Rumsfeld's poorly managed Department of Defense

Any student of management in large organizations will be shocked at this. Here is a portion of Gen. Shinseki's letter to Donald Rumsfeld, sent just before Shinseki retired:

[On the workings of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, or OSD, under Rumsfeld:] I am greatly concerned that OSD processes have often become ad hoc and long established conventional processes are atrophying. Specifically, there are areas that need your attention as the ad hoc processes often do not adequately consider professional military judgment and advice. . . . . Second, there is a lack of strategic review to frame our day-to-day issues . . . . Third, there has been a lack of explicit discussion on risk in most decisions. . . . Finally, I find it unhelpful to participate in senior level decision-making meetings without structured agendas, objectives, pending decisions and other traditional means of time management.

No large organization with numerous responsibilities can be expected to operate efficiently if the Commander/CEO tries to manage it in an ad hoc manner. Too much is overlooked - like possibly planning for the post-war occupation.

Donald Rumsfeld was a naval aviator. His job - like that of all combat pilots - was to fly a complex machine, with managing people a secondary mission. Management of a large organization is a very different set of skills, one that most of the members of the Bush administration seem to consider unimportant along side knowledge of conservative ideology. Still, that Rumsfeld did not know how to run effective meetings that used the skills of those attending surprises me.

The rest of Gen. Shinseki's letter to Donald Rumsfeld is also very much worth reading.

The Air Force shake up is aimed at the roots of the Air Force culture

The firing of the Air force Chief of staff (a fighter pilot) and his replacement by a special ops pilot who is not a member of the Christian evangelists who have taken control of the Air force since the end of the Cold War means a really major attack on the current culture of the Air Force. Laura Rozen comments on the Bob Gates initiated change.

"USAF CoS: Fighter pilots 'out,' unconventional ops, team player 'in'":

The SAC bomber pilots ran the USAF from 1947-1989. The fighter pilots, mostly "F-15 mafia" (fighter vs. the attack air-to-ground guys like me), have run the USAF since 1989.

Gates appointment of Schwartz is significant for a number of reasons, and clearly points to issues of "roles and missions" and procurement strategy -- not just nuclear weapon assurance.

Expect more emphasis on:

-- team player leadership vs. fighter pilot mavericks who nod their heads at civilian Pentagon leadership then do whatever they please

-- mobility (tanker/transport) vs. combat forces (fighter/attack/bomber)

-- UAVs (unmanned "drones") procurement vs. fighters (especially F-22 - the USAF gold-plated fighter without an adversary)

-- USAF support for small-unit special ops vs. preparing for global war with one of the [B]RIC nations

-- (perhaps) less promotion based on secret hand-shake patronage

The fact that Gates is going the Langley AFB (USAF's fighter HQ) to lecture them on leadership is really striking. It is a direct slap at the entrenched USAF culture.

Last, I don't know if Gen. Schwartz is Jewish or not. Given his name, he may be. If he is, his appointment is also a strong message against the evangelical Christian cult that has overtaken the USAF since the end of the Cold War.

The places to look for real change are a revamp of announced strategy along with changes in weapons system procurement.

One area I would speculate on is that since the Marine Corps is in the process of proving the V-22 Osprey, a major change in aerial support of special operations troops, will the Air Force increase purchases of the Osprey?

Another place to look is the procurement of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

This is an interesting move from Bob Gates.

Did Iranian Intelligence dupe Cheney and company into the Iraq invasion?

Journalists are frantically wading through the long delayed (four years?) but finally issued Phase II of the Senate investigation into the US Government's use of Intelligence before invading Iraq. Trust McClatchy News to come up with a really big issue. Did Iranian Intelligence use a small cabal of American government officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Cheney's office to feed fake Intelligence to the government and cause the American invasion of Iran's worst enemy, Iraq?

By John Walcott | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that a small group of Pentagon officials who'd collected dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran from Iranian exiles might have "been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service . . . to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government," a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.

A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the group's activities after only a month, and Pentagon officials never followed up on investigators' recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.

