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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
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January 2nd,
2007 - Chaos Overran Iraq Plan in ’06, Bush Team Says |
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Chaos Overran Iraq Plan in
’06, Bush Team Says By David E. Sanger, Michael R. Gordon & John F. Burns New York Times January 2, 2007 Washington, Dec. 31 -
President Bush began 2006 assuring the country that he had a “strategy for
victory in Iraq.” He ended the year closeted with his war cabinet on his
ranch trying to devise a new strategy, because the existing one had
collapsed. The original plan, championed
by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top commander in Baghdad, and backed by
Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, called for turning over
responsibility for security to the Iraqis, shrinking the number of American
bases and beginning the gradual withdrawal of American troops. But the plan
collided with Iraq’s ferocious unraveling, which took most of Mr. Bush’s war
council by surprise. In interviews in Washington
and Baghdad, senior officials said the White House, the Pentagon and the
State Department had also failed to take seriously warnings, including some
from its own ambassador in Baghdad, that sectarian violence could rip the
country apart and turn Mr. Bush’s promise to “clear, hold and build” Iraqi
neighborhoods and towns into an empty slogan. This left the president and
his advisers constantly lagging a step or two behind events on the ground. “We could not clear and
hold,” Stephen J. Hadley, the president’s national security adviser,
acknowledged in a recent interview, in a frank admission of how American
strategy had crumbled. “Iraqi forces were not able to hold neighborhoods, and
the effort to build did not show up. The sectarian violence continued to
mount, so we did not make the progress on security we had hoped. We did not
bring the moderate Sunnis off the fence, as we had hoped. The Shia lost
patience, and began to see the militias as their protectors.” Over the past 12 months, as
optimism collided with reality, Mr. Bush increasingly found himself uneasy
with General Casey’s strategy. And now, as the image of Saddam Hussein at the
gallows recedes, Mr. Bush seems all but certain not only to reverse the
strategy that General Casey championed, but also to accelerate the general’s
departure from Iraq, according to senior military officials. General Casey repeatedly
argued that his plan offered the best prospect for reducing the perception
that the United States remained an occupier - and it was a path he thought
matched Mr. Bush’s wishes. Earlier in the year, it had. But as Baghdad spun further
out of control, some of the president’s advisers now say, Mr. Bush grew
concerned that General Casey, among others, had become more fixated on
withdrawal than victory. Now, having ousted Mr.
Rumsfeld, Mr. Bush sees a chance to bring in a new commander as he announces
a new strategy, senior military officials say. General Casey was scheduled to
shift out of Iraq in the summer. But now it appears that it may happen in
February or March. By mid-September, Mr. Bush
was disappointed with the results in Iraq and signed off on a complete review
of Iraq strategy — a review centered in Washington, not in Baghdad. Whatever
form the new strategy takes, it seems almost certain to include a “surge” in
forces, something that General Casey insisted earlier this year he did not
need and which might even be counterproductive. In a telephone interview on
Friday, General Casey continued to caution against a lengthy expansion in the
American military role. “The longer we in the U.S. forces continue to bear
the main burden of Iraq’s security, it lengthens the time that the government
of Iraq has to take the hard decisions about reconciliation and dealing with
the militias,” he said. “And the other thing is that they can continue to
blame us for all of Iraq’s problems, which are at base their problems.” Yet if Mr. Bush does send in
more American forces, historians may well ask why it took him so long. Some
Bush officials argue that the administration erred by refusing to send in a
bigger force in 2003, or by sufficiently bolstering it when the insurgency
began to take hold. This year, decisions on a
new strategy were clearly slowed by political calculations. Many of Mr.
Bush’s advisers say their timetable for completing an Iraq review had been
based in part on a judgment that for Mr. Bush to have voiced doubts about his
strategy before the midterm elections in November would have been politically
catastrophic. Mr. Bush came to worry that
it was not just his critics and Democrats in Congress who were looking for
what he dismissed last month as a strategy of “graceful exit.” Visiting the
Pentagon a few weeks ago for a classified briefing