SubscribeDavid Phillips, a former State Department official, tells the story in his book, 'Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco'. Phillips was in charge of the Democratic Principles Working Group of the Future of Iraq Project, where he convened a variety of Iraqi exiles to envision how Iraq would be governed after the fall of Saddam. The most prominent exile in the group was Brandeis professor Kanan Makiya, one of Ahmed Chalabi's chief deputies. Makiya was the man who had famously told Bush that Americans would be greeted in Iraq with sweets and flowers. In late January 2003, less than eight weeks before the war began, Phillips wrote:I mean, hell, I knew that, and I'm just some Canadian computer programmer! Doesn't Bush bother to read his briefing papers?Kanan was invited to watch the Super Bowl at the White House; he told me later that he had to explain to the President of the United States the differences between Arab Shi'a, Arab Sunnis, and Kurds.I talked to David Phillips over breakfast and asked what Makiya had meant by this. Did he mean that Bush didn't understand the fine points of their cultural and religious differences? No.
PHILLIPS: What Makiya told me was that he didn't know there was a difference. That among Iraqis there were Arab Shia, Arab Sunni, and Kurds.
ME: He didn't know that there existed those three groups?
PHILLIPS: That's right. This is pretty basic. You're going to go to war in a country, you should know who lives there.
The situation for American troops may be even more precarious. While our forces are still able to carry out aggressive patrolling, it nets little except to increase popular hostility, which, of course, makes it yet easier for the various insurgents and guerrilla groups to operate against us. It appears that in many places our people may have simply hunkered down to stay out of trouble. The vast construction projects of a few years ago are all but closed down, too, as the American forces appear to be doing less and less of anything but holding on and holding out.Or we could still nuke Iran. Or supersize our order and get both. Oh, well, look on the birght side, hope for the not worst.
The shortage of troops, which three years ago was a restraining factor, has become a potential disaster, with the ever-rising level of hostility to the American presence. To stay the course, to win, to realize our objectives, we need a half-million soldiers to pacify that country. If the force levels remain the same for another year and a half, this small, exhausted and overused American force may become so unglued that staying in Iraq will be come impossible. There may be no choice but retreat.
No, that's wrong. There is another choice. Americans can try to make up for their lack of numbers with firepower. Blow what's left of the country to smithereens. The political effects would be unspeakable and the ground troops might well still have to be extracted from their plight...
Air evacuation would mean abandoning billions of dollars of equipment. There is no seaport troops could get to, so the only way out of Iraq would be that same desert highway to Kuwait where fifteen years ago the American Air Force destroyed Saddam Hussein's army.
Dunkirk in the desert.
The New York Times and others have reported that in 2003, the CIA station chief in Baghdad authored several special field reports that offered extremely negative assessments of the situation on the ground in Iraq—assessments that later proved to be accurate. The field reports, known as “Aardwolfs,” were angrily rejected by the White House. Their author—who I'm told was a highly regarded agency veteran named Gerry Meyer—was soon pushed out of the CIA, in part because his reporting angered the See No Evil crowd within the Bush administration. “He was a good guy,” one recently retired CIA official said of Meyer, “well-wired in Baghdad, and he wrote a good report. But any time this administration gets bad news, they say the critics are assholes and defeatists, and off we go down the same path with more pressure on the accelerator.”
In 2004 Meyer was replaced with a new CIA station chief in Baghdad, who that year filed six Aardwolfs, which, sources told me, were collectively as pessimistic about the situation in Iraq as the ones sent by his predecessor. The station chief finished his assignment in December 2004; he was not fired, but according to one source is now “a pariah within the system.” Three other former intelligence officials gave me virtually identical accounts, with one saying the ex–station chief was “treated like shit” and “farmed out.” (I was given the former station chief's name and current position, but I am not publishing the information because he is still employed by the CIA.)
As has been the case with other people deemed to be insufficiently loyal, the White House went fishing for dirt on the two station chiefs, including information on their political affiliations. “I spent 30 years at the CIA,” said one former official, “and no one was ever interested in knowing whether I was a Republican or a Democrat. That changed with this administration. Now you have loyalty tests.”
The fate of those two station chiefs had a predictable effect. In 2005, I'm told, the Baghdad station chief filed but a single Aardwolf. The report, which one person told me was widely derided within the CIA as “a joke,” asserted that the United States was winning the war despite all evidence to the contrary. It was garbage, but garbage that the Bush administration wanted to hear; at the end of his tour, that Station Chief was given a plum assignment. “This is a time of war,” said one former intelligence official. “Every day American kids are getting killed over there. We need steady, focused reporting [from Baghdad] but no one is willing to speak out since they know they'll get shot down.”
Baghdad - A car bomb struck an Iraqi police checkpoint in a Shi'ite area southwest of Baghdad, killing at least 12 people and wounding 38, police said.Some but by no means not all of today's entries from Reuters's Factbox: Developments in Iraq on June 17
Baghdad - A car bomb targeting a police patrol in Baghdad's southern Dora district killed one policeman and wounded four others, a police source said.
