WASHINGTON, 29 June 2004 — The US-led occupation of Iraq, plagued from the start by poor planning, miscalculation and insufficient personnel, leaves behind a bitter lesson that military might alone is not enough to overhaul a country.
Ahead of yesterday’s surprise transfer of power in Baghdad to an Iraqi leadership, US officials were already trumpeting a new era of freedom for Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s downfall. But even the invasion’s most ardent supporters acknowledge the occupation did not go quite as planned.
“We have failed to come anywhere near meeting the post-war expectations of Iraqis for security and post-conflict reconstruction,” said Larry Diamond, ex-adviser to the occupation authority and now a political scientist in California.
Officials insist they have made good progress in rebuilding post-Saddam Iraq, citing the formation of a new government, the adoption of a provisional constitution and the beginnings of a security force, financial and legal system.
They say the coalition has completed more than 20,000 projects to build or renovate schools, orphanages, medical facilities, roads, power grids and industrial infrastructure. But by many standards the nearly 15-month occupation has been a litany of failure or partially accomplished goals, plagued by fighting, bombings, murders, abductions and sabotage that are frightening away investors.
Only a fifth of the expected 35,000-strong army has been recruited and more than two-thirds of the 90,000 Iraqi police are untrained, according to Pentagon figures. A 40,000-strong National Guard is still in the planning stage.
Barely 20 percent of the 18.6 billion dollars in reconstruction aid approved by the US Congress has actually been spent. Electricity generation is a third below the target of 6,000 megawatts and homes are often without power.
Cracks in post-war planning appeared even before the capture of Baghdad in April 2003. The reconstruction operation was put under Pentagon control, which basically ignored extensive spadework done by the State Department.
When army chief of staff Eric Shinseki said several hundred thousand troops would be needed, he was slapped down. The new Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance under retired Gen. Jay Garner was long on slogans, short on details.
Iyad Allawi, the new Iraqi prime minister, insists US overseer Paul Bremer made “big mistakes” in disbanding Saddam’s 400,000-strong army as well as the police and internal security forces he is now trying to reconstitute. More fundamentally, some analysts said, the coalition depended on civilian affairs officers who in large part had little feeling for the complex relationship between Iraq’s Shiite and Sunni Muslims and Kurds. Anthony Cordesman, an analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said US forces made the fundamental error of treating the reconstruction phase as a secondary objective in the military campaign.
“The effort to win the peace should begin as a political struggle before the first shot is fired,” he told Congress last month. “And it should continue to have a priority through every day of combat.”
If many Iraqis initially hailed Saddam’s downfall, their enthusiasm turned to dismay and then anger as coalition forces failed to speed the return of basic services and humanitarian aid, and stood idly by amid a wave of looting. A year later, polls showed that an overwhelming number of Iraqis viewed coalition forces as occupiers rather than liberators or peacekeepers. More surprising was the resiliency and growing organization of armed insurgents.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a main architect of the war, acknowledged last week the Americans did not appreciate the depth of the Iraqi resistance beyond its “most-wanted” list of 55 regime leaders.
“If you want to say what might have been underestimated, it was probably too great a willingness to believe once we got the 55 people on the black list, the rest would stop fighting,” he told Congress.
Wolfowitz also said the coalition was slow to train and equip Iraqi security forces. “By the time the war began, we had only trained a total of 71 people. It could have been much more.”
A stubborn insurgency has forced Washington to scrap plans to reduce its troop strength from the current 140,000. Wolfowitz said “it’s entirely possible” that American soldiers would be in Iraq for years.
