"I was very surprised to receive a mission so vital to our exit strategy so late," Eaton said. "I would have expected this to have been done well before troops crossed the line of departure. That was my first reaction: We're a little late here." "We set out to man, train and equip an army for a country of 25 million - with six men," Eaton said. He worked into the autumn with "a revolving door of individual loaned talent that would spend between two weeks and two months," and never received even half the 250 professional staff members he had been promised." Eaton's broad assessment of the problems he confronted was seconded by Walter Slocombe, sent by the Bush administration to Baghdad for six months to serve as the senior civilian adviser on national security and defense. Slocombe, an under secretary of defense in the Clinton administration, said, "I have to agree with General Eaton, that it was hard to get the resources we needed out there. There was not a broad enough sense of urgency in Washington."
Problem was, CICBush43, Cheney and the Bushworld gang were delusional. Since the two top guys had never spent a day in a combat zone, they had no concept of what it meant to not just invade a nation, defeat its army and subjugate its people, but then have to OCCUPY and RUN the nation while at the same time abolishing ALL of its political, governmental and military infrastructures. Thus our chickenhawk leader sent no forces skilled in either local pacification and control or nationbuilding, other than Bremer's feeble Green Zone crew and a scattering of folks like Eaton, to actually replace the abolished infrastructures. Without local civil and political direction, chaos resulted everywhere. Criminal gangs rampant. Embryonic insurgent groups free to loot unguarded Iraqi ammo dumps of arms, ammunition and the makings of IEDs (that kill at least half of all U.S. casualties) in such large quantities that the insurgent groups, now grown huge and highly skilled, will be able to kill Americans (and each other) efficiently in Iraq for decades with most of the disillusioned Iraqis cheering them on. And that new Iraqi army? It is finally growing now but is so sectarian that its primary fate will be to provide the U.S. trained and armed cadres for the Shiite and Kurd forces in the slowly arriving civil war. Another day in Bushworld... David Bier http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/02/10/news/army.php General faults U.S. on Iraqi military By Thom Shanker The New York Times SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2006 WASHINGTON The American general in charge of training the new Iraqi military after Baghdad fell says the Bush administration's strategy to use those forces to replace departing U.S. soldiers was hobbled from its belated start by poor pre-war planning and insufficient staff and equipment. The account of Major General Paul Eaton, who retired on Jan. 1 after 33 years in the U.S. Army, suggests that commanders in Iraq might by now have been much closer to President George W. Bush's goal of withdrawing American forces if they had not lost much of the first year's chance to begin building a capable force. Eaton's views, drawn from an essay he is preparing for publication and from interviews in which he spoke out publicly for the first time, were broadly affirmed by Pentagon and other civilian officials involved at the time. They agreed that the mission also was slowed by conflicting visions from senior Pentagon and administration officials, civilian administrators in Baghdad and the former top commander of the military's Central Command, which carried out the invasion. While he criticized others for decisions that led to what he called a "false start," Eaton accepted responsibility for the most visible setback in the training, when a battalion of the new Iraqi Army dissolved in April 2004 as it was sent into its first major battle. After that embarrassment, which Eaton said he might have headed off, Pentagon officials sent Lieutenant General David Petraeus, who had commanded the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion and the early occupation, to review the program and then to take over the training mission after Eaton completed his yearlong tour. "Paul Eaton and his team did an extraordinary amount for the Iraqi Security Force mission," said Petraeus, now commander of the army's Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. "They established a solid foundation on which we were able to build as the effort was expanded very substantially and resourced at a much higher level." Eaton was commander of all army infantry training at Fort Benning, Georgia, when he was told on May 9, 2003 - just over a week after Bush's "mission accomplished" speech - to hurry to Baghdad, where he was to set up and then command an organization to rebuild Iraq's military. "I was very surprised to receive a mission so vital to our exit strategy so late," Eaton said. "I would have expected this to have been done well before troops crossed the line of departure. That was my first reaction: We're a little late here." Pentagon officials initially told Eaton that rebuilding the army was their fifth priority for Iraqi security forces, falling behind the civil defense corps, police, border forces and guards for government buildings, power plants and oil lines. L. Paul Bremer, head of the occupation government, insisted that police training fall not under the military, but under his civil administration. And General Tommy Franks, who planned and carried out the invasion of Iraq, made sure that retraining and managing the Iraqi armed forces would not burden his war-fighting headquarters at the Central Command. He also insisted that the task be managed by a separate unit with its own staff and budget, Eaton said. Key allies, alienated by American policies, also refused to contribute experienced military personnel, Eaton noted. In particular, Germany and France, which participated in rebuilding the Afghan military after the invasion there and the removal of the Taliban, declined to assist in Iraq to show their disagreement with the invasion. "We set out to man, train and equip an army for a country of 25 million - with six men," Eaton said. He worked into the autumn with "a revolving door of individual loaned talent that would spend between two weeks and two months," and never received even half the 250 professional staff members he had been promised. Eaton's broad assessment of the problems he confronted was seconded by Walter Slocombe, sent by the Bush administration to Baghdad for six months to serve as the senior civilian adviser on national security and defense. Slocombe, an under secretary of defense in the Clinton administration, said, "I have to agree with General Eaton, that it was hard to get the resources we needed out there. There was not a broad enough sense of urgency in Washington." Eaton said his small staff "thought we were going to build an army in a benign environment, that we were going to be able to incubate this army." The rise of a tenacious insurgency ultimately killed that hope, but at the start of his tour, the main problem was not the insurgency, which had not yet emerged in full force, it was the chaos that followed the invasion. -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: osint@yahoogroups.com Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. 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