The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator. [Snip]

The aborted counterintelligence investigation probed some Pentagon officials' contacts with Iranian exile Manucher Ghorbanifar [1}, whom the CIA had labeled a "fabricator" in 1984. Those contacts were brokered by an American civilian, Michael Ledeen [2], a former Pentagon and National Security Council consultant and a leading advocate of invading Iraq and overthrowing Iran's Islamic regime.

According to the Senate report, the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity unit concluded in 2003 that Ledeen "was likely unwitting of any counterintelligence issues related to his relationship with Mr. Ghorbanifar."

The counterintelligence unit said, however, that Ledeen's association with Ghorbanifar "was widely known, and therefore it should be presumed other foreign intelligence services, including those of Iran, would know."

Stephen Cambone [4], then the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, shut down the counterintelligence investigation after only a month, the Senate report said.

The Senate report said that Pentagon officials never followed up on the investigators' recommendation for a comprehensive analysis of whether Ghorbanifar or his associates tried "to directly or indirectly influence or access U.S. government officials."

The counterintelligence investigators recommended that U.S. officials attempt "to map Ghorbanifar's relationship within Iranian elite social networks and, if possible, his contacts with other governments and/or intelligence organizations," but that effort was never undertaken.

The Senate committee also found that Pentagon officials concealed the contacts with Ghorbanifar from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department. Pentagon officials also provided Senate investigators with an inaccurate account of events and, with support from two unnamed officials in Cheney's office, continued meeting with Ghorbanifar after contact with him was officially ordered to stop.

The first meetings with Ghorbanifar, which were disclosed in August 2003 by the Long Island, N.Y., newspaper Newsday, took place in Rome in December 2001. They were attended by two Pentagon Iran experts, Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin; by an Italian military intelligence official, and by Ledeen.

On the Iranian side were Ghorbanifar, an unidentified Iranian exile from Morocco and an alleged Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps defector.

Among other things, the Iranians told the Americans about:

_ Iranian "hit teams" they said were targeting U.S. personnel and facilities in Afghanistan.

_ What they claimed was Shiite Muslim Iran's longstanding relationship with the secular Palestine Liberation Organization.

_ "Tunnel complexes in Iran for weapons storage or exfiltration of regime leaders," and about the alleged growth of anti-regime sentiment in Iran.

Franklin [1], who, in an unrelated matter, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to prison in 2006 for providing classified information on Iran policy to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, passed the information about the alleged Iranian hit squads to a U.S. Special Forces commander in Afghanistan. Although a DIA analyst told the Senate committee that he couldn't speculate on whether the information had been "truly useful," Ledeen and Pentagon officials claimed it saved American lives, the committee said.

During the Rome meetings, Ghorbanifar also laid out a scheme to overthrow the Iranian regime on a napkin during a late night meeting in a bar. "The plan," said the Senate committee, "involved the simultaneous disruption of traffic at key intersections leading to Tehran that would create anxiety, work stoppages and other disruptive measures" in a capital city famous for its traffic congestion.

Ghorbanifar asked for $5 million in seed money, Franklin told the committee, and indicated that if the traffic jam plan succeeded, he'd need additional money.

"The proposed funding for, and foreign involvement in, Mr. Ghorbanifar's plan for regime change were never fully understood," the Senate committee said.

Nevertheless, Ghorbanifar's proposals grew more ambitious — and expensive. A February 2002 memo from Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Rodman referred to an unnamed foreign government's support for a Ghorbanifar plan that would cost millions of dollars. A later summary referred to contracts "that would assure oil and gas sales in the event of regime change". The U.S. ambassador to Italy said that DOD officials "were talking about 25 million for some kind of Iran program."

After Franklin and Rhode returned from the Rome meetings, the Senate report said, two series of events began to unfold in Washington that were typical of the gamesmanship that plagued the Bush administration's national security team.

"First," the report said, "State Department and CIA officials attempted to determine what Mr. Ledeen and the DOD representatives had done in Rome, and second, DOD officials debated the next course of action."

