Thursday, May 20, 2004
Blind Into Baghdad
In the January/February edition of The Atlantic MonthlyJames Fallows has an article entitled Blind Into Baghdad. In my opinion this is probably the one important must read piece about the Iraq occupation.
Fallows writes in the piece about an interview he conducted with Douglas Feith. Feith is the undersecretary for defense policy. His position is just under that of Paul Wolfowitz. Wolfowitz is directly answerable to Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense.
Fallows quotes Feith as saying, "You will not find a single piece of paper ... If anybody ever went through all of our records—and someday some people will, presumably—nobody will find a single piece of paper that says, 'Mr. Secretary or Mr. President, let us tell you what postwar Iraq is going to look like, and here is what we need plans for.' If you tried that, you would get thrown out of Rumsfeld's office so fast—if you ever went in there and said, 'Let me tell you what something's going to look like in the future,' you wouldn't get to your next sentence!"
"This is an important point," he (Feith) said, "because of this issue of What did we believe? ... The common line is, nobody planned for security because Ahmed Chalabi told us that everything was going to be swell."
Fallows goes on to quote Feith further:
"So we predicted that everything was going to be swell, and we didn't plan for things not being swell."
"Can you believe it?" expression. "I mean—one would really have to be a simpleton. And whatever people think of me, how can anybody think that Don Rumsfeld is that dumb? He's so evidently not that dumb, that how can people write things like that?"
Apparently Feith doesn't get out much. Or at least he isn't doing his bedside table reading. According to Fallows, "Almost everything, good and bad, that has happened in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime was the subject of extensive pre-war discussion and analysis. This is particularly true of what have proved to be the harshest realities for the United States since the fall of Baghdad: that occupying the country is much more difficult than conquering it; that a breakdown in public order can jeopardize every other goal; that the ambition of patiently nurturing a new democracy is at odds with the desire to turn control over to the Iraqis quickly and get U.S. troops out; that the Sunni center of the country is the main security problem; that with each passing day Americans risk being seen less as liberators and more as occupiers, and targets.
Which organizations or persons made such extensive analysis? Fallows says, "the CIA, the State Department, the Army and the Marine Corps, the United States Agency for International Development, and a wide variety of other groups inside and outside the government are underappreciated by the public. The one pre-war effort that has received substantial recent attention, the State Department's Future of Iraq project, produced thousands of pages of findings, barely one paragraph of which has until now been quoted in the press.",
One could probably understand if there were a few memos floating around Washington outlining such problems for post-invasion Iraq. After all, thousands of reports are generated and floating around up there. But wouldn't one want to make sure one had read everything one could about the potential problems of occupation before one invades and occupies? Especially when it's from a major intelligence branch, the State Department and two branches of the military?
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Fallows writes in the piece about an interview he conducted with Douglas Feith. Feith is the undersecretary for defense policy. His position is just under that of Paul Wolfowitz. Wolfowitz is directly answerable to Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense.
Fallows quotes Feith as saying, "You will not find a single piece of paper ... If anybody ever went through all of our records—and someday some people will, presumably—nobody will find a single piece of paper that says, 'Mr. Secretary or Mr. President, let us tell you what postwar Iraq is going to look like, and here is what we need plans for.' If you tried that, you would get thrown out of Rumsfeld's office so fast—if you ever went in there and said, 'Let me tell you what something's going to look like in the future,' you wouldn't get to your next sentence!"
"This is an important point," he (Feith) said, "because of this issue of What did we believe? ... The common line is, nobody planned for security because Ahmed Chalabi told us that everything was going to be swell."
Fallows goes on to quote Feith further:
"So we predicted that everything was going to be swell, and we didn't plan for things not being swell."
"Can you believe it?" expression. "I mean—one would really have to be a simpleton. And whatever people think of me, how can anybody think that Don Rumsfeld is that dumb? He's so evidently not that dumb, that how can people write things like that?"
Apparently Feith doesn't get out much. Or at least he isn't doing his bedside table reading. According to Fallows, "Almost everything, good and bad, that has happened in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime was the subject of extensive pre-war discussion and analysis. This is particularly true of what have proved to be the harshest realities for the United States since the fall of Baghdad: that occupying the country is much more difficult than conquering it; that a breakdown in public order can jeopardize every other goal; that the ambition of patiently nurturing a new democracy is at odds with the desire to turn control over to the Iraqis quickly and get U.S. troops out; that the Sunni center of the country is the main security problem; that with each passing day Americans risk being seen less as liberators and more as occupiers, and targets.
Which organizations or persons made such extensive analysis? Fallows says, "the CIA, the State Department, the Army and the Marine Corps, the United States Agency for International Development, and a wide variety of other groups inside and outside the government are underappreciated by the public. The one pre-war effort that has received substantial recent attention, the State Department's Future of Iraq project, produced thousands of pages of findings, barely one paragraph of which has until now been quoted in the press.",
One could probably understand if there were a few memos floating around Washington outlining such problems for post-invasion Iraq. After all, thousands of reports are generated and floating around up there. But wouldn't one want to make sure one had read everything one could about the potential problems of occupation before one invades and occupies? Especially when it's from a major intelligence branch, the State Department and two branches of the military?
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