Why did the Iraq occupation go so very bad?

First, the invasion of Iraq was itself a total mistake. It was a right-wing fantasy enacted by close-minded individuals who were proud of their party's ability to win an election and failed to apply any other skills.

That said, the actual military invasion of Iraq, planned and operated by our well-trained and well-equipped military was a case of applying a very large hammer to a relatively small nail. For the most part, the military aspects of the actual invasion worked rather well. But everything after the fall of the statue of Saddam in Baghdad has been a disaster. This is the famous "Phase IV." While there is little doubt now that this was the case, there is still the question of how it could possibly have gone SO VERY bad.

Now the Special Inspector General for Iraq has provided a report that answers these questions. By Dana Hedgpeth, Staff writer for the Washington Post:

The U.S. government was unprepared for the extensive nation-building required after it invaded Iraq, and at each juncture where it could have adjusted its efforts, it failed even to understand the problems it faced, according to the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

In a stinging, wide-ranging assessment of U.S. reconstruction efforts, Stuart W. Bowen Jr. said that in the days after the invasion, the Defense Department had no strategy for restoring either government institutions or infrastructure. And in the years since, other agencies joined the effort without an overall plan and without a structure in place to organize and execute a task of such magnitude.

Lines of authority remained unclear in the reconstruction effort. With a demand for speed and a shortage of government personnel, much of the oversight was turned over to the contractors doing the work. There was little coordination among the various agencies. The result was a series of missed opportunities to address the unraveling situation, Bowen said.

"Many layers of management . . . made it difficult to determine who had ultimate authority over money, people and projects," he said. [Snip]

For the first time, the report lays out a timeline documenting the paucity of planning from the beginning of the war in Iraq, noting what was needed when and describing how the scale of reconstruction grew once the United States was in Iraq. It details how Congress provided vast amounts of money with little idea of how it was being spent. The push to get things done quickly meant turning much of the reconstruction over to contractors with little oversight from the government, as security worsened. And the lack of coordination magnified every shortcoming. [Snip]

Bowen said changes like those that took place in Iraq are not "short-term affairs."

"They are complicated, with social, political and security dimensions, and if you can't think of all the pieces of them together, then you're not ever going to end up with a response that works," he said.

In other words, the White House and the civilians at the Pentagon, applying Republican free market theory, failed to recognize that there was a need for government to conduct nation-building. So they walked into Iraq without any plan for doing anything at all except securing the oil supplies and removing the "dead hand of government from the backs of the entrepreneurs in Iraq." The result of this was that the Americans who were supposedly running things at the CPA and then from the Embassy were winging it. Each individual was trying to make decisions on their own with no coordination of the overall operation.

They removed the government, dismantling it with debaathification and the disbanding of the military and police forces, while not having enough troops in country to replace those they were getting rid of. (Yay, Rumsfeld!) Jerry Bremer, Head of the CPA, knew what the political bosses in Washington said they wanted, and he thought that by disbanding the Iraqi government and military he was giving it to them. But the absence of an overall integrated plan made such decisions made "from the hip" very unreliable. Bremer clearly did not realize what the results of disbanding the Iraqi government would be.

Of course, the free market theory was correct. Remove the government and military, leave a vacuum, and the free market did take over. But not to create an economy and a peaceful society.

The Sunnis wanted their jobs running the country back, and to get those jobs back, they had to evict the occupying American armies. Fortunately for the Sunnis, those American armies were too small to provide stability in Iraq by themselves. Al Qaeda wanted to disrupt American operations, and the lack of political and social stability was exactly what they needed. Kurds wanted their effective Kurdistan to remain in place, but they had had a decade to establish effective government structures and build a defense around the Peshmerga (Kurdish militias.) The Shiites wanted to protect themselves from the Sunni oppressors, but were (and are) highly disorganized and have no tradition of running a government. The result was that, under the very noses of the Americans, the Sunni resistance developed, aided by al Qaeda-in-Iraq. The Sunni resistance attacked the Americans, and al Qaeda-in-Iraq attacked the Shiites to provoke a civil war. The fractured Shiites, having to learn to govern a nation which has always before been governed by military force had no room to make mistakes as they learned on the job. Of course they have made numerous mistakes, as would be expected.

By the end of the first year after the invasion, the insurgent groups had organized, trained and were becoming effective. Here is your free market at work. The needed institutions to kick the invading Americans out of Iraq were developed quite quickly.

The Americans, being led by a President who does not listen to underlings or outsiders and who makes a (political) fetish of non rational intuitive decisions which must never be changed, actively prevented American adaptation to the changing conditions in Iraq. The American Enterprise Institute approved members of the Kiddy Brigade who staffed the CPA were too inexperienced to be anything better than simply useless. The Sec. of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was so busy trying to prove that the military could operate "lean and mean" that he, too, refused to listen to his subordinates and failed to adapt. Rumsfeld also made it crystal clear to the Generals under his command that their careers depended on carrying out orders, not questioning them. In this vein, a number of Generals were retired and replaced by compliant Generals like Richard Meirs who was appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The American institutions were made to be about as unadaptive to changing situations as possible, just as it was facing an enemy that was willing to try anything and to promote the survivors who were able to make something entrepreneurial work. The result was to create two competing institutions, the U.S. military which was too small to be effective and which was made as unresponsive to conditions on the ground as an institution filled with well-trained and well-motivated people can be, and the competing insurgents who became the lean, mean fighting machines that Don Rumsfeld wanted his military to be. Probably by the end of the first year and certainly by the end of the second after the invasion, the U.S. had lost all hope of bringing stability to Iraq. This was a total failure by America's political leaders, the Republican Party led by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the NeoCons.

In the meantime, the very fractured Shiite community tried to create an Iraqi government that was acceptable to the occupying Americans, while every local community set up its own militia to protect themselves and their families because the government and the Americans were not doing that very basic function of government. Peace could only come with an effective government that had a monopoly on the use of deadly force. In the absence of such a government, everyone had to join some local militia or become fodder for the insurgents and the militias.

The American civilian leaders in Iraq tried to solve the economic problems by throwing money at them. Money by the pallet-load of cash - the most stealable form of money they could get. This, of course, attracted every individual and company in the world with get-rich-quick schemes. Halliburton, Parsons, and Blackwater have all lined up at the money trough with shovels. But the economic problems cannot be solved until there is a government in place which, with its monopoly on deadly force, can enforce stability on Iraq. Since the various militias are sending their members to the Iraqi Army and Police to be trained and equipped before they go back to rejoin their militias, such stability is not to be expected in any near term.

So why did the Iraq occupation go so very bad? The short answer is George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld refused to plan, and the absence of an integrated plan for the occupation has unleashed a deadly anarchy.

So the next question is how will they be made accountable for their failures?

The answer to that question is yet to be written.