What Went Wrong in Iraq
Larry Diamond
From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2004

Summary: Although the early U.S. blunders in the occupation of Iraq are
well
known, their consequences are just now becoming clear. The Bush
administration was never willing to commit the resources necessary to
secure
the country and did not make the most of the resources it had. U.S.
officials did get a number of things right, but they never understood-or
even listened to-the country they were seeking to rebuild. As a result,
the
democratic future of Iraq now hangs in the balance.

Larry Diamond is Co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and Senior Fellow
at
Stanford University's Hoover Institution. From January to April 2004, he
served as a Senior Adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in
Baghdad.


BLUNDERING IN BAGHDAD

With the transfer of power to a new interim Iraqi government on June 28,
the
political phase of U.S. occupation came to an abrupt end. The transfer
marked an urgently needed, and in some ways hopeful, new departure for
Iraq.
But it did not erase, or even much ease at first, the most pressing
problems
confronting that beleaguered country: endemic violence, a shattered state,
a
nonfunctioning economy, and a decimated society. Some of these problems
may
have been inevitable consequences of the war to topple Saddam Hussein. But
Iraq today falls far short of what the Bush administration promised. As a
result of a long chain of U.S. miscalculations, the coalition occupation
has
left Iraq in far worse shape than it need have and has diminished the
long-term prospects of democracy there. Iraqis, Americans, and other
foreigners continue to be killed. What went wrong?

Many of the original miscalculations made by the Bush administration are
well known. But the early blunders have had diffuse, profound, and lasting
consequences-some of which are only now becoming clear. The first and
foremost of these errors concerned security: the Bush administration was
never willing to commit anything like the forces necessary to ensure order
in postwar Iraq. From the beginning, military experts warned Washington
that
the task would require, as Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki told Congress
in February 2003, "hundreds of thousands" of troops. For the United States
to deploy forces in Iraq at the same ratio to population as NATO had in
Bosnia would have required half a million troops. Yet the coalition force
level never reached even a third of that figure. Secretary of Defense
Donald
Rumsfeld and his senior civilian deputies rejected every call for a much
larger commitment and made it very clear, despite their disingenuous
promises to give the military "everything" it asked for, that such
requests
would not be welcome. No officer missed the lesson of General Shinseki,
whom
the Pentagon rewarded for his public candor by announcing his replacement
a
year early, making him a lame-duck leader long before his term expired.
Officers and soldiers in Iraq were forced to keep their complaints about
insufficient manpower and equipment private, even as top political
officials
in the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) insisted publicly that
greater
military action was necessary to secure the country.

In truth, around 300,000 troops might have been enough to make Iraq
largely
secure after the war. But doing so would also have required different
kinds
of troops, with different rules of engagement. The coalition should have
deployed vastly more military police and other troops trained for urban
patrols, crowd control, civil reconstruction, and peace maintenance and
enforcement. Tens of thousands of soldiers with sophisticated monitoring
equipment should have been posted along the borders with Syria and Iran to
intercept the flows of foreign terrorists, Iranian intelligence agents,
money, and weapons.

But Washington failed to take such steps, for the same reasons it decided
to
occupy Iraq with a relatively light force: hubris and ideology.
Contemptuous
of the State Department's regional experts who were seen as too "soft" to
remake Iraq, a small group of Pentagon officials ignored the elaborate
postwar planning the State Department had overseen through its "Future of
Iraq" project, which had anticipated many of the problems that emerged
after
the invasion. Instead of preparing for the worst, Pentagon planners
assumed
that Iraqis would joyously welcome U.S. and international troops as
liberators. With Saddam's military and security apparatus destroyed, the
thinking went, Washington could capitalize on the goodwill by handing the
country over to Iraqi expatriates such as Ahmed Chalabi, who would quickly
create a new democratic state. Not only would fewer U.S. troops be needed
at
first, but within a year, the troop levels could drop to a few tens of
thousands.

Of course, these naive assumptions quickly collapsed, along with overall
security, in the immediate aftermath of the war. U.S. troops stood by
helplessly, outnumbered and unprepared, as much of Iraq's remaining
physical, economic, and institutional infrastructure was systematically
looted and sabotaged. And even once it became obvious that the looting was
not a one-time breakdown of social order but an elaborately organized,
armed, and financed resistance to the U.S. occupation, the Bush
administration compounded its initial mistakes by stubbornly refusing to
send in more troops. Administration officials repeatedly deluded
themselves
into believing that the defeat of the insurgency was just around the
corner-just as soon as the long, hot summer of 2003 ended, or
reconstruction
dollars started flowing in and jobs were created, or the political
transition began, or Saddam Hussein was captured, or the interim
government
was inaugurated. As in Vietnam, a turning point always seemed imminent,
and
Washington refused to grasp the depth of popular disaffection.

Under its chief administrator, Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III, the CPA
(which
ruled Iraq from May 2003 until June 2004) worked hard and creatively to
craft a transition to a legitimate, viable, and democratic system of
government while rebuilding the overall economy and society. As I saw
during
my brief tenure as a senior CPA adviser on governance earlier this year,
the
U.S. administration got a number of things right. But one cannot review
the
political record without underscoring the pervasive security deficit,
which
undermined everything else the coalition sought to achieve.


NATIONAL INSECURITY

Any effort to rebuild a shattered, war-torn country should include four
basic components: political reconstruction of a legitimate and capable
state; economic reconstruction, including the rebuilding of the country's
physical infrastructure and the creation of rules and institutions that
enable a market economy; social reconstruction, including the renewal (or
in
some cases, creation) of a civil society and political culture that foster
voluntary cooperation and the limitation of state power; and the provision
of general security, to establish a safe and orderly environment.

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http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20040901faessay83505/larry-diamond/what-went-wrong-in-iraq.html

Instead of preparing for the worst, Pentagon planners assumed that
Iraqis would joyously welcome U.S. and international troops as
liberators. With Saddam's military and security apparatus destroyed, the
thinking went, Washington could capitalize on the goodwill by handing
the country over to Iraqi expatriates such as Ahmed Chalabi, who would
quickly create a new democratic state.