Rummy's Stubborn Incompetence

by emptywheel

Josh Marshall and Atrios are having a discussion about whether Lawrence Kaplan is a raving lunatic or just stupid. They're both responding to a description in which Kaplan tries to learn a lesson from the ugly violence of Baghdad.

Robertson's dispatch points to a revolting truth about the war in Iraq--one that American officers discovered long ago, but which has yet to penetrate fully the imaginations of theoreticians writing from a distant remove. The fact is, there is very little that we can do to dampen the sectarian rage and pathologies tearing Iraq apart at the seams. Did the Army make a mistake when it banished "counterinsurgency" from the lexicon of military affairs?  Absolutely.  Does it matter in Iraq?  Probably not. How can you win over the heart and mind of someone who sews a dog's head on a girl? Would more U.S. troops alter Iraq's homicidal dynamic? Not really, given that, on the question of sectarian rage, America is now largely beside the point. True, U.S. troops can be--and have been--a vital buffer between Iraq's warring sects. But they cannot reprogram their coarsened and brittle cultures.

For the record, I think Atrios is right, that in an attempt to find an excuse for the utter failure of the Neocon Iraq adventure, Kaplan is choosing ugly racism over a real assessment of the problem. But insofar as Josh and Duncan are letting Kaplan choose racism, they're both wrong. We should never let go unchallenged assertions that civil war and barbarity in Iraq were inescapable. George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld made choices that resulted in that barbarity, and they must be held responsible for those choices.

By sheer chance, I'm listening to Cobra II at the same time as I read Chasing Ghosts. And I can think of no starker demonstration--at least to a civilian sitting on her butt in safety--of the consequences of Donald Rumsfeld's stubborn incompetence.

Cobra II provides the thus-far definitive description of what went wrong in the planning stage of the war. It's a very balanced book (meaning, there have already been several points where I recognize Trainor and Gordon back off of blame or scandalous details). But it is damning. Utterly damning.

I'm just a third of the way through, and already there have been about 10 points where someone tried to explain the need for a constabulary force, not Americans and not Iraqis, but someone to police Iraq until something filled the vacuum of leadership left by Saddam. Trainor and Gordon explain, in excruciating detail, how Rumsfeld assumed Iraqis would capitulate and work with the Americans. And that therefore, we could simply rely on the Iraqis to keep order. Most damning are the number of times someone estimate the necessary costs for policing. And, apparently without exception, Rummy judged those costs to be too high. Rummy refused to spend a few billion dollars and now we're spending $500 billion.

And Chasing Ghosts shows us the consequences of Rummy's obstinate stupidity. As a First Lieutenant in the National Guard, Chasing Ghosts author Paul Rieckhoff and his men were precisely where the policemen Rummy refused to employ should have been: in the center of Baghdad, living in a glass-walled building, trying to keep the hospitals and gas stations functioning, trying to cut off the flow of arms within Iraq. Rieckhoff begins his book with the ominous, "George Bush had better be fucking right," then spends 300 pages showing the consequences of Bush being dead wrong. He shows how, to get training on urban warfare, he had to set it up with some from Special Forces guys himself. He shows how, absent being supplied properly with more than one Humvee, his men had to adapt some SUVs they found in a parking garage by bashing the doors off. He shows how, in addition to their time and their safety, his men sacrificed to get school supplies for Iraqi kids or medical care for the Iraqi who worked as their janitor. Rieckhoff shows how Rummy's stupid decisions look from the perspective of the guys stuck trying to make do because of his stupidity. As he describes:

We had destroyed Iraq's political and social infrastructure and failed to provide its people with another one to replace it. There were few police and still not enough American troops. The power was still out in Baghdad most of the time. With no garbage pickup or working sewage system, people just three all their trash and refuse out the windows, to pile up stinking and rancid in the narrow streets. We couldn't even keep them safe from each other. In the absence of any other type of social institutions, the mosques and clerics assumed they dominant role among the people. As we retreated into compounds that were growing more formidable, they disappeared into mosques that became increasingly mysterious.

And of course, Rieckhoff describes the futile situation as it disintegrated in Summer 2003. I shudder to imagine what the books from the guys in Iraq now are going to say.

But we don't have to wait long to understand what is happening. The reports of sectarian violence grow worse and worse.

Shortly after 6.30am, Shia gangs dressed in civilian clothes set up checkpoints in Jihad to scan people’s identity papers for Sunni-sounding names, pulled men from their cars and shot them. Squads of gunmen, some wearing masks and black uniforms, then stormed into Sunni homes and shot men in alleys, witnesses said. The violence rivalled the communal killings after February’s bombing of the Shia al-Askari mosque in Samarra.

“They went into the Sunni houses. They dragged all the male occupants out and shot them in front of their mothers and sisters. I was lucky enough to have both my sons able to make it out before they met the same fate,” Umm Firas, who lived on Jihad’s main street, said.