When the CIA and the State Department discovered that Ledeen and Ghorbanifar were involved, they opposed any further contact with the two. Ledeen's contacts, the Defense Human Intelligence Service concluded, were "nefarious and unreliable," the Senate committee reported.

According to the report, Ledeen, however, persisted, presenting then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith with a new 100-day plan to provide, among other things, evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that supposedly had been moved to Iran — Saddam Hussein's archenemy. This time, the report said, Ledeen solicited support from former speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich and from three then-GOP senators, Sam Brownback of Kansas, Jon Kyl of Arizona and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.

Rhode and Ghorbanifar met again in Paris in June 2003 with at least the tacit approval of an official in Cheney's office, the Senate report said.

He reported back to officials in the Pentagon and the vice president's office, but "there is no indication that the information collected during the Paris meeting was shared with the Intelligence Community for a determination of potential intelligence value," the report said.

[1] Iranian exile Manucher Ghorbanifar was suspected by the CIA of passing forged documents to the U.S. during the Iran-Contra situation, and had been completely abandoned by the CIA as totally unreliable. He had been a close associate to LtC. Oliver North.

[2} American civilian, Michael Ledeen was another individual who used Ghorbanafar as a source, and was upset with the CIA when the issued a "burn Notice" (meaning do not use this individual or information he provides - he is a known liar.) Ledeen had vouched for Ghorbanafur to National Security Adviser Robert McFarland who then used his data in the Iran-Contra situation. Ledeen was also tightly linked to the Yellow Cake Forgeries which led George Bush to include the statement "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." in his 2003 State of the Union speech. The book The Italian Letter describes how a forged letter became a key element in the invasion of Iraq. Michael Ledeen is a key player in the book, in large part because of his connections with Italian Military Intelligence. The NeoCon Michale Ledeen still supports the invasion of Iraq and pushes actively for air strikes on Iran.

[3] Larry Franklin worked in Douglass Feith's Office of Special Plans, an organization set up to use Intelligence reports rejected by the CIA and the rest of the Intelligence community. The so-called Intelligence reports from OSP were then stove-piped directly into Vice President Dick Cheney's office. Cheney was known to dislike and distrust the CIA and the rest of the Intelligence Community because he felt they ignored, downplayed, or rejected significant Intelligence reports.

[4] Stephen Cambone was the much disliked Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence under Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld who shut down the investigation after only a month. He was known as Rumsfeld's chief henchman, and the orders to Intelligence personnel and contractors to "soften up" prisoners came from his office. He resigned shortly after Donald Rumsfeld left the job of Secretary of Defense. It seems probable to me that he and Douglas Feith worked closely together stovepiping Intelligence information to the office of the Vice President.

Consider also the Iraqi National Congress which was set up under the leadership of Ahmed Chalabi after the Persian Gulf War to coordinate the activities of the various anti-Saddam groups attempting to overthrow Saddam's government. Chalabi has a record of illegal dealings and is known to have numerous Iranian contacts. Since he is a Shiite, this is not surprising but it leads to speculation that he has long been an agent for Iran. Yet since he was close to the American NeoCons and considered one of them, the Pentagon had initially planned to install him as the new leader of Iraq after America removed Saddam. His inability to obtain on the ground support from Iraqis ended that effort shortly after the Pentagon delivered him to Baghdad in 2003. Suspicion that he is and has been an agent for Iranian Intelligence persist. Using the INC to confirm false intelligence sent thorugh other sources to the American NeoCons and the Pentagon and Office of the Vice President is exacly the kind of activity a foreign Intelligence agency bent on sending bad Intelligence to the top American Officials would conduct.

There is also the fact that America has used Iraq as a counter to Iran since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and in fact covertly supported Iraq when Saddam attacked Iran in the early 80's. If Iranian Intelligence could get Americans to removed Saddam from power that action would make Iran much safer. It has to be assumed that the Iranian Intelligence Services has been working hard to distract America from Iran and to get Saddam removed. That certainly has been the effect of the Bush/Cheney invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Have we been witnessing the very successful efforts of Iranian Intelligence to remove Saddam, Iraq and weaken America in the Middle East?

