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Now what do we do about Rumsfeld?

And stuff has kept happening for 3-1/2 years now, and all that stuff adds up to a civil war.  Rumsfeld said it would never happen.  His plan was to go into Iraq, topple Saddam’s regime, establish an order that would allow the people of Iraq to govern themselves, and then the U.S. would leave. 

Well…  Like General Shinseki said in the months leading up to the war, several hundred thousand troops would be required to secure Iraq and keep the peace.  Rumsfeld laughed it off.

Ha ha ha…

From today’s Los Angeles Times:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld may be leaving under a cloud of criticism over his handling of the Iraq war, but his invasion plan — emphasizing speed over massive troop numbers — has consistently been held up as a resounding success.

Yet with Iraq near chaos 3 1/2 years later, a key Army manual now is being rewritten in a way that rejects the Rumsfeld doctrine and counsels against using it again.

The draft version of the Army’s Full Spectrum Operations field manual argues that in addition to defeating the enemy, military units must focus on providing security for the population — even during major combat.

“The big idea here is that stability tasks have to be a consideration at every level and every operation,” said Clinton J. Ancker III, head of the Army’s Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate and an author of the guide.

Officers use the field manual, the authoritative guidebook on how to conduct ground operations, to develop tactics for military endeavors including war, counterinsurgency and peacekeeping. When completed, the manual will be taught to officers at all levels.

Before the war, Rumsfeld prodded Gen. Tommy Franks and other officers to design an invasion plan to fit his beliefs about how modern militaries should fight. When Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed and Baghdad seemed to fall in just 21 days, Rumsfeld and his emphasis on speed over mass got the credit.

But after the initial military success, the Pentagon was criticized for not doing enough to plan for postwar stability. And Rumsfeld drew objections for his dismissive attitude toward the disorder and looting in Iraq, particularly when he said, just days after the fall of Baghdad, that “stuff happens” in democracies.

The old manual emphasized that stability operations usually follow combat. The draft version of the 2007 ground operations manual instructs commanders that they cannot wait for offensive operations to end before providing security and services for the population, and stresses a combination of offense, defense and stability operations.

Bush’s blind loyalty to his advisors prevented him from dumping Rumsfeld two years ago when it was pretty clear that Rumsfeld’s strategy failed to achieve Bush’s goal of establishing a peaceful, democratic government.  

Now it’s too late.

It took just one day for George W Bush to unceremoniously dump his Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, following the mid-term elections on November 7^th. It was a fate long overdue and much too late to do any real good.

If Vice-President Dick Cheney was, as many believe, the prime moving force behind the Iraq invasion, the execution of this decision bore the indelible stamp of Rumsfeld.  He thus bears primary responsibility for the failure of the American-led invasion force to properly secure Iraq following the easy defeat of its army.  This in turn enabled the insurgency to take hold and create the quagmire in which we find ourselves three and a half years later.

Determined as he was to prove his theory that light, fast moving, high technology-equipped ground forces supported by overwhelming air power could achieve the same or better results as a much heavier and more substantial attack force, he scoffed at Army Chief of the Staff General Eric Shinseki’s estimate, given during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, that the occupation of Iraq would take several hundred thousand troops.  In fact the original army plan for the invasion envisioned a much larger assault force, something that Rumsfeld cited as an example of the sort of hidebound, backward thinking that he intended to change.

With his scathing and, at times, disrespectful treatment of senior army officers such as Shinseki, Rumsfeld largely succeeded in browbeating and intimidating the service into producing a plan more to his liking.  He appears to have surrounded himself with military advisors distinguished more by their willingness to agree with him than for any outstanding ability.  One example is General Tommy Franks who, as Commander-in-Chief of Central Command, was responsible for the planning and execution of the assault on Iraq.  Astonishingly, Franks did not plan beyond the defeat of the regular Iraqi armed forces and the capture of Baghdad.  The aftermath he left to others.  Within weeks of the overthrow of Suddam Hussein’s regime, he sailed off into happy retirement leaving behind a nascent insurgency that has since killed more than 2800 American soldiers.  

The failure to plan for the occupation phase and to provide enough boots on the ground to smother a simmering insurgency were colossal blunders from which the United States in Iraq has never recovered.  It was Rumsfeld who insisted that the occupation be administered by the Pentagon rather than the much better prepared State Department.  The man chosen by the Pentagon to lead the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, Paul Bremmer, turned out to be a disastrous choice.  His decisions to disband the Iraqi army and ban members of the Ba’ath Party from army and governmental posts at virtually all levels fed the budding insurgency as perhaps nothing else could, just as the failure to provide sufficient troops to secure weapons and ammunition dumps served to arm and equip it.  He failed to see that the looting and disorder that followed the overthrow of the established order would severely damage the image of the occupying forces and feed the belief that the Americans didn’t care about the security and welfare of the people of Iraq.

