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Stephen, I just finished reading this. Thanks for
posting it. It covers the
chronology of the planning process quite well, and though it is critical of the
Pentagon and White House, does not subscribe to conspiracy theories for
motives. I would concur that the
section on neglecting ORHA and the critical but ignored support of the Shiites suggests
where we are now in terms of the next threats, with time running out. Those following the other thread on FW ‘getting the
hell out” should read Rieff’s version, even though much of it will be familiar.
He puts it into context, and most importantly, by being in the NYT Sunday
magazine, it will get broad distribution and airing. This essentially exonerates Garner, who was scapegoated
quickly, but focuses more on the ideological determination of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz,
Feith and Cheney, by implication. Given the recent polls that show Bush’s numbers
continuing to erode, although they are temporarily propped up, it’s rather like
returning to your home after a fire destroyed it, knowing that the coming rains
will bring mudslides and more problems, with less margin of error available. The
Bush2 credibility factor is declining precipituosly. - KWC I have the whole article in word (75KB). Here are #5 & 6 of Rieff’s piece,
after his work detailing how the Pentagon went in “too deep” with Chalabi and
froze out the foundational work of the Future of Iraq project and other exiles
who didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear, or practicing “selective
deafness”: 5. Neglecting ORHA (Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance) Timothy Carney has given the best and most damning account
of this dialogue of the deaf between ORHA officials and the U.S. military on
the ground in Iraq. ''I should have had an inkling of the trouble ahead for our
reconstruction team in Iraq,'' he wrote in a searing op-ed article in The
Washington Post in late June, ''from the hassle we had just trying to get
there. About 20 of us from the Organization for Reconstruction and Humanitarian
Assistance showed up at a military airport in Kuwait on April 24 for a flight
to Baghdad. But some general's plane had broken down, so he had taken ours.'' Carney stressed the low priority the military put on ORHA's
efforts. ''Few in the military understood the urgency of our mission,'' he
wrote, ''yet we relied on the military for support. For example, the military
commander set rules for transportation: we initially needed a lead military
car, followed by the car with civilians and a military vehicle bringing up the
rear. But there weren't enough vehicles. One day we had 31 scheduled missions
and only nine convoys, so 22 missions were scrubbed.'' More substantively, he added that ''no lessons seem to have
taken hold from the recent nation-building efforts in Bosnia or Kosovo, so we
in ORHA felt as though we were reinventing the wheel.'' And doing so under
virtually impossible constraints. Carney quoted an internal ORHA memorandum
arguing that the organization ''is not being treated seriously enough by the
command given what we are supposed to do.'' The lack of respect for the civilian officials in ORHA was a
source of astonishment to Lieutenant Colonel Rutter. ''I was amazed by what I
saw,'' he says. ''There would be a meeting called by Ambassador Bodine'' -- the
official on Garner's staff responsible for Baghdad -- ''and none of the senior
officers would show up. I remember thinking, This isn't right, and also
thinking that if it had been a commander who had called the meeting, they would
have shown up all right.'' Carney attributes some of the blame for ORHA's impotence to
the fact that it set up shop in Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace, where
''nobody knew where anyone was, and, worse, almost no one really knew what was
going on outside the palace. Some of us managed to talk to Iraqis, but not
many, since the military didn't want you to go out for security reasons unless
accompanied by M.P.'s.'' Kevin Henry of CARE, a humanitarian organization active in
Iraq, says that he still has similar concerns. ''One of my biggest worries,''
he says, ''is the isolation of the palace.'' Garner disputes these complaints. He is adamant that he
managed to talk with many Iraqis and strongly disagrees with claims that
officials in the palace were out of touch. Still, ORHA under Pentagon control was compelled to adhere
rigidly to military force-protection rules that were anything but appropriate
to the work the civilians at ORHA were trying to do. Larry Hollingworth, a
former British colonel and relief specialist who has worked in Sarajevo and
Chechnya and who briefly served with ORHA right after Baghdad fell, says that
''at the U.S. military's insistence, we traveled out from our fortified
headquarters in Saddam's old Republican Palace in armored vehicles, wearing
helmets and flak jackets, trying to convince Iraqis that peace was at hand, and
that they were safe. It was ridiculous.'' And Judith Yaphe adds, ''In some ways, we're even more
isolated than the British were when they took over Iraq'' after World War I. Kevin Henry has described the Bush administration as
peculiarly susceptible to a kind of ''liberation theology in which they
couldn't get beyond their own rhetoric and see things in Iraq as they really
