IRAQ: Ill-thought out and badly executed plans characterise US policy in Iraq and elsewhere, suggests Jonathan Eyal
With a short wave, Paul Bremer, until now the head of the US administration in Iraq, finally bid farewell this week to Baghdad, and boarded a military plane for the journey back to Washington. Bremer has reasons to feel satisfied that he had achieved his main objective: the hand over of power to a local Iraqi administration. But the debate about US policy in the country over the last year is just beginning. And the effects of any errors committed by Bremer and his people will be felt for a long time, not only in Iraq, but in America's military posture throughout the world.
Contrary to the appearance of improvisation which the world witnessed, the US did prepare in advance for the occupation of Iraq; the problem was that this contingency planning had nothing to do with Iraqi realities, and that the plans were entrusted to the wrong people. Before the war was unleashed, Washington assumed that the biggest challenge for the occupying force would be a posed by large numbers of refugees, fleeing the war zone. The American military secretly rehearsed airlifts of food and water, and stockpiled both in various regions around the Middle East. In the event, there were few refugees, mainly because the intensive phase of the war was shorter than expected.
Yet the one outcome which nobody in Washington rehearsed was the complete collapse of law and order, which duly followed Saddam's overthrow on April 9th last year. This is a curious omission for, as every military man knows, looting and murders are the inevitable by-products of any war. But the Pentagon deliberately ignored this question, essentially for operational reasons. Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, adopted a war plan which emphasised great mobility, with small units pushing directly to Baghdad. There was no room in this strategy for the various auxiliary services required to police a country. So, one of the biggest errors in the US administration of Iraq took place even before the war started: ordinary Iraqis suddenly found themselves without a government but without personal protection, as local police melted away.
The Pentagon also had no immediate incentive to rectify this mistake. Saddam City, a vast swathe of dense but dilapidated housing in one corner of Baghdad, was where widespread looting first started. But it was also an ideal area for snipers and guerrilla warfare. Faced with the choice of risking the lives of their troops or abandoning Iraqis to the mercy of the looters, US commanders on the ground chose the latter option. By the time Paul Bremer arrived to restore some normality (after a chaotic first administrator was summarily dismissed), America's claim to be a benign liberator was already destroyed.
"We are aiming to be on the ground - for years. We're going to be running a colony, almost," Bremer told a group of businessmen before the Iraq war even started. And this clearly continued to be the idea when Bremer was actually given the job. His decision to formally disband the Iraqi armed forces, taken in mid-May last year, is widely regarded as disastrous, partly because it merely increased mayhem, and also because it contributed to the rise of an insurgency against US troops. Some of the dismissed soldiers and officers turned against American forces; all the weapons they used came from Saddam's arsenals.
Bremer has since argued that the decision to disband the military amounted to just acceptance of an existing fact: defeated and demoralised, Iraqi troops were already leaving their barracks in droves. There is some truth in this argument. But the formal order to dissolve Iraq's standing army sent the wrong message to many thousands of mid-ranking officers; it basically told them that they had no future employment. Their disenchantment ended up costing the US dearly during the guerrilla fighting which unfolded.
Once Iraqi armed opposition begun - and this was already apparent by the summer of last year - the real task for US troops was to isolate the extremists while using force surgically, and for a short period of time. But American forces deployed their might in an attempt to crush their opponents and, in the process, managed to alienate the local population even further. And Bremer's decision to go after some of the individual leaders of the uprising was another classic mistake: it made them instant celebrities, precisely what should always be avoided in such confrontations.
With hindsight, it is clear that the US entered Iraq on the assumption that the occupation would last for years, and there would be time to remould the country's institutions from the bottom up. As opposition to the Americans mounted - and as the casualties piled up - the US initially refused to change its strategy, but looked instead for miracles. The killing of Saddam's sons in July last year was supposed to stop the insurgency. The capture of Saddam himself last December was assumed to have the same effect. Yet, on both occasions, the insurgency intensified.
So, by the spring of this year, Washington reversed its position, opting instead for a quick end of the occupation, and the installation of a new government. The bottom-up reconstruction effort ended up as a top-bottom approach. And neither strategy was pursued with much determination.
Yet it would be unfair to put all the blame on the US administrators in the country. For none of them was able to address the bigger problem, which was the persistent row between the State Department and the Pentagon over the future of Iraq. It was this dispute which prevented the creation of an Iraqi government in exile before the war even begun. And it was a persistent argument among officials in Washington which resulted in a constantly shifting policy on the ground, the periodic selection and dumping of Iraqi officials, a total confusion which baffled not only ordinary Iraqis, but most of America's friends around the world.
More seriously still, the failures in Iraq are part of a pattern in US military behaviour. Over the last decade, America and its allies intervened decisively in three countries. On all occasions - Bosnia in 1995, Kosovo in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001 - the aim was to save people from their own governments. In many respects, the previous interventions were easier: the countries were smaller, the numbers of US-led troops were proportionally much larger than those currently stationed in Iraq, and the local populations originally received foreign troops as liberators.
The American post-war approach in all these conflicts never varied, however: the installation of new governments, the drafting of constitutions, and the promise of fresh elections. And yet, everything went wrong.
The assumption was that, given a free choice, people would vote for non-religious or racially-based political parties. Exactly the opposite: Kosovo, Bosnia and Afghanistan remain divided along ethnic lines. There was also the hope that the installation of new governments would result in a quick withdrawal of foreign troops. But the need for the presence of foreign armies continues to this day. Nor has economic prosperity followed; the countries of the Balkans and Afghanistan are still utterly dependent on international handouts.
Why has that happened? For a transfer of power to work as intended, a long period of preparation is required: the occupation of Germany or Japan - the two successful historic cases of this process - took years. Yet American public opinion today cannot tolerate such a lengthy period of involvement. At the same, the holding of elections has to follow economic and political stability; free elections are the product, rather than the mechanism to achieve stability.
But, given the US rhetoric, no American president can disengage from a conflict without at least the claim that US military involvement has resulted in the establishment of democracy. So, fresh elections are invariably promised, and they usually become part of the problem, not a solution.
In Iraq today, the new government is saddled with a promise to draft a new constitution in the absence of any consensus about what it may contain, while holding free elections in the absence of any electoral rolls, and all within a period of less than six months. Meanwhile, the country has to be governed, terrorists must be eliminated and ordinary Iraqis are expecting to see the first fruits of economic recovery.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that, yet again, US power controlled a country long enough to annoy the local population, but not long enough to place the foundation for a real transformation. Perhaps this is the predicament of any intervening power. But the people of Iraq deserve better. And the chances are that they are not going to get it.
Ironically, when President Bush came to power four years ago, he announced that US troops would never be involved in the messy task of "nation-building". Yet this is precisely what American forces have been doing in Iraq for over a year. Despite the publicised cases of torture, most of the US troops remained courageous, disciplined and humane. However, bereft of a clear direction from their political masters, their effort was largely nugatory. So, perhaps George Bush was right in his original idea: "nation-building" will never be an American speciality.
Jonathan Eyal is Director of Studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London