Iraq: More Evidence Of Failed Planning genre: Just Jihad & Six Degrees of Speculation

The New York Times has an excellent article on the failure of the Bush administration to anticipate the security needs in Iraq and to plan for rebuilding a police force to maintain order in the wake of toppling Hussein. Read the full article here.

As chaos swept Iraq after the American invasion in 2003, the Pentagon began its effort to rebuild the Iraqi police with a mere dozen advisers. Overmatched from the start, one was sent to train a 4,000-officer unit to guard power plants and other utilities. A second to advise 500 commanders in Baghdad. Another to organize a border patrol for the entire country.

Before the war, the Bush administration dismissed as unnecessary a plan backed by the Justice Department to rebuild the police force by deploying thousands of American civilian trainers.

After Baghdad fell, when a majority of Iraqi police officers abandoned their posts, a second proposal by a Justice Department team calling for 6,600 police trainers was reduced to 1,500, and then never carried out. During the first eight months of the occupation — as crime soared and the insurgency took hold — the United States deployed 50 police advisers in Iraq.

What becomes increasingly apparent in reading this and many other reports on the planning and decision making for this war is the disregard for the cautions and concerns expressed by those who were not part of the administration's inner circle of advisors. Those who continue to defend Defense Secretary Rumsfeld do so despite the growing evidence that he is a man with a penchant for intransigence who routinely dismissed the suggestions and cautions issued by subordinates. The calls for his resignation by numerous generals simply serve to support the negative data that continues to surface.

Field training of the Iraqi police, the most critical element of the effort, was left to DynCorp International, a company based in Irving, Tex., that received $750 million in contracts. The advisers, many of them retired officers from small towns, said they arrived in Iraq and quickly found themselves caught between poorly staffed American government agencies, company officials focused on the bottom line and thousands of Iraqi officers clamoring for help.

This spring, three years after administration officials rejected the large American-led field training effort, American military commanders are adopting that very approach. Declaring 2006 the year of the police, the Pentagon is dispatching a total of 3,000 American soldiers and DynCorp contractors to train and mentor police recruits and officers across Iraq.

Once again, we see that only long after the evidence on the ground clearly demonstrates the miscalculation, does this administration adapt the approach. In the meantime, the lives of American soldiers and numerous Iraqi civilians are lost unnecessarily as a result of these countless strategy mistakes. Not only did the administration ignore the advice of numerous experts, they ignored recent historical information that clearly did not support their approach.

In Kosovo, one-tenth the size of Iraq, the United Nations fielded about 4,800 police officers. In Bosnia, 2,000 international police officers trained and monitored local forces.

Two lessons had emerged from the Balkans, Mr. Mayer said. "Law and order first," a warning that failing to create an effective police force and judicial system could stall postwar reconstruction efforts. Second, blanketing local police stations with foreign trainers also helped ensure that cadets applied their academy training in the field and helped deter brutality, corruption and infiltration by militias, he said.

General Garner raised an ambitious plan by Richard Mayer, a Justice Department police-training expert on his staff, to send 5,000 American and foreign advisers to Iraq. Mr. Mayer said his detailed, inch-and-a-half-thick plan included organizational tables, budgets and schedules.

Even before General Garner presented his case, Pentagon officials were criticizing reconstruction efforts known as nation building. In a speech on Feb. 14, 2003, Mr. Rumsfeld warned that international peacekeeping operations could create "a culture of dependence" and that a long-term foreign presence in a country "can be unnatural."

I was struck by the observation that the administration continued to criticize nation building in the build-up to the invasion and seemingly made decisions with that principle in mind...despite the evidence that an invasion of Iraq would likely place the United States in that very position. Keep in mind that President Bush campaigned against nation building in 2000 and that john Kerry campaigned in 2004 for the need to drastically increase the training of an Iraqi security force. Astonishingly, we have become nation builders and we have failed to train a security force that might have minimized the appearance, if not the need, to become nation builders. The contradictions are striking and difficult to explain.

Mr. Bremer said he repeatedly pushed for more trainers during the summer of 2003 but was told that no foreign countries were willing to send large numbers of police officers, and that DynCorp was unable to find Americans.

