"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 troo
