biochem wrote:I was there in 2003-2004. Reconstruction projects started as soon as we had semi-permanent bases. The biggest obstacle was the tribal Arabic mindset of doing business, not money. It was all well and good to say you'd pay a million dollars in cold, hard American cash to build a water treatment facility or $10k for a school; if there weren't any locals capable of completing the project, or accepting the project without trying to embezzle 80% of the money, it wasn't going to get done.
What we needed was more than a battalion of troops to deal with an entire city. We needed to keep everybody in the initial push, plus everybody who followed them in summer/fall, PLUS everybody who reinforced in early 2004. We didn't need one more division in-country, we needed five or ten more.
If the United States didn't have enough troops (again, not one more division) to invade and secure the country in March of 2003, then either it shouldn't have invaded in March 2003, or it should have been scrambling to get more troops in 2001-2002, while the material build-up was going on in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and our civilian leadership knew it wanted to invade. Either one points to a dramatic failure of strategic leadership at a policy-making (civilian) level.
When the military leader of your army says "We don't have the troops to pull this off," you don't ignore him and go ahead anyway. You assume the guy with 40 years experience has a little bit of a clue what he's doing, and you figure out what you need to do. Maybe that's putting everything you've got except the 18th Airborne Corps into Iraq for the next five years with WW II style deployments instead of trying for one year Vietnam style rotations. Maybe that's going in front of the nation and saying, "Because of Bill Clinton's drawdown, we need more soldiers to pull this off. Congress, you need to authorize 150,000 more soldiers *right now* because we swear that Saddam Hussein has WMDs and can hit Washington DC with them this instant, cross our hearts."
When the American leadership attempted to reconstitute the Iraqi Army (which didn't start until around November of 2003), the assumption was that soldiers were soldiers anywhere you go. American soldiers, Iraqi soldiers, same thing, and they're capable of the same tasks. Anyone who paid attention to various Israeli/Arabic conflicts should be aware that's not true. Either the American strategic leadership was unaware, ignoring those lessons, or inept. I don't know which is the case. Culturally, Arabic armies are similar to a late feudal European army, which is one reason they're so ineffective by comparison. If you tell an Arabic army to do something difficult, dangerous and/or uncomfortable, you're going to see losses every time you don't keep a guard to watch the inside of the camp.
The Iraqi Army was disbanded by Paul Bremer in May 2003, well before these reconstitution attempts. Bremer stated it was to reinforce the idea that the old regime was gone and not coming back. You're correct that Iraqi military units were useless in April 2003. The same was true in 2004, 2005, all the way up to 2014. Outside of portions of the Republican Guard, the concept of a professional military never truly existed in Iraq. Why the units that were underfed, undersupplied and unable to even care for themselves in January 1991 and March 2003 would suddenly become effective because Americans were giving orders is a mystery.
This was his second order, the first being the forcible disbanding of the Baathist administration and forbidding anyone with Baath affiliation from holding office. The British were still trying to bring the remnants of the Republican Guard they'd fought in Basra into the fold when Bremer cut their legs out from under them. The idea that those two orders support the concept of using existing Iraqi organizational structures is ludicrous. Being a Baathist in Iraq is like being a Communist in China, or a Democrat/Republican in the United States. If you want to have any decent civil service job, you join up. Paul Bremer wanted to rebuild everything from the ground up, without using anyone in the old regime. The problem is, you can't run a government without having a single person with civil service experience in it.
By the time the Americans had reached Baghdad in April, the only opposition to taking the airport came from Fedayeen fanatics in pickup trucks trying to charge tanks. One armored brigade with infantry support tried to hunker down in the city itself and destroy the Americans from hull-down positions and was wiped out for their troubles.
The vast majority of the Iraqi Army wasn't coming out to fight, risk death against a vastly superior enemy, and be taken prisoner if they were very lucky. Telling them to report to their barracks, sit their butts down and get fed on a regular basis would still have been possible in April/May, but the humanitarian supplies to do that didn't exist. Until well over a year later, even sufficient translation resources didn't exist.
The supposed flex capacity in Iraqi oil production that would pay for the war didn't exist either. I walked through a pumping station that was allegedly going to push over a hundred thousand barrels a day of crude. It hadn't worked for 20 years and the pipeline itself was rusted through in places.
Your comment on Al Sadr is a complete red herring. Even if there had been a million U.S. soldiers in Iraq at that time, it would have changed nothing. American military forces weren't allowed into holy sites like mosques without express clearance from senior leadership, unless they were being shot at from inside at that very moment. It took about a week for the Iraqis to figure that one out.
The American civilian leadership made the decision to conduct a short, victorious war on the cheap. The Americans would be welcomed as liberators, so there was no need to worry about controlling the country. The Iraqi oil infrastructure would pay for it. The Iraqis would spontaneously create a new government in cooperation with the CPA. We'd be gone in six months. Blaming Ted Kennedy or Turkey is like blaming Admiral Filareta for losing the second Battle of Manticore.
Thank you for the succinct boots on the ground summary.
The single thing that I liked best about the McCain candidacy, is that he and Palin both had sons serving on the ground in Iraq. That would have given McCain access to first hand information direct from the troops similar to the above as opposed to the heavily filtered official reports that Bush and Obama worked from. Everyone in Washington has an agenda and it is difficult for leaders to get truly accurate information that hasn't been filtered through the lens of someone's agenda. I don't know if Bush & Obama would have made better decisions if they had received this type of first hand information from someone they could trust such as a son but I would like to think so.