Across Baghdad, 2,600 military policemen carried out joint patrols with Iraqis and tried to secure a city twice the size of Chicago.

By comparison, Chicago's police force is over 13,000 and New York's is over 40,000 (find data source here). The numbers speak for themselves. Any notion that the city of Baghdad, in the midst of a war, could be secured on the paltry basis noted above is unconscionable.

By August, the field training plan had shrunk. Mr. Bremer said his staff, frustrated by the inability to get enough manpower, dropped the target number to 3,500 trainers from 6,600. By September, it fell to 1,500.

Mr. Bremer said he repeatedly complained in National Security Council meetings chaired by Ms. Rice and attended by cabinet secretaries that the quality of police training was poor and focused on producing high numbers.

"They were just pulling kids off the streets and handing them badges and AK-47's," Mr. Bremer said.

Mr. Bremer and his staff backed a plan to reduce the number of field trainers to 500 from 1,500, and use the remaining funds to intensively train senior Iraqi police officials.

Mr. Powell and Richard L. Armitage, then the deputy secretary of state, said in e-mail and phone interviews that they both fought the reduction. They argued that the police trainers could still operate in safer areas outside the Sunni Triangle.

They lost the fight in Washington in March 2004. The field training of a new Iraqi police force — at this point some 90,000 officers — was now left to 500 American contractors from DynCorp.

Is there any doubt as to why Colin Powell ultimately left this administration? Time and again, the expertise of those in key positions was ignored in favor of the preferences of a select group of insiders that clearly included Secretary Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney. Condoleezza Rice, Powell's replacement, has simply become a mouthpiece to defend the decisions made by this administration. The motivation behind the replacement of an experienced military operative with a trusted Bush apologist is akin to the appointment of Harriet Meyers to the Supreme Court. Sadly, those cultural conservatives who savaged Meyers quietly accepted the replacement of Powell with Rice without objection. From my perspective, the latter is far more representative of moral bankruptcy. It simply points out the fully misguided values of these cultural conservatives.

Jon Villanova, a North Carolina deputy sheriff hired by DynCorp, said he was promoted to manage other trainers in southern Iraq four months into his yearlong stint. Under the plan drawn up by the Justice Department team, he would have commanded a battalion of at least 500 trainers.

What he got instead was a squad of 40 men to train 20,000 Iraqi policemen spread through four provinces. He said he could not even dream of giving them the kind of one-on-one mentoring that American police cadets received. His team struggled merely to visit their stations once a month.

From September 2004 through April this year, 2,842 police officers were killed and 5,812 were injured, according to American records, which are not available for the first 17 months of the war.

By December 2004, there were also signs that the police were being drawn into the evolving sectarian battles. Senior officers in the police department in the southern city of Basra were implicated in the killings of 10 members of the Baath Party, and of a mother and daughter accused of prostitution, according to a State Department report.

By then there was a growing sense among American officials that the civilian training program was not working, and the United States military came up with its own plan. It was the Americans' third strategy for training the Iraqi police, and it would run into the worst problems of all. Basra was just the beginning.

Can there be any doubt that the security planning for Iraq has been a failure? It is no wonder that the American public grows increasingly skeptical of the efforts in Iraq. Each miscalculation costs lives, money, and American credibility in the eyes of the rest of the world. Each day that passes without a workable plan serves to lessen the ability to overcome the increasing objections to the war. At the same time, the reality is that even if we withdraw from Iraq, we will have left the region far less stable, heightened the distrust and dislike of the United States, and given Islamic extremists ample fodder to foment further terrorism. That's a very steep price to pay for refusing to admit mistakes when they still have the potential to be rectified.

Daniel DiRito | May 21, 2006 | 7:52 AM
AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Post a comment


Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry


© Copyright 2024

Casting

Read about the Director and Cast

Send us an email

Select a theme:

Critic's Corner

 Subscribe in a reader

Encores

http://DeeperLeft.com

Powered by:
Movable Type 4.2-en

© Copyright 2024

site by Eagle River Partners & Carlson Design