 In this week's (Nov.24) New Yorker, author George Packer
attempts valiantly to portray post-war Iraq accurately and moderately,
so that both sides can realize what must urgently be done and hopefully
draw together to stave off what he sees as impending disaster. But what
emerges is not a moderate picture. What Packer reveals is the
absolutely staggering ignorance of the decision-makers in Washington:
about Iraqi culture, about geography, about history, about global
politics, about what is really going on in Iraq. Because 'the war after
the war' is being run with an iron hand by a handful of ideologues in
Washington who do not know or seemingly care about the facts, not only
is the world's only superpower acting in a grossly incompetent manner
in 'reconstructing' Iraq, but those in Iraq now perceive their
'liberators', through no fault of the brave troops and volunteers on
the ground, as complete idiots, horrendously under-resourced, unwilling
to spend any money on even basic infrastructure, extravagant in
rewarding their own higher-up stalwarts, insensitive and indifferent to
the suffering of the people, and utterly disorganized. To the troops
and volunteers, the perception is only marginally better: the internal
dissension between the ideologues and the more competent military and
humanitarian leaders is palpable, disruptive, confusing,
counter-productive and demoralizing. It is now clear that, with
mind-boggling naïveté, Bush went to war in Iraq with absolutely no plan for post-war
reconstruction, expecting not only that Iraq would somehow be able to
manage this enormous task themselves, but would be able to do it with
their own money. It is clear that there still is no plan for
reconstruction, and the inadequate and uncoordinated team on the ground
in Iraq has no idea what to do first, does not have the skills or
resources to do the things that most urgently need to be done, and is
essentially making it up as they go along. The war in Iraq is clearly
going to go down in history as one of the most colossal political and
military blunders of all time.
 The consequence of all this is a
country largely in limbo, ungoverned, chaotic, with people living in
constant and abject fear. Without authority, without resources for
reconstruction, the country is degenerating quickly into anarchy,
despair, lawlessness, and civil war. With a monstrous live grenade
about to go off in its face, there is no wonder that Bush has suddenly
decided the US has to make a hasty retreat before next year's
elections, to hell with the consequences. As so many of us said before
the war was launched, the US has neither the stomach nor the bankroll
to lead Iraq through at least a generation of necessary rebuilding that
will cost at least a trillion dollars in US taxpayers' money, and
involve inevitable setbacks, violence and loss of American lives. It's
still hard to conceive that Bush's cloister of advisors were too stupid
to realize this.
The article itself is very long, and although you can get an
interesting Flash
presentation of some of Packer's comments and the
accompanying photos by Gilles Peress (in ironic black and white) on the
New Yorker site, the
full text is not online, so you owe it to yourself to buy this issue
and read the article in its entirety. The cover to look for, reproduced
above, features a stark illustration entitled The Occupation by Anthony Russo.
Although I'd never attempt to summarize the whole article, here are
some noteworthy excerpts:
One of [acting Iraq
Education Minister Andrew] Erdmann's fundamental conclusions was that
long term success depended on international support. In the short run,
he explained to me one evening, "the foundation of everything is
security", which partly depends on having sufficient numbers of troops.
"You don't have to look too far to see that isn't the case here...The
question is, why weren't more people put in? That was the concern of
[the long research memo that led to my appointment] - were we prepared
to do what it took in the postwar phase?" ... Powell circulated
Erdmann's memo to [Cheney, Rumsfeld & Rice]. "Maybe it wasn't
read", Erdmann said.
"There was a desire by some in [Cheney's] office and the Pentagon to
cut and run from Iraq and leave it up to Chalabi to run it", a senior
Administration official told me..."The planning was so wishful that it
bordered on self-deception. It isn't pragmatism, it isn't Realpolitik,
it isn't conservatism, it isn't liberalism...It's theology."
Two days [after the Army chief of staff said several hundred thousand
troops would be needed for reconstruction and the President's chief
economic advisor said it would cost $200B], Wolfowitz appeared before
the House Budget Committee and said that so high an estimate was
"wildly off the mark". He explained "It's hard to conceive that it
would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it
would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of
Saddam's security forces and his Army. Hard to imagine."