The effect of reading Cobra II and Chasing Ghosts together is stark. I hear of one stupid decision, then read how that decision hampered the ability of our National Guard to do their jobs. Rummy and Dick and Bush made some decisions with real consequences. And we need to hold them responsible for those consequences.

Update: Digby (and Jim Webb) are thinking along these lines too:

I am undoubtedly much more liberal than Jim Webb. But we are in agreement (and have been for years) about the ramifications of this war and the need for some accountability:

GS: Senator Allen seemed to say that you were part of the 'I told you so' caucus on Iraq.

JW: Well, I think there are a lot of people who don't want to be reminded that they were warned. I think it's relevant, when you talk about how you build national strategy, and how you use the military -- to talk about how these decisions should be made. There should be some sort of accountability.

Is that so hard?

Comments

[DemFromCT]

Condi should not be let off the hook here. The former national security advisor will try to run from iraq so it doesn't tarnish her image, but she was smack in the middle of that decison and many others in the first term.

Allowing any rehabilitation as a 'statesman' is a farce thast should not go unchallanged..

[emptywheel]

True. Though I was kind of limiting things to Trainor and Gordon's take.

MARGARET WARNER: And then, of course, ultimately, General Trainor, it's the civilian leadership that really is running the show.

To what degree, in terms of the decisions, whether they were good or not wise in retrospect, would you say that Secretary Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney and President Bush were really involved, were hands-on?

BERNARD TRAINOR: A troika, three of them joined at the hip.

They were the ones that ran the war. The president presiding, the vice president kind of being the brains behind the organization, and the man that carried the thing out would be Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense.

Everybody else was kind of in and out of circle. Condi Rice, the national security adviser, Colin Powell cut out, even the so-called neo-cons, they were part of the great cause.

But those three were joined at the hip and they thought the same way and acted the same way.

Though it should be said that Gordon takes on Franks just before this.

[Mimikatz]

The portrayal of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld jibes with what Suskind says, based on interviews with "the invisibles," that is, the men and women who toil in obscurity to try to provide info to the troika and carry out its wishes. he shows all three as being contemptuous of experts, analysis, evidence and thought period. They wanted action, and they wanted to take the gloves off. A perfect and deadly combination of circumstances.

They all think they are above reality, that they can create their own reality. And then, of course, they can't admit any errors, because that would make the whole house of cards fall down.

The neo-cons are a little different, since despite their pretentions to being manly, they were basically intellectuals (or pseudo-intellectuals, in some cases). They are now blaming the stupid and savage and ungrateful Iraqis for not understanding how their noble enterprise would have been so good for them, and in this they are like British colonials, or even some liberals who get disgusted when the downtrodden don't properly and gratefully respond to their efforts to "raise" them.

Maybe we should call this the hard bigotry of raised expectations.

[emptywheel]

Great comment, Mimikatz, the whole thing. Though, "Hard bigotry of raised expectations" is a class.

[Hostile]

Iraq's new society was deliberately planned to create a totalitarian terror environment modeled after the Palestinian experiment. The talk of ignorance and obstinance by the Bush war pigs is a cover, and makes us citizens feel better about the catastrophe the Iraqi people are living. The horror was created on purpose, I think, for oil.

Henry Kissenger is credited with calling normal people useless eaters. The new Iraq totalitarian society was created to separate useless eaters from their natural resources.

[freepatriot]

oh great, blame the Iraqis

Sun Tzu says that you must know your enemy

from Mimikatz:

"They are now blaming the stupid and savage and ungrateful Iraqis for not understanding how their noble enterprise would have been so good for them"

so shouldn't we be asking why these dolts didn't know that the Iraqis were "savage and ungrateful ???

blaming your enemy for something you didn't know about your enemy seems to be an open admission that you do not understand the science of warfare

or maybe it's just me ...

[al-Fubar]

so shouldn't we be asking why these dolts didn't know that the Iraqis were "savage and ungrateful ???

Exactamundo.

The practical issue is how to get us out of this mess, preferably without allowing the Right to manufacture a Those-Liberals-Lost-Iraq mythology that they can recycle every election for the next 20 years.

For that purpose, "savage" Iraqis - and the Bushies' failure to recognize that fact - will do perfectly well. In some cosmic sense it is unfair to the Iraqis, but so what? It isn't as if many Iraqis care, or are likely to care, what Americans think of them. And it creates a simple framework - easy for even the lazy to grasp - for pinning the blame for the whole Iraq misadventure, and any dismal things may happen after we leave, on the people who got us into the mess instead of the people who get us out of it.

[QuickSilver]

A country is invaded, the invaders fail to provide basic services and protections given by the previous regime, sectarian civil war is touched off -- well then, who is responsible? This recent Los Angeles Times article, nominally a profile of Saddam's lawyer Boushra Khalil, helped me understand why so many Iraqis and members of the Arab intelligentsia see the U.S. on trial in a Baghdad courtroom, not Saddam.