There's no smoking gun yet, but it certainly fits the publicly known motivations of the various players in the last two decades. Then there is the fact that Stephen Cambone shut down the internal investigation of those Pentagon - Office of the Vice President players after only one month with no results reported. That's so suspicious that it is close to an admission of guilt. Any report of an investigation that resulted in such a report would be politically disastrous to the Bush administration, and they have been very good at shutting down such investigations.

Maybe it's time to reopen that investigation. Hey! It might exonerate all the various Bush administration players from suspicion. But it might also show them as stupid rubes played for suckers by Iranian Intelligence, too.

I know which alternative that I consider more likely.

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If you are curious and have some time on your hands, here are the (large!) PDF files that contain the Phase II report:

• "Report on Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information"


• "Report on Intelligence Activities Relating to Iraq Conducted by the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group and the Office of Special Plans Within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy"

Talking Points Memo has bloggers reviewing those files and reporting what they find

• here.

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Addendum 6/6/08 3:40 PM
The New York Times has now published its reflections on the Senate report on Intelligence. It's not kind to the Bush administration. Instead it's a compendium of example of how it is possible to lie by misdirection and technically accurate yet highly misleading statements.

It took just a few months after the United States’ invasion of Iraq for the world to find out that Saddam Hussein had long abandoned his nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs. He was not training terrorists or colluding with Al Qaeda. The only real threat he posed was to his own countrymen.

It has taken five years to finally come to a reckoning over how much the Bush administration knowingly twisted and hyped intelligence to justify that invasion. On Thursday — after years of Republican stonewalling — a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee gave us as good a set of answers as we’re likely to get.

The report shows clearly that President Bush should have known that important claims he made about Iraq did not conform with intelligence reports. In other cases, he could have learned the truth if he had asked better questions or encouraged more honest answers.

The report confirms one serious intelligence failure: President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration officials were told that Iraq still had chemical and biological weapons and did not learn that these reports were wrong until after the invasion. But Mr. Bush and his team made even that intelligence seem more solid, more recent and more dangerous than it was.

The report shows that there was no intelligence to support the two most frightening claims Mr. Bush and his vice president used to sell the war: that Iraq was actively developing nuclear weapons and had longstanding ties to terrorist groups. It seems clear that the president and his team knew that that was not true, or should have known it — if they had not ignored dissenting views and telegraphed what answers they were looking for.

Over all, the report makes it clear that top officials, especially Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, knew they were not giving a full and honest account of their justifications for going to war.

The report was supported by only two of the seven Republicans on the 15-member Senate panel. The five dissenting Republicans first tried to kill it, and then to delete most of its conclusions. They finally settled for appending objections. The bulk of their criticisms were sophistry transparently intended to protect Mr. Bush and deny the public a full accounting of how he took America into a disastrous war.

The report documents how time and again Mr. Bush and his team took vague and dubious intelligence reports on Iraq’s weapons programs and made them sound like hard and incontrovertible fact.

The New York Times Editors also make it quite clear that this report was available nearly five years ago, but was buried by the Republican Senators on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee.

The lies told by the Bush administration are not the work of just a few individuals. The entire Republican leadership in Congress and in the White House all got behind those lies.

And why?

To misdirect the American public into a war against Iraq which was no threat to anyone other than their own people, and to direct Americans away from the real threats of terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan, largely funded by Saudi Arabian money.

It sounds insane, unless the only purpose was to gain power in the American government for a permanent minority party by faking an external threat that did not exist. Still, why did they ignore the threat that did exist?

It still sounds insane. But that's the Party of Ronald Reagan and the movement conservatives. Threats and fear where none really exists while ignore real threats right in front of their eyes because to recognize the real threats would jeopardize their power in government, which allows them to corruptly steal taxpayer money left and right.