Baghdad - A bomb on a minibus killed four people and wounded 14 in eastern Baghdad, a police source said.
Baghdad - A car bomb targeting a police patrol wounded four people, including three police commandos, in eastern Baghdad, police said.
Mahmudiya - A car bomb targeting an Iraqi army checkpoint killed seven people and wounded 15 in Mahmudiya, 30 km (20 miles) south of the capital, police said.
Baghdad - A car bomb targeting Iraqi army and police forces in Baghdad killed 11 people, including an Iraqi soldier, and wounded 15, police sources said...
While the security situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate, there are further indications of the slide towards open insurgency in Afghanistan. The Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) is still meant to be taking control of all substantive military operations from the United States, thus enabling the Pentagon to withdraw several thousand troops from the country. Amid conflicting estimates, the intention seems to have been to evacuate around 4,000 troops in the coming months, taking the US forces in the country down to perhaps 15,000 from the current figure of close to 20,000.A Tale of Two Insurgencies
Instead, and quite extraordinarily, the reverse is happeningjust as Nato member-states feed in several thousand more troops for Isaf, the United States is adding thousands more to its own contingent. In all, there will be well over 30,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan by mid-summer 2006--the largest number since the war began nearly five years ago.
Furthermore, the evidence of the past few weeks indicates that Taliban militia groups have hugely increased in confidence, taking over some districts and even engaging foreign troops in large groups of fifty-strong or more (rather than in units of fewer than ten, as formerly). It is also likely that as they permeate more districts across the south and east of the country they will tend to identify the weaker and less well-trained elements of the Isaf military, isolating them for specific attack and further complicating the whole Isaf stance...
...Visits to detention centers in southern Iraq in recent months indicated they are often badly overcrowded and unsanitary. At the Tesfirat prison in Najaf last October, 122 prisoners were packed into cells designed for a maximum of 60, according to Lt. Jassim Juwad, the prison officer in charge. A prison maintained by police commandos in Hilla and designed for 150 inmates housed 400 as recently as April. Inmates at both locations had been incarcerated for up to 18 months without trial.Shiite Militias Control Prisons, Official Says
On Saturday, a group of parliament members paid a surprise visit to a detention facility run by the Interior Ministry in Baqubah, north of Baghdad. "We have found terrible violations of the law," said Muhammed al-Dayni, a Sunni parliament member who said as many as 120 detainees were packed into a 35-by-20-foot cell. "They told us that they've been raped," Dayni said. "Their families were called in and tortured to force the detainees to testify against other people."
"The detention facilities of the ministries of Defense and Interior are places for the most brutal human rights abuse," he added.
Despite broad U.S. efforts to encourage the Iraqi government to improve conditions in prisons, the problem of militia control could prove particularly intractable. Shiite militias such as the Badr Organization and the Mahdi Army, loyal to cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, are backed by dozens of members of parliament whose political parties run the armed groups.
"You can't even talk to the militias, because they are the government," Yei said. "They have ministers on their side."
..."My question to the panel is, What is the path to success in Iraq?"At U.S. Naval War College, Scholar Likens Iraq to Plague
There was a damburst of laughter in the audience, then the scholars took it on, one by one. The first, Stephen Walt of Harvard, said "This was a huge strategic blunder, there are no attractive plans forward." The greatest danger—an international conflict in Iraq—would be there no matter when we left. The next man, Robert Art of Brandeis, said, he thought it was extremely important for America's image in the Arab world not to have permanent bases in Iraq.
The last one to speak was the one who had used the word "folly" in the program: John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. Mearsheimer is 58. He told the audience that when he was a teenager, he had enlisted in the Army. Then he'd spent 1966-1970 at West Point. Then he said this:
I remember once in English class we read Albert Camus's book The Plague. I didn't know what The Plague was about or why we were reading it. But afterwards the instructor explained to us that The Plague was being read because of the Vietnam War. What Camus was saying in The Plague was that the plague came and went of its own accord. All sorts of minions ran around trying to deal with the plague, and they operated under the illusion that they could affect the plague one way or another. But the plague operated on its own schedule. That is what we were told was going on in Vietnam. Every time I look at the situation in Iraq today, I think of Vietnam, and I think of The Plague, and I just don't think there's very much we can do at this point. It is just out of our hands. There are forces that we don't have control over that are at play, and will determine the outcome of this one. I understand that's very hard for Americans to understand, because Americans believe that they can shape the world in their interests.
But I learned during the Vietnam years when I was a kid at West Point, that there are some things in the world that you just don't control, and I think that's where we're at in Iraq.
The panel was over. For a moment or two there was stunned silence, and then applause—at once polite, sustained and thunderous.
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posted by ewkpates at 11:06 AM on June 16, 2006