So again, military planners do not deserve principal criticism for the shortcomings here. But uniformed planners knew the command arrangements and were aware of the relative marginalization of the State Department in the process. They also knew how important it was that someone have responsibility for these types of political and economic tasks. In that sense, they were too willing to be quiet in the hope that somehow the problem would sort itself out.
How much did it really matter that the coalition got off to a poor start in securing post-Saddam Iraq, allowing chaos to reign in much of the country for weeks before fully responding? In fairness, we cannot know for sure. Porous borders and foreign fighters exacerbated the situation. There are, however, several powerful counterarguments to the claim that post-Saddam Iraq was destined to be chaotic. First, porous borders and large unprotected weapons caches were to a large extent preventable.
Indeed, while estimates of the strength of insurgencies are never reliable, it is nonetheless striking that the Iraq resistance was estimated to number only 5, hardened fighters in mid-late but later thought by some U. Wasting those precious first weeks and months gave this third group—the fence-sitters—a perceived rationale to take up violence too. With the security environment and the economy both stagnant, dissatisfaction grew, and the resistance thus had more potential recruits to draw upon.
That translated into a certain goodwill towards occupation forces, or at least a willingness to tolerate their presence as a necessary means of ensuring stability. This was not just a matter of winning a popularity contest. Citizens are more likely to provide information when convinced it will help defeat an insurgency; they are less likely to take such risky steps if they see the tide of battle favoring the rebels.
If a major effort had been made to nip the resistance in the bud, that effort could have developed self-perpetuating momentum. Entering into this conflict without a readiness to quickly restore order in post-Saddam Iraq was the military equivalent of going into open heart surgery without extra units of blood on hand just because the head surgeon insisted that he had devised a new procedure that would make such precautions unnecessary.
One might say to the surgeon, perhaps your new technique is good and worth employing, but why should we be so confident about an untried method that we throw caution to the wind? Why not prepare for the possibility of perfectly foreseeable complications, even if we hope that the new method will make such precautions unnecessary? The same sort of question should have been posed in regard to the Iraq invasion. Whatever forces were on hand should have been fully prepared for the mission of keeping order once the Baathists were defeated, with proper pre-war training and proper planning that was then conveyed to officers on the ground.
This perspective is mostly right. It is also too simple. The uniformed military in fact shares some of the blame for the mistakes made in planning the Iraq stabilization mission. That is partly because General Tommy Franks in the end was the author of the plan. Even if he was under pressure from Secretary Rumsfeld to produce a certain concept, he had every opportunity to voice his objections.
It is also because the joint chiefs of staff, with the apparent exception of Army Chief of Staff Shinseki, reportedly blessed the plan as well. It is also because no member of the armed forces of the United States went public with his objections or resigned in protest even though the plan was the military equivalent of medical malpractice. Only a very small fraction of military officers had the opportunity to understand and object to the shortcomings in the war plan; only they can be even partially blamed.
Unfortunately, their willingness to turn a blind eye to a badly constructed Phase IV plan is costing the country—and most of all their own comrades in arms, who are still fighting and dying in Iraq—very dearly. Whether or not it was an understandable mistake, it is one we must collectively strive to learn from now so that we can avoid similar mistakes with comparably tragic consequences in the future. Who in the military officer corps should have done a better job?
Primary responsibility must lie with General Tommy Franks and those elements of the joint chiefs of staff who blessed the warfighting concept. They gave their professional imprimatur to a military strategy that was innovative and solid for the invasion phase of the war yet negligently incomplete for the aftermath.
Second, those officers who did limited planning for the post-Saddam phase of operations at CENTCOM should have realized that their efforts were not receiving proper emphasis, support, or visibility. In the end, their efforts were not successful. CENTCOM did not have an overall framework for ensuring at least a modicum of security throughout most of the country that was conveyed to forces on the ground in advance.
As a result, most division commanders had not worked out concepts of operations for the period after the Baathist regime fell. Their key officers had to resort to improvisation in whatever localities they found themselves; lower-ranking individual unit officers had no idea what was expected of them. Hospitals were looted, major buildings destroyed, shops ransacked, and chaos allowed to reign as American soldiers stood by.
Iraq quickly became one of the most violent places on earth—not so much in terms of the ongoing resistance, which while brutal was limited in scale especially at first , but particularly in the growing prevalence of street crime throughout the country. What should the military have done differently?
For one thing, it could have carried out detailed planning for the stabilization phase of the operation informally at CENTCOM even without explicit civilian permission. To avoid direct confrontation with Rumsfeld, it could have been viewed not as development of a formal plan but as backup analysis.
But that would probably not have been enough here. Leaks to the media would therefore also have been justified under the circumstances. Leaks are used on many matters of defense policy, sometimes for reasons no better than to embarrass political opponents. The uniformed military has itself leaked information about the readiness rates of individual divisions data that are supposedly classified , about its unmet funding needs for weapon x or weapon y , and about other such issues, so it is hard to believe that the uniformed military is against such unauthorized releases of information as a matter of principle.
Finally, some military personnel probably should have resigned. If my charges are right that the willful neglect of planning for the post-invasion phase of the conflict amounted to professional malpractice, it was unprofessional and unconscionable for the uniformed military to stand by while such a plan was finalized and put into effect.
This measure would have been extreme for the people resorting to it, requiring enormous individual sacrifice, but it would have been less costly than seeing so many lives lost, at least some of them needlessly and as a result of poor policy, since the invasion.
And it would hardly have been unconstitutional or un-American. Military personnel cannot legally and constitutionally disobey orders while in uniform. That does not mean, however, that they must remain in uniform when asked to do things that violate either their ethics or their sense of proper professional conduct. Peter Feaver and Richard Kohn have made a powerful argument against resignations by military officers, which as they point out can become tantamount to mutiny if done widely at a given moment in time.
One of them told Al Jazeera that the more people died, the more they would come out into the streets. That has spurred the protesters to ask why they are being targeted.
They are not ISIL. They are Iraqis. The government said tactical measures were needed to prevent civil unrest. Yet, unrest continues in the form of determination to continue to protests.
Politically speaking, the government seems paralysed. That will not matter to the protesters. It is not this government that they are angry at. Past governments are also at fault. The protesters do not want a change of government. They want a change of governance. The system needs to change. Our politicians need to build a country, not build their own profile. Build a country. It is a big ask but that is exactly what these young men are protesting for.
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