Right to the end, Rumsfeld in his arrogance insists that the real problem is that the rest of us simply don’t understand this war.  In reality, it’s Rumsfeld who doesn’t get it – any more than does Bush or Cheney. He completely failed to recognize the danger posed by the insurgency even as it developed in the early months, or to take the necessary steps to combat it.  In this he shares responsibility with a U.S. army hierarchy that seems to have indulged in a sort of self-imposed institutional amnesia regarding Vietnam and the lessons learned in fighting an insurgency.  The significance of that early failure cannot be overemphasised; all subsequent efforts to combat the insurgents and to quell sectarian violence are akin to trying to get the toothpaste back in the tube.

Ironically it may be that the successful operation to remove the Taliban from Afghanistan may have reinforced Rumsfeld’s conviction that massive force was no longer required in the successful invasion and occupation of a country.  In Afghanistan, highly trained special operations units in conjunction with indigenous Northern Alliance forces and pinpoint airpower were sufficient to defeat the Taliban.  It was a textbook operation, but even here the failure to deploy substantial American ground troops in the mountains of Tora Bora ensured that the bulk of the Al-Qaeda remnant and Osama bin Laden would escape to fight another day. 

Iraq was a completely different problem in which what followed immediately after formal hostilities were ended would determine success or failure in a dysfunctional society riddled with suppressed tribal and religious divisions.  Rumsfeld’s inability to grasp this essential fact and to plan for it has cost us dearly. He will forever be remembered together with the president and vice-president he served, as one of the architects of the greatest and costliest strategic blunder in modern American history.

According to The Girl in Iraq, this is what’s going on in Baghdad:

When All Else Fails…
… Execute the dictator. It’s that simple. When American troops are being killed by the dozen, when the country you are occupying is threatening to break up into smaller countries, when you have militias and death squads roaming the streets and you’ve put a group of Mullahs in power- execute the dictator.

…

So we all knew the outcome upfront (Maliki was on television 24 hours before the verdict telling people not to ‘rejoice too much’). I think what surprises me right now is the utter stupidity of the current Iraqi government. The timing is ridiculous- immediately before the congressional elections? How very convenient for Bush. Iraq, today, is at its very worst since the invasion and the beginning occupation. April 2003 is looking like a honeymoon month today. Is it really the time to execute Saddam?

It’s not about the man- presidents come and go, governments come and go. It’s the frustration of feeling like the whole country and every single Iraqi inside and outside of Iraq is at the mercy of American politics. It is the rage of feeling like a mere chess piece to be moved back and forth at will. It is the aggravation of having a government so blind and uncaring about their peoples needs that they don’t even feel like it’s necessary to go through the motions or put up an act. And it’s the deaths. The thousands of dead and dying, with Bush sitting there smirking and lying about progress and winning in a country where every single Iraqi outside of the Green Zone is losing.
Once again… The timing of all of this is impeccable- two days before congressional elections. And if you don’t see it, then I’m sorry, you’re stupid. Let’s see how many times Bush milks this as a ‘success’ in his coming speeches.

Yes… there’s nothing like the prospect of a hanging to rally the Republican base.

“Saddam Hussein’s trial is a milestone in the Iraqi people’s efforts to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law,” Bush told reporters before leaving Texas for campaign stops here and in Topeka, Kan. “It’s a major achievement for Iraq’s young democracy and its constitutional government.”

Although he did not predict whether it would help the reconciliation process in Iraq, Bush portrayed the trial as a chance to expunge Hussein’s legacy. “The man who once struck fear in the hearts of Iraqis had to listen to free Iraqis recount the acts of torture and murder that he ordered against their families and against them,” he said. “Today, the victims of this regime have received a measure of the justice which many thought would never come.”

If only one day we could be so lucky…

Robert Scheer wrote a column about the Iraqi Draft Constitution and those in power who are writing it. Here’s an excerpt:

“The U.S. now has to recognize that [it] overthrew Saddam Hussein to replace him with a pro-Iranian state,” said regional expert Peter W. Galbraith, the former U.S. ambassador to Croatia and an advisor to the Iraqi Kurds. And, he could have added, a pro-Iranian state that will be repressive and unstable.

Think this is an exaggeration? Consider that arguably the most powerful Shiite political party and militia in today’s Iraq, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its affiliated paramilitary force, the Badr Brigade, was not only based in Iran but was set up by Washington’s old arch-foe, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. It also fought on the side of Iran in the Iran-Iraq war and was recognized by Tehran as the government in exile of Iraq.

My head hurts…