Nat'l Defense University calls Iraq war 'a major debacle'

[Lanya]

 Pentagon institute calls Iraq war 'a major debacle' with outcome 'in doubt'

By Jonathan S. Landay and John Walcott, McClatchy Newspapers Thu Apr 17, 8:38 PM ET

WASHINGTON ? The war in Iraq has become "a major debacle" and the outcome "is in doubt" despite improvements in security from the buildup in U.S. forces, according to a highly critical study published Thursday by the Pentagon's premier military educational institute.


The report released by the National Defense University raises fresh doubts about President Bush 's projections of a U.S. victory in Iraq just a week after Bush announced that he was suspending U.S. troop reductions.

The report carries considerable weight because it was written by Joseph Collins , a former senior Pentagon official, and was based in part on interviews with other former senior defense and intelligence officials who played roles in prewar preparations.

It was published by the university's National Institute for Strategic Studies , a Defense Department research center.

"Measured in blood and treasure, the war in Iraq has achieved the status of a major war and a major debacle," says the report's opening line.

At the time the report was written last fall, more than 4,000 U.S. and foreign troops, more than 7,500 Iraqi security forces and as many as 82,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed and tens of thousands of others wounded, while the cost of the war since March 2003 was estimated at $450 billion .

"No one as yet has calculated the costs of long-term veterans' benefits or the total impact on service personnel and materiel," wrote Collins, who was involved in planning post-invasion humanitarian operations.

The report said that the United States has suffered serious political costs, with its standing in the world seriously diminished. Moreover, operations in Iraq have diverted "manpower, materiel and the attention of decision-makers" from "all other efforts in the war on terror" and severely strained the U.S. armed forces.

"Compounding all of these problems, our efforts there (in Iraq ) were designed to enhance U.S. national security, but they have become, at least temporarily, an incubator for terrorism and have emboldened Iran to expand its influence throughout the Middle East ," the report continued.

The addition of 30,000 U.S. troops to Iraq last year to halt the country's descent into all-out civil war has improved security, but not enough to ensure that the country emerges as a stable democracy at peace with its neighbors, the report said.

"Despite impressive progress in security, the outcome of the war is in doubt," said the report. "Strong majorities of both Iraqis and Americans favor some sort of U.S. withdrawal. Intelligence analysts, however, remind us that the only thing worse than an Iraq with an American army may be an Iraq after a rapid withdrawal of that army."

"For many analysts (including this one), Iraq remains a 'must win,' but for many others, despite obvious progress under General David Petraeus and the surge, it now looks like a 'can't win.'"

The report lays much of the blame for what went wrong in Iraq after the initial U.S. victory at the feet of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld . It says that in November 2001 , before the war in Afghanistan was over, President Bush asked Rumsfeld "to begin planning in secret for potential military operations against Iraq ."

Rumsfeld, who was closely allied with Vice President Dick Cheney , bypassed the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the report says, and became "the direct supervisor of the combatant commanders."

" . . . the aggressive, hands-on Rumsfeld," it continues, "cajoled and pushed his way toward a small force and a lightning fast operation." Later, he shut down the military's computerized deployment system, "questioning, delaying or deleting units on the numerous deployment orders that came across his desk."

In part because "long, costly, manpower-intensive post-combat operations were anathema to Rumsfeld," the report says, the U.S. was unprepared to fight what Collins calls "War B," the battle against insurgents and sectarian violence that began in mid-2003, shortly after "War A," the fight against Saddam Hussein's forces, ended.

Compounding the problem was a series of faulty assumptions made by Bush's top aides, among them an expectation fed by Iraqi exiles that Iraqis would be grateful to America for liberating them from Saddam's dictatorship. The administration also expected that " Iraq without Saddam could manage and fund its own reconstruction."

The report also singles out the Bush administration's national security apparatus and implicitly President Bush and both of his national security advisers, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley , saying that "senior national security officials exhibited in many instances an imperious attitude, exerting power and pressure where diplomacy and bargaining might have had a better effect."

Collins ends his report by quoting Winston Churchill , who said: "Let us learn our lessons. Never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. . . . Always remember, however sure you are that you can easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think that he also had a chance."

To read the report:

www.ndu.edu/inss/Occasional_Papers/OP5.pdf

http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20080418/wl_mcclatchy/2913186;_ylt=AhhHdocxhKqeCrJYOOA2ueas0NUE
 

[BT]

The Two Wars in Iraq & Mistaken Republican Support for Obama

[T]he root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
--James Baldwin.

Bush screwed the pooch in Iraq. There is a good argument to be made that we should not have invaded in the first place.* There is no good argument that we should leave.

This conclusion is inevitable when one comes to the same realization as me. There was a war in Iraq and there is a war in Iraq. In fact, we've had two wars in Iraq: Iraq War I & Iraq War II.

The war now is not the same as that war. The first war in Iraq was against Saddam Hussein, the second war is against Islamists of various stripes, but mainly al Qaeda.

Many of the arguments used by those who keep reminding us that Bush's decision to invade Iraq was a mistake are valid. While Saddam Hussein strategically supported groups linked to Osama bin Laden, there was not a substantial al Qaeda presence in Iraq prior to the invasion. Ansar al Islam, the main Sunni Islamist group in Iraq prior to the invasion that would eventually morph into al Qaeda in Iraq, operated nearly exclusively in the Kurdish north---a zone not firmly under Hussein's sovereignty.