Erdmann said "I had a particular historical perspective. I felt this
[the Iraq War] was a defining event which, good or bad, would have an
impact for the next decade. If it went badly, the consequences would be
worse than Vietnam. And second, the postwar phase was going to be the
most important."
"We were incompetent as far as they [the Iraqi people] were concerned",
[NYU law professor and constitutional advisor Noah] Feldman said. "The
key to it all was the looting. That was when it was clear that there
was no order. There's an Arab proverb: Better 40 years of oppression
than one day of anarchy." He added, "That also told them they could
fight against us -- that we were not a serious force."
One of the most hierarchical, top-down state systems on earth had been
wiped out almost overnight, and no new system had taken its place...[As
a result] confused, frustrated Iraqis turn to the Americans, who seem
to have all the power and money; the Americans, who don't see
themselves as occupiers, try to force the Iraqis to work within their
own institutions, but those institutions have been largely dismantled.
At that moment [following a series of bungled nighttime raids in search
of Baathists], Iraq did feel
like Vietnam. The Americans were moving half blind in the alien
landscape, missing their quarry and leaving behind frightened women and
boys with memories.
[Twenty-nine year old Captain John] Prior wants to make a career in the
Army, but many other junior officers plan to quit after their current
tour. Alcohol use, which is illegal for soldiers stationed in Iraq, has
become widespread, and there have been three suicides in other
battalions at the base...All the soldiers suffer from the stress of
heat, long days, lack of sleep, homesickness, the constant threat of
attack, and the simple fact that there are nowhere near enough of them
to do the tasks they've been given.
"The ayatollah is hooking the international community by using
prisoners' tales," [warned Elahe Sharifpour-Hicks, a human rights
officer working at the UN offices in Baghdad]. "No one should
underestimate these ayatollahs, and I'm afraid the Americans are doing
this". [The ayatollahs tell stories repeatedly about their brutal
imprisonment at the hands of Saddam as a means of whipping up frenzy in
support, sometimes, of their own political aspirations in Iraq, for an
Iran-style extreme Islamist state].
As with so many other aspects of the occupation, the origins of the
problem [the Iraq Media Network runs music videos most of the day,
instead of real news or educational programming] lie in Washington. The
insipid programming reflects the Pentagon's desire to proclaim freedom
in Iraq without doing the harder, riskier work of helping Iraqis create
the necessary institutions. The intellectual failures of planning
continue to haunt the occupation.
[Paul Bremer:] "Your mentality, if you're an Iraqi, still is: It's the
government that fixes things. The government fixed everything before,
for better and for worse -- they did everything. And now here comes a
government that can throw out our much-vaunted army in three weeks, so
why can't they fix the electricity in three weeks?"
[Describing a good-will visit by Bremer to a hospital, where infant
mortality is soaring due to lack of supplies and non-existent
distribution infrastructure] In one room, a skeletal baby lay in its
mother's arms. On a nearby bed, a toddler lolled against its mother's
body, mouth open. This was sickness, maybe even the approach of death,
not childbirth. The smile died on Bremer's face. "I don't like seeing
this at all", he said, and asked the photographer to stop taking
pictures.
[Dr. Jean-Bernard Bouvier, medical charity worker, whose WHO-supported
emergency distribution plan for drugs was rejected by the Coalition:]
"They don't see the fragility of the system. It's not that children are
starving yet, but it's a structure that's slowly crumbling. You can
degrade a society bit by bit, but then you reach a point where you just
crash."
Bremer's decision to abolish the Iraqi Army and purge high-level
Baathists from the civil administration only added to the tumult in
Iraq. As Jay Garner put it, the immediate result of the May 16th order
was the creation of "four hundred thousand new enemies". Even some of
Bremer's advisors now acknowledge that cutting loose an army without
guns and without pay was a serious mistake.
[Ghassan Salame, political advisor to Sergio Vieira de Mello, UN
special representative in Iraq]: "When I listen to Mr. Wolfowitz, I
feel that he mistakes Baghdad for Berlin in 1945. He doesn't know the
place...This country does not need at all the kind of sweeping
privatization that these guys back in Washington are looking for." [de
Mello died in the August 19th UN building bomb blast]
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MADE IN CANADA
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