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April 23, 2003
No gameplan, no victory
Yesterday, it was reported that not only are officials in the Bush administration losing faith in the intelligence they had indicating where WMDs could be found, but that their lack of pre-planning for the need to secure potential WMD sites may well make it easier for any biological or chemical weapons Iraq may have had to fall into the hands of terrorist organizations and others. Today we learn that they weren't prepared for the Iraqi Shi'ite majority to want to run their own government after Saddam was removed from power, and may be unable to prevent them from taking over and creating a fundamentalist Islamic government, such as is found in Iran.
As the administration plotted to overthrow Hussein's government, U.S. officials said this week, it failed to fully appreciate the force of Shiite aspirations and is now concerned that those sentiments could coalesce into a fundamentalist government. Some administration officials were dazzled by Ahmed Chalabi, the prominent Iraqi exile who is a Shiite and an advocate of a secular democracy. Others were more focused on the overriding goal of defeating Hussein and paid little attention to the dynamics of religion and politics in the region.It turns out that, while many in the administration believe Chalabi to be a Shi'ite leader, he's not nearly as popular in Iraq as they had thought he would be, and the main Iraqi Shi'ite organisation, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) not only has close ties to the fundamentalist regime in Iran, but also has shown little interest in working with the US, as demonstrated by their boycott of the first meeting of US officials and Iraqi political and religious leaders, held recently, to discuss the future of Iraq."It is a complex equation, and the U.S. government is ill-equipped to figure out how this is going to shake out," a State Department official said. "I don't think anyone took a step backward and asked, 'What are we looking for?' The focus was on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein."
Who, exactly, runs a war with this little planning for the aftermath? We have seen that a great number of the assumptions about what would happen after the war would be wrong. While the reaction to our presence hasn't been as poor as some of us on the anti-war side had feared, it's certainly not nearly as warm as many on the pro-war side anticipated. We weren't prepared for the looting and chaos, and, as a result, have not only made it easier for our enemies to get a hold of any WMDs (if, in fact there are any, something we still do not know), but we've let their hospitals be cleaned out of all their equipment and medicines, were unable to stop people from stealing samples of highly dangerous, if not lethal, strains of cholera, black fever, HIV, polio, and hepatitis from Iraqi's disease control center, and managed to lose countless treasures and artifacts from the museums and libraries that were ravaged. We obviously didn't have any idea of who or what we would establish as an interim government during the messy transition, or how we were going to go about helping the Iraqis form their own government to run their newly freed nation. At times it seems like the only thing we were prepared to do was protect Iraq's oil reserves.
The level of incompetence in planning and executing this war is not, in the least, mitigated by the fact that we "won" it so quickly. That we would win at least the military engagement part of the war was never in question. It would have taken even greater incompetence than I think (or at least hope) Bush is capable of to lose it. But despite the military victory, its hard to find much else that could be considered "well done".
Sadly, the result of all this incompetence is what we're going to have to live with for quite some time to come.
Posted by thorswitch at April 23, 2003 02:21 PM
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