw-up when Dumbos Bremer and Wolfowitz canceled the plans on their own ... and you know what followed. See this article from November 2003, when it was already obvious that Bremer and Wolfowitz had screwed up:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A63423-2003Nov19?language=printer
Before the war, President Bush approved a plan that would have put several hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers on the U.S. payroll and kept them available to provide security, repair roads and prepare for unforeseen postwar tasks. But that project was stopped abruptly in late May by L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, who ordered the demobilization of Iraq's entire army, including largely apolitical conscripts....
As Garner was developing the policy amid the unexpected lawlessness in Baghdad, the White House replaced him with Bremer, a terrorism specialist with high-level State Department experience. He arrived May 12 with a mandate from Bush to take firm control of the U.S. occupation.
By that time, the prewar intelligence had proved inaccurate. No Iraqi units changed sides, and the number of surrendering forces was small. Iraqis had sacked Army garrisons, and entire divisions had melted away.
Bremer soon declared in internal meetings that no Iraqi units would be reconstituted and that soldiers would not be paid. On May 23, he issued a formal order that dismissed the army and canceled pensions. The order covered many categories of Iraqis, among them war widows and disabled veterans who were senior party members, defined as any officers at the rank of colonel or above.
U.S. officials in Baghdad, including Garner and Bates, were startled.
"It came with formidable force and decisiveness, as the president's policy. Nobody was supposed to challenge it and that was that," said one U.S. official in Baghdad at the time. Another said: "There was never a discussion that I was involved in where we would disband the military. It caught me completely by surprise."
The second official, recalling violent crime in the Iraqi capital, said Iraqi commanders had offered to gather soldiers, who would be paid for their work. The Americans could easily have pulled together "a couple of thousand military police in the Baghdad region," he said. "Many of the soldiers had taken their weapons home. Some had armored vehicles."
The demobilization decision appears to have originated largely with Walter B. Slocombe, a former undersecretary of defense appointed to oversee Iraqi security forces. He believed strongly in the need to disband the army and felt that vanquished soldiers should not expect to be paid a continuing salary. He said he developed the policy in discussions with Bremer, Feith and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz.
Bremer and Wolfowitz also made the other major blunder of the war: stopping the Marines' attack on Fallujah. So it's certainly possible to argue that Wolfowitz should already have been sacked. I certainly won't dispute that we needed either more troops or loyal Iraqi troops during the post-invasion period.
However, is Iraq a "huge mess"? It happens to be one of only three (or maybe four) countries in the Middle East that isn't controlled by a government dedicated to the destruction of Israel (the others: Israel, Afghanistan, and maybe Pakistan). Now that the al-Sadr problem appears to have been resolved, the focus can stay on the Sunni.
Oh, and Afghanistan is holding elections this weekend, despite the ongoing efforts of the Taliban remnants and al-Qaeda to stop them:
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=599525§ion=news
The tanker truck would have made a big boom --- but it seems to have been averted. And look at what the residents are quoted by Reuters (certainly not a friendly source) as saying:
"Yes, security is a concern," said an elderly man with a trim salt-and-pepper beard as he shopped in a Kabul bazaar. "But this will be a great day. I will vote. I'm optimistic that an elected government can improve people's lives."...
As worshippers thronged Kabul's mosques for weekly prayers on Friday, much of the talk was about the poll.
"The majority of the people will vote," said Zabihullah Jawad, a university student who was at the Pul-i Khishti Mosque, the largest in the city.
"The election will not only make the destiny of one man, it is important for every individual Afghan. It will make the destiny of each one of them."
The preacher said in the sermon: "Be happy tomorrow, it is a very important moment for Afghanistan. It is important to vote."
More than 10.5 million Afghans within the country have registered to vote, despite threatened Taliban reprisals. Women make up more than 40 percent of those who have registered, organisers say. An additional 1.3 million refugees in Pakistan and Iran are also eligible.
Late on Friday, a Kabul mobile phone company sent a text message to all its subscribers: "One day till election day. Remember to cast your vote. For a better tomorrow."
But, Skiver, you, shakes and Kedwards do have people rooting for your side in Afghanistan:
In the south, a hotbed of Islamic conservatism, some men said they would not vote nor allow their wives and daughters to vote.
"We are against these elections," said Mullah Hassan, speaking at his home in the city of Kandahar.
"I never wanted to take part in it. A successful election here is just a success for the Americans."...
"Whichever government is made by the Americans for us, it will be unacceptable," Mullah Obaidullah, the former defence minister of the Taliban regime, said in a statement.
"The Americans have insulted our autonomy, independence and dignity (and) unjustly invaded our frontiers. We will retaliate to this insulting attitude and treatment with full force."
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