were.'' As the spring wore on, administration officials continued to
insist publicly that nothing was going seriously wrong in Iraq. But the
pressure to do something became too strong to resist. Claiming that it had been
a change that had been foreseen all along (though it had not been publicly
announced and was news to Garner's staff), President Bush replaced Garner in
May with L. Paul Bremer. Glossing over the fact that Bremer had no experience
in postwar reconstruction or nation-building, the Pentagon presented Bremer as
a good administrator -- something, or so Defense Department officials implied
on background, Garner was not. Bremer's first major act was not auspicious. Garner had
resisted the kind of complete de-Baathification of Iraqi society that Ahmad
Chalabi and some of his allies in Washington had favored. In particular, he had
resisted calls to completely disband the Iraqi Army. Instead, he had tried only
to fire Baathists and senior military officers against whom real charges of
complicity in the regime's crimes could be demonstrated and to use most members
of the Iraqi Army as labor battalions for reconstruction projects. Bremer, however, took the opposite approach. On May 15, he
announced the complete disbanding of the Iraqi Army, some 400,000 strong, and
the lustration of 50,000 members of the Baath Party. As one U.S. official
remarked to me privately, ''That was the week we made 450,000 enemies on the
ground in Iraq.'' The decision -- which many sources say was made not by
Bremer but in the White House -- was disastrous. In a country like Iraq, where
the average family size is 6, firing 450,000 people amounts to leaving
2,700,000 people without incomes; in other words, more than 10 percent of
Iraq's 23 million people. The order produced such bad feeling on the streets of
Baghdad that salaries are being reinstated for all soldiers. It is a slow and
complicated process, however, and there have been demonstrations by fired
military officers in Iraq over the course of the summer and into the fall. 6. Ignoring the Shiites Again, an overestimation of the role of Ahmad Chalabi may
help account for this miscalculation. Chalabi is a Shiite, and based on that
fact, the Pentagon's planners initially believed that he would enjoy
considerable support from Iraq's Shiite majority. But it rapidly became clear
to American commanders on the ground in postwar Iraq that the aristocratic,
secular Chalabi enjoyed no huge natural constituency in the country, least of
all among the observant Shiite poor. The Americans gravely underestimated the implications of the
intense religious feelings that Iraqi Shiites were suddenly free to manifest
after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Making religious freedom possible for the
Shiites was one of the great accomplishments of the war, as administration
officials rightly claim. But the Shiites soon demonstrated that they were
interested in political as well as religious autonomy. And although the
Americans provided the latter, their continued presence in Iraq was seen as an
obstacle to the former -- especially as the occupation dragged on and Secretary
Rumsfeld warned of a ''long, hard slog ahead.'' After the war, American planners thought they might be able
to engage with one of the most moderate of the important Shiite ayatollahs,
Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim. He was rhetorically anti-American and yet was willing
(and urged his followers) to establish a detente with the occupiers. Had he
lived, he might have helped the Americans assuage Shiite fears and resentments.
But Hakim was assassinated during Friday prayers in the holy city of Najaf on
Aug. 29, along with more than 80 of his followers. At this point, it is not
clear who the current American candidate is, although there are reports that
American planners now believe they can work with and through Grand Ayatollah
Ali al-Sistani. Meanwhile, in the streets the anger of ordinary Shiites
grows hotter. Every reporter who has been in Iraq has encountered it, even if
administration officials think they know better. As Robert Perito argues, ''One
of the things that has saved the U.S. effort is that the Shiites have decided
to cooperate with us, however conditionally.'' But, he adds, ''if the Shiites
decide that they can't continue to support us, then our position will become
untenable.'' Although they are, for the most part, not yet ready to
rebel, the Shiites' willingness to tolerate the American occupation authorities
is growing dangerously thin. ''We're happy the Americans got rid of Saddam
Hussein,'' a young member of the Hawza in Sadr City told me. ''But we do not
approve of replacing 'the tyrant of the age''' -- as he referred to Hussein --
''with the Americans. We will wait a little longer, but we will fight if things
don't change soon.'' Or as his sheik told me later that afternoon at the nearby
mosque, so far they ''have no orders'' from their religious superiors to fight
the Americans. Still, he warned, ''we have been very nice to them. But the U.S.
is not reciprocating.'' Last month, in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, the
first firefights between American forces and Shiite militants took place,
suggesting that time may be running out even more quickly than anyone imagined.
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