Blackwater in Iraq under no effective control

The private mercenary firm, Blackwater, has been in a lot of trouble with the Iraqi government over the killing of a number of Baghdad civilians last Sunday. Blackwater spokesmen say that their employees were providing protection to a Department of State convoy when the convoy was hit by an explosive device and came under fire from insurgents. The company spokesman says they returned fire. The Department of State Incident Report gives the company's version of events.

Prime Minister Maliki of the Iraq government disputes the story told by Blackwater, saying that, while an explosive device did go off, it was nowhere near the convoy and that the contract security people responded with excessive force, firing on civilian vehicles which were not threatening in any way and even using helicopters to fire on the civilians. Maliki has ordered Blackwater to leave Iraq. The Baltimore Sun provides a good article on the differing reports from Blackwater spokesman and from Prime Minister Maliki of the Iraqi government.

This gets especially interesting, more that just the cowboy antics that Blackwater is once again accused of. It is interesting in two ways. First, because Blackwater is not under the same regulations as most of the security contractors working in Iraq. Most security contractors in Iraq work under contracts from the Department of Defense. Because of similar incidents in which such security contractors (the euphemism for Mercenaries)Congress passed a law requiring that such mercenaries be brought under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ.) While apparently no DoD contractor has ever been charged under UCMJ, there is at least some effort by DoD to get incident reports and gather some information on alleged incidents they are involved in. Blackwater is not under the UCMJ because it has a contract with Department of State rather than with Department of Defense, and DoS has not made significant efforts to control them.

The second question is whether PM Maliki, as the leader of the government of Iraq established by the United States after the earlier government of Saddam was totally dismantled, will have any control over the criminal actions of the mercenaries that the U.S. government has contracted to operate in that country. PM Maliki has lifted the license Blackwater has to operate in Iraq. As the New York Times pointed out "Early in the period when Iraq was still under American administration, the United States government unilaterally exempted its employees and contractors from Iraqi law."

The efforts of Congress to bring the security firms under control have all given the DoD the power to control those firms it contracts with, but those the State Department contracts with are outside those controls. Much more important, the U.S. has no Status of Forces Agreement with the supposedly independent government of Iraq. Blackwater, USA is a private contractor owned and operated by the ultra conservative Erik Prince who has close ties to the Republican Party. Will the Bush administration and Condoleeza Rice permit PM Maliki to kick Blackwater out of Iraq?

There is little reason to doubt that the security contractors operating in Iraq have suffered from a lack of effective control of their operations. The conflict between what the government of Iraq accuses Blackwater of and what the Blackwater spokesman says they did is at present a "He said - He said" argument. It is hard to decide which side is telling the greater truth since there are few independently obtained reliable facts currently available to the rest of us.

Still, the best bet is that Blackwater did use excessive or even unnecessary force since it has operated without controls and has been encouraged to be highly aggressive in the performance of its defensive duties. Blackwater operatives have a reputation for such aggressive, even cowboy tactics. Using helicopters to fire on civilians inside the city of Baghdad demonstrates that they weren't very careful who they were shooting at.

Then, too, a reputation for such aggressiveness could be considered good for sales of their services. When someone is buying protection service and it comes down to a choice between two firms with equal apparent capabilities, the one that has a reputation for being more aggressive is likely to get the contract. This is, of course, speculation, but it is quite reasonable speculation when looking at someone selling the services of armed soldiers.

The trouble is, America is trying to fight a counterinsurgency as well as attempting to tamp down a civil war in Iraq, and success in a counterinsurgency goes to the side that gains the hearts and minds of the people of the country. The Blackwater incident is another indicator that the U.S. is not serious about trying to fight a counterinsurgency in Iraq. Blackwater's reputation for aggressive cowboy tactics will add to the reasons for the Iraqi people to demand that the American troops leave their country. Why shouldn't they? This incident with Blackwater demonstrates that the U.S. occupation of Iraq is part of the problem, not part of the solution to violence in Iraq.

The use of mercenary troops by the U.S. means using armed forces which are under no effective political control in a combat zone. At best they are handed a set of Rule of Engagement which are not enforced. That never works in a counterinsurgency because it makes enemies of those we need to befriend. But we can't replace the mercenaries in Iraq with government soldiers unless we start a draft. A draft is a political impossibility today in America.

