by Ken Bell

Two items appearing in today’s press, one in the Washington Post, the other in the Washington Times, finally begin to address some of the real mistakes made in the conduct of the Iraq war, as opposed to the standard litany of “mistakes” which were no such thing.

In “Official Admits Errors in Iraq”, Ann Scott Tyson reports on an interview with Douglas J. Feith, who is leaving his post as undersecretary of defense for policy. Bizarrely, inaccurately and yet revealingly, the subhead of the article reads “Feith Cites Delay in Transfer of Power, Size of U.S. Force.” The description is half true, anyway, and perhaps we should chalk that up as progress for the MSM.

Feith certainly, and correctly, observes that one crucial error “was the reluctance among some U.S. officials to transfer power early on to an Iraqi government and dismantle the U.S. occupation authority, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), headed by Ambassador L. Paul Bremer.

“‘How would Iraq have been different if we had terminated the CPA in May or June of '03?’ and created an Iraqi government, he asked. ‘Some people said if you do that and it fails, you’ll set the country back irretrievably and . . . the only way you could set up a government early on would be to rely unduly on the ‘externals’,’ he said, referring to Iraqi exiles.

“‘My views were generally in favor of transferring responsibility to the Iraqis earlier. I thought there were ways of getting the ‘internals’ involved earlier,’ he said, speaking of prospective Iraqi leaders inside the country who were not well known to the United States before the invasion.” What he doesn’t say, but what we know, is that this policy dispute pitted the Pentagon against then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, the State Department and the CIA. The latter insisted upon delay, and led us into error. That error, however, was almost predetermined by the earlier stance taken – again, in error – by State and CIA with respect to the other great mistake Feith describes. Tyson, with marginally more accuracy than the headline writer, describes this second (but prior and determinative) mistake as “that he [Feith] did not know whether the invading U.S. force was the right size.”

But if you read Feith’s words (even as represented by Tyson) carefully, you find that that’s not quite it at all. “Feith acknowledged that there were ‘trade-offs’ and ‘pros and cons’ to the Pentagon’s plan to use a relatively small invasion force in Iraq, voicing uncertainty about whether that decision was correct. The war’s ‘rolling start’ with a streamlined ground force achieved some tactical surprise, he said, potentially averting a longer war and other catastrophes such as the destruction of Iraqi oil fields. But he acknowledged that a small force had drawbacks, and others have criticized the plan for failing to stop widespread looting and insecurity after Saddam Hussein's government fell in April 2003.

“‘I am not asserting to you that I know that the answer is, we did it right. What I am saying is it’s an extremely complex judgment to know whether the course that we chose with its pros and cons was more sensible . . . .”

Achieving “tactical surprise” and thereby winning earlier and more easily with fewer casualties (How many fewer? Hundreds? Thousands? More than 1,750?) and “saving the oilfields” (Saving billions of dollars in assets and cleanup costs for the new Iraqi government and precluding unknowable environmental damage that might even have been greater) are hardly trivial considerations. Feith isn’t saying it was a mistake. He is saying that it was a complex judgment, and whether or not it was right, we will probably never know.

But he does in fact outline a second and more vital error, which almost inevitably entailed the “delayed transfer of power to a new Iraqi government.” Tellingly, this error is mentioned first and emphasized by Tyson, but only second by Feith. Again, we should attend carefully to his own words as represented. “He said mistaken actions and policies in Iraq resulted in frequent ‘course corrections,’ pointing to two that he considered significant – both resulting from an early failure to put Iraqis in charge.

“First, the United States missed the opportunity before the war to train enough Kurds and other Iraqi exiles to assist the U.S. military, he said. ‘That didn’t happen in the numbers we had hoped,’ he said.

“A plan to train an estimated 5,000 Iraqi exiles in Hungary produced instead only a few hundred, in part because U.S. military leaders at the Central Command, which oversees the Middle East, were uncomfortable with it [and, we also know, because State and CIA opposed it strenuously]. Training Iraqi forces has since emerged as the central thrust of the U.S. exit strategy for Iraq.”[I’d bet that little interpretive phrase “exit strategy” wasn’t Feith’s at all.]

So even through the interpretive fog and “analytical” distortion of the Post’s reporter, Feith indicates that the failure to create a viable Iraqi allied force prior to the invasion, which could have served as the nucleus of a liberating Iraqi army (remember images of DeGaulle marching into Paris, and imagine what might have been had Saddam’s statue been toppled by Free Iraq Forces) and also forming the nucleus of a new Iraqi government, was a fundamental dual mistake.

The third crucial mistake is outlined by Rowan Scarborough in a Washington Times article entitled “Analysts Urge U.S. Forces to Attack Invaders at Border”. This is the failure to bring military force to bear against the FascIslamic Baathist government of Bashar Assad in Syria, allowing them for two long years to provide vital sanctuary, succor, aid and comfort to the jihadist terrorists and their revanchist terror allies, the irreconcilables. The failure to seal Iraq’s border with Syria has permitted mass infiltration of enemy combatants, weapons and supplies, costing hundreds of American lives and thousands of innocent Iraqi civilian lives, retarded the stabilization of the new Iraqi government, and offered encouragement to FascIslamists worldwide.

Scarborough cites the opinions of unspecified “government officials” who in interviews “said midlevel personnel increasingly think that the IED [improvised explosive device] threat will never be defeated unless the flow of foreign suicide bombers, primarily via Syria, is stopped.
“The analysts also believe the U.S. must start identifying the foreign fighters as invaders, which would better justify the redeployment of American and Iraqi forces along the border with Syria, aided by more use of spy drones and satellites to watch for incursions 24 hours a day.

“‘Until the invaders are stopped or the traffic reduced, there will always be violent people willing to sacrifice themselves to advance the schemes of others,’ said a defense official who has brainstormed the problem with analysts in the U.S. intelligence community. ‘I think the trick is to dry up the source of those willing to commit acts of unspeakable violence.’”

Even now, unfortunately, there is a great reluctance by some to exercise force against the recalcitrant and uncooperative Syrians. But “Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, an author on counterterrorism, agrees that the U.S. should step up counterterrorism operations on the Syrian border. He would take it one giant leap forward by conducting air strikes inside Syria at terrorist staging areas and by sending special operations forces across the border to attack would-be invaders.

“‘I would clearly up the ante for Bashar Assad,’ he said, referring to the Syrian leader and head of the ruling Baathist socialist party . . . .” The measure is long, long overdue.