corrente

As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

This is my third trip to Iraq since the war, and the situation is the worst I've seen. Neither U.S. nor Iraqi intelligence has made much headway in tracking the source of the suicide bombs that paralyze Iraq's recovery. U.S. and Iraqi officials fully expect the violence to get worse after June 30 as insurgents try to influence U.S. elections.

Meanwhile, Iraqi anger increases at the abrasions of occupation. Security is so bad that 130,000 U.S. troops will stay on indefinitely, along with thousands of South African, Nepalese, and other security contractors, causing continuous friction with the Iraqi public. Only $3.7 billion of the $18 billion for reconstruction has been spent, with little trickle-down effect, because most goes to huge U.S. firms. Tales of corruption and kickbacks are widespread.

What's most infuriating about this sorry state of affairs is that it is the direct outcome of the arrogant and blinkered policies of the Bush team.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told me that postwar Iraq would resemble post-World War II France. He expected the London opposition - headed by Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi - to come back and establish a democracy. Like De Gaulle. He believed the likelihood of postwar instability was virtually nil.

Another delicious irony. Not only is Wolfowitz a lover of the reviled French, he allowed his Francophilia to cloud his judgement! What a piece of work.

In a whitewash of history, Wolfowitz told the House Armed Services Committee last week: "Contrary to what I see over and over again in the newspapers, Chalabi was not a favorite of the Pentagon." Excuse me? The Pentagon airlifted Chalabi into southern Iraq early in the war along with his private militia.

Why does this matter now? Because the expectation that liberation would be easy, a la Chalabi, meant the Pentagon never prepared for occupation. The consequences of that blindness are being felt now.

The disarray we see today was shaped by the Pentagon's initial errors. The first 30 days of any occupation are critical, according to Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, former commander of the 101st Airborne in Mosul. He was sent back here this month by President Bush to try to reshape Iraq's hapless security forces at the 11th hour.

From his experience in Bosnia and elsewhere, Petraeus developed a strategy for postwar planning. In Mosul, Petraeus trained new Iraqi security forces and established stability in those first 30 days, and he used Iraqis (not big U.S. contractors) to rehab factories and infrastructure. The Petraeus model brought relative calm to Mosul while he was there.

Bosnia, eh? That was under Clinton, so it had to be wrong!

But in Baghdad, the Pentagon-led occupation did no such thing. Looting and mayhem in Baghdad were left unchecked and infrastructure ruined so badly that much remains unrepaired today. The looters - including thousands of criminals released from Saddam Hussein's jails - have formed a mafia that helps the insurgency. But at the time, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld mocked those who called on him to intervene.

In the biggest mistake of all, Pentagon planners ensured that Iraqis would be unprepared to fight. Ignoring State Department warnings, they abolished the Iraqi army in May 2003. And they deliberately chose not to train new Iraqi forces to combat a domestic insurgency. That would not be necessary, I was told by a top occupation official here last October, because the United States could handle the problem.

So removed from reality was the Pentagon that it sent tens of thousands of U.S. reservists to Iraq without adequate body armor or armored vehicles. They weren't expected to face combat. Tell that to the widows.
(via the Philadelphia Inquirer)

Say, has Bush issued that executive order to repay families for the body armor they had to buy and send their own children because Bush didn't plan? Or to repay the local governments that raised money to armor the Pentagon's flimsy HumVees? Didn't think so.