http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB108232780526786049,00.html
EXCERPT: *** Early U.S. Decisions on Iraq Now Haunt American Efforts: Officials Let Looters Roam, Disbanded Army, Allowed Radicals to Gain Strength, Failure to Court an Ayatollah By FARNAZ FASSIHI, GREG JAFFE, YAROSLAV TROFIMOV, CARLA ANNE ROBBINS and YOCHI J. DREAZEN Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL April 19, 2004; Page A1 As soon as U.S. troops occupied Iraq a year ago, an orgy of looting erupted. Telephone wires were pulled out of the ground, while hospitals, schools and government buildings were stripped bare of windows, door frames and faucets. The crime wave seemed a passing embarrassment at the time, so the U.S. made a conscious decision not to use military might to stop it. It's now clear that decision led to lasting problems that have reverberated through this month's wave of violence in Iraq. The looting alienated Iraqis who questioned the intentions of their new U.S. protectors. It made the job of rebuilding Iraq much harder, delaying improvements that would have lessened the appeal of radicals. It even allowed a then-obscure cleric named Muqtada al Sadr to build up goodwill among the country's downtrodden by collecting and redistributing some looted merchandise. The battles U.S. forces are waging, against Sunni insurgents around the town of Fallujah and Shiite forces loyal to Mr. Sadr across the south, may have seemed to erupt suddenly. In reality, they have been long in the making, fed by a year's worth of decisions and calculations about the Iraqi army and security, about the depth of popular tolerance for occupation and about the role of the country's important Shiite leaders. The problems are rooted most firmly in one basic but faulty assumption about the level of postwar stability. In prewar days, the U.S. planned to administer Iraq for two years or more, as the country's Baath party was purged, war-crimes trials held, a new constitution written and new democratic institutions built from the ground up. But the luxury of that long and quiet occupation never materialized. Iraq's infrastructure and its economy were in far worse shape than the U.S. had calculated, meaning public patience with the occupation wasn't as extensive as imagined. Difficulties in establishing a respected media network undercut U.S. efforts to turn around opinions. The failure quickly to find and lock down the huge stocks of weaponry in Iraq meant insurgents could quietly arm themselves without much trouble. An early decision to disband the Iraqi army -- and a long debate over which of three new security forces to build up -- left the U.S. without any sizable Iraqi force to help quell the unrest. The security situation grew more troublesome yesterday when Spain's new prime minister announced he would withdraw his country's troops from Iraq as soon as possible. And in Baghdad, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer said Iraqi forces won't be able on their own to deal with security threats by the time the U.S. hands power to an Iraqi government on June 30. Meanwhile, the U.S. is still scrambling to recover from a key political miscalculation. When launching an accelerated plan to create an Iraqi government, U.S. officials assumed, incorrectly, that they would have the tacit support of the nation's most powerful Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. An agreement with him would have left Mr. Sadr little room to maneuver among Shiites. The Bush administration says the political situation is being sorted out with help from the United Nations and that this month's violence obscures a much brighter overall picture. "It's not a popular uprising," President Bush said last week. "Most of Iraq is relatively stable. Most Iraqis by far reject violence and oppose dictatorship." Iraqi oil output is now back to about what it was before the war, as is production of electricity. School enrollments are up, with far more girls than previously attending classes, according to U.S. officials. And a country ruled for decades by a brutal dictator has an interim constitution and a rebirth of free speech. Still, some of the difficulties the U.S. has encountered were forecast within the U.S. government before the war. A look back at some of the key events and decisions that led to crises in Fallujah and the south provides clues about what the U.S. now needs to do: Reach a quick understanding on Iraq's political future with the country's Shiite political establishment, fix Iraq's own security forces and convince Iraqis their lives are improving. Ignoring the Looting There never was much doubt in Washington that the U.S. could fight and win a war against Saddam Hussein on its own. But some officials in the White House and many more in the State Department knew that rebuilding Iraq would be different -- and that a broader coalition would make the postwar occupation more tolerable to Iraqis and to Americans by making clear that the international community stood behind it. The Pentagon was more grudging but willing to share some of the burden, so long as its own political vision for a democratic and pro-American Iraq was strictly followed. Yet Mr. Bush never managed to persuade key allies -- not only France and Germany but also Turkey and India -- that Iraq posed a clear and present danger to international security or that there was no choice besides war. In the end, the U.S. had to settle for support from the British and several smaller states, including some that were seeking to cement ties with the Bush administration but were unable to make more than a marginal contribution. So when Baghdad fell a year ago, the U.S. was pretty much on its own. One of the first decisions it made didn't seem like much of a decision at all at the time. It involved the unexpected outbreak of lawlessness and looting that accompanied Saddam Hussein's ouster. U.S. and British commanders, who said they were fearful they didn't have enough troops or the right kind to control urban unrest, rarely interfered to stop looters. Many Iraqis concluded that the vandalism was sanctioned by the U.S. Graffiti on the wall of a wrecked telephone exchange in the middle-class Mansour neighborhood of Baghdad summed up these feelings. "Bush looter," the writing read, in English. "The occupation forces were not prepared to fill the vacuum and the situation grew out of hand -- looting, burning, killing and the complete breakdown of order," says Adnan Pachachi, a member of the governing council that helps the U.S. run Iraq. "That really cast a shadow and affected the outcome of events later. We are still paying for that mistake today." The seeming anarchy created a vacuum into which clerics, particularly Shiites, stepped. Imams called for looted goods to be handed over to mosques and then donated them to the needy. In the Hekma mosque that was the headquarters of Mr. Sadr's organization in Saddam City, the imam, Abdelzahra al Sweyadi, distributed goods to supporters he deemed worthy. "The people suffered a lot in the past, so now the people must claim its share," he said at the time. Imams organized food and gasoline drives, deployed young men to act as traffic police on intersections and neighborhood-watch guards, arranged for garbage pickups and even set up free clinics inside the mosques. The clergy's influence on the population grew day by day. Meantime, a second threat was taking shape. Huge weapons caches had been left by the Iraqi military. It took more than a month for U.S. forces to start removing the most conspicuous ones because of the confusion and distractions as fighting wound down. Late last April, the central meadow of Baghdad's unguarded zoo held thousands of pieces of ammunition -- mortars, rockets in crates bearing Yugoslav markings, hand grenades and mines. After guerrilla warfare erupted in May, much of this ammunition was taken by insurgents. As late as September, U.S. military officials were struggling to find spare troops to stand guard over caches of live artillery shells, which were looted to make remote-detonated roadside bombs. Disbanding the Army Meantime, U.S. plans to get Iraqi help to restore order were sputtering. In fact, some of the early moves -- such as disbanding the Iraqi military -- may have inadvertently fed the insurgency's ranks, say U.S. military officials and Iraqis. When the U.S. took control, the Iraqi army disappeared. Some leaders of the occupation, as well as Bush administration officials back home, concluded that reassembling that force to provide security as initially planned would be too costly and time consuming. Besides, the loyalties of top army leaders who served Mr. Hussein and his party were suspect. So when Mr. Bremer arrived in May to take over as the top American administrator in Iraq, he decided to disband the Iraqi army and cancel pensions for soldiers. The decision was widely unpopular among Iraqis, who saw it as a slight to their national pride. (A month later, following several violent demonstrations, the pension decision was reversed.) Disbanding the army also struck some U.S. military officers as a mistake. "One of the cardinal sins in warfare is losing contact with the enemy," says Army Col. Paul Hughes, who worked for the Coalition Provisional Authority, the organization running the occupation. "And we did it. We don't know where the former army went. We don't know what they did with their weapons." .... http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB108232780526786049,00.html
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