That means we do not have enough trained and controlled troops to win in Iraq and no way to raise them other than hiring mercenaries. The mercenaries are beyond effective control. The best answer would be to get out of Iraq. Yet we also are convinced that we can't leave as quickly as logistically possible since that would leave Iraq as a failed state. America's invasion and incompetent occupation has left no remnant of effective central government in Iraq.

So we can't leave, but can't stay in Iraq and win without using the mercenaries. Talk about poor planning! Still, it is the lack of control over the mercenaries that is their worst fault. So the mercenaries must remain for a while longer, but be brought under tight and effective control. Not only must they be brought under control, they must be shown to be brought under control by very publicly charging, convicting and punishing some of the worst offenders and by placing ALL security contractors in Iraq under close and public inspection. If the Iraqi people are not convinced that all the American troops - including the mercenaries - are working for their betterment, then America has lost the counterinsurgency in Iraq and staying longer will just make the damage worse.

Unfortunately, this solution runs counter to the radical free-market ideology of the Bush administration and the Republican Party. Efforts to attempt such controls will quickly be derailed by politically connected Republican donors, particularly those in the security industry. Then, even if a solution is was attempted, the Bush administration has repeatedly demonstrated that it is incompetent at conducting such control over any organization, even those like FEMA that are integral to the government itself. The complexities of actually doing something effective are beyond the abilities of the Bush administration.

While the Bush administration has repeatedly proven that it cannot "make the trains run on time," they are brilliant at public relations. Instead of fixing the problem they will instead do their usual action of trying to treat the problem as a public relations problem. In place of actually solving he problem, they will work to convince the American public that there is no problem. Oddly, since the real problem is public perception of American troops by the Iraqi public, they will not work as hard there to fix the PR problem. That's because they have fewer effective PR tools in Iraq and don't understand the public perceptions there. The PR effort there will be less intense.

What will not happen is any effective, centrally controlled effort by the Bush administration to actually fix the problems in Iraq caused by the out-of-control mercenaries there. That's just another can they will kick down the road to the next President, providing further fodder for conservatives to use to attack the incoming Democratic President in 2009 for losing Iraq.

The problems caused by the use of uncontrolled mercenaries in Iraq is a real one. They stem from poor planning and inadequate organization by the Bush administration both in the invasion of Iraq and the resulting occupation. Solving those problems will not provide a benefit to the Republican Party, so Congressional Republicans will block any effort to solve those problems, just as the Republicans are currently doing their best to prevent the Democrats from passing any legislation that solves American problems. Meanwhile the Bush White House will sit on its hands rather than recognize the difficulties it has created.

It's not a pretty picture.

Is there a culture demanding Rogue intelligence operations?

Look at the article by David Kurtz over at TPM. David reads Sy Hersh has suggesting that the alumina of the Iran-Contra Scandal have been using what they learned there and running "off-the-books" operations around both the CIA and the Pentagon in order to avoid Congressional scrutiny.

This is much like the numerous crimes under Nixon, especially the Plumbers unit. It is also like the way the conservatives ran the wars in Latin America under Reagan, although they let the CIA in there. But it came out of the National Security Counsel under Admiral Poindexter and Lt. Col. Oliver North.

Abrams determined that the lack of tight, central control let too many details of Iran-Contra escape, so this time they had their man in the Office of the Vice President, and they have had him run things from there. With Rumsfeld at DoD, many of the operations that should have gone through the CIA were instead transferred to DoD and run out of the Pentagon. To top it off, the Republicans who ran Congress never permitted any Congressional oversight.

In short, the Republican Party has run the federal government like a Mafia organization would, or like the Communist Party in the USSR ran the USSR.

So my question: Is the Bush administration the last of the extremist Cold Warriors trying to hold onto and even expand their power here in the U.S.? Has the war in Iraq been little more than an attempt to shift the resources of the United States towards a new set of enemies now that the Soviets and Communism are gone?

Sure is what it looks like to me.