All would agree that the invasion liberated Iraqis from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. That was the First Iraq War.** It ended the day Saddam Hussein was captured.

The post-invasion period subjected Iraqis to the tyranny of chaos. The vacuum left by the Baathist police state was filled by yet another tyranny: the tyranny of Sunni Islamists, like al Qaeda; and the tyranny of Shia Islamists, like those following Muqtada al Sadr. This is when the Second Iraq War started.

The first war was against Iraq, a nation-state. The second war is against terrorists and Islamist rebels.

It is true that mistakes made in the first war led to the second war. It may also be true that our national security was not enhanced by that first war.

But the first war is over. We won. Handily. Easily. It's history.

Failing to see the two war distinction is critical. From Obama we hear that he was "against the war" from the beginning. From Clinton we hear that she "changed her mind on the war sometime after she realized that the war was a mistake."

Continuing to allow politicians to criticize the war in Iraq by criticizing the decision to topple the Hussein regime is to allow them to conflate two very separate issues: 1) should we have invaded Iraq? 2) should we now give up fighting al Qaeda and anti-government Islamist elements in Iraq?

Answering no to question number one says nothing about how question two should be answered. Nothing.

The Second Iraq War may have been of our own making, but it is the very war the Democrats say they want to fight: a war against terrorists.

In fact, until recently our greatest enemy in this Second Iraq War has been al Qaeda, the very people that all Americans claim as common enemies.

Failing to see the two war distinction has led to much confusion and obfuscation. The vast majority of criticisms about Bush's handling of post-war Iraq can be equally leveled at Bush's handling of post-war Afghanistan.

In both countries there is a weak central government engaged in a protracted civil war against Islamist rebels with no end in sight. In both countries the removal of U.S., Coalition, and NATO forces would almost certainly lead to a failed state and return to anarchy. In turn this would lead to pockets where Islamist friendly to al Qaeda would give them free reign to open training camps. The exact conditions that existed in Afghanistan just prior to 9/11 and which existed in Iraq from the fall of the Baathist state until last year!

If the results of a U.S. withdrawal would be the same in both Afghanistan and Iraq, then why is there so much focus on removing troops from Iraq and not Afghanistan? Partly it is because we continue to speak of the war in Iraq as a mistake because we should not have invaded in the first place. While we continue to speak of the war in Afghanistan in terms of the decision to invade being correct.

Many in American cannot get over that initial mistake. And because we lack the vocabulary to distinguish between the initial mistake leading to the First Iraq War, we are unable to separate our feelings about it from the Second Iraq War.

After years of support for the war, some in the center and on the right have decided that the initial invasion of Iraq was a mistake. They feel like their initial support was in error or that they were duped [notoriously, John Cole]. Lacking any other vocabulary, they lash out at the war or at the Bush Administration for starting it.

Because McCain supports the war in Iraq they have no other recourse than to support Obama who was against the war. A vote for McCain is a vote in support of the war, which they now see as a mistake.

What they do not see-- and in fact cannot see, because how can you see what you cannot articulate? -- is that they are voting to end a war that is already over! Simultaneously, a vote for Obama is a vote to end the very war on terror that they claim they fully support!

It may seem hypocritical that one could support the war against terrorists in Afghanistan but not the war against terrorists in Iraq, but it's not. As long as we continue to speak of the war in Iraq a large proportion of people will conceive of it in terms of the same war as the one to topple Saddam Hussein. They are not being internally inconsistent, but completely consistent. They do not support the war in Iraq because it is the same war they believe was a mistake.

We must begin to speak of two Iraq wars. The two wars conception is more precise. It describes what has happened and what is happening in Iraq more fully than speaking of the war. It clarifies many of the debates surrounding the present war as well as allows us to conceptually think more clearly.

Further, the only way to convince war skeptics that winning the present war in Iraq is in our national interests is to give them the linguistic tools for being able to conceive of it as separate from the first war, even if it flows from it.

The First Iraq War may have been "optional", as many of the critics say; but the Second Iraq war is not. We must win it. The price of victory may be high, but the price of defeat is higher.

*There are also good arguments, in my estimation, that the decision to invade Iraq was correct.

**There may be an argument that Iraq I was an extension of the Gulf War in the same way that some view WWII was an extension of WWI.

http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/192340.php

[Xavier_Onassis]

Isn't it interesting that prior to Juniorbush no one ever heard about "failed states"?

Somalia is as close to a government that does not have any major control of the country, but somehow, that 'failed state' is less important that other potential 'failed states' which haven't 'failed' yet.

The US should do what it takes to overcome the Taliban in Afghanistan, but what we have in Iraq is NOT a war against Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda cannot win in Iraq. What is most likely is a Shiite government closely allied, but less religious, than the present government of Iran. I imagine that this would be called a 'failed state' even if the bombings and attacks decreased.

It would be 'failed' in that it would not be a corrupt government willing to sell excess oil on demand to ExxonMobil et al, thereby thwarting the OPEC agreements to keep prices high by restricting the flow.

This is in no way a way to bring democracy to anyone. What we have here is a colonial war to gain a needed resource on the cheap, not for we the people but for they the Big Oil companies. They have chosen McCain as their patsy. He is not nearly so good a patsy as Juniorbush, who was the most submissive suckup they have ever enjoyed, but he has convinced them that he is sufficiently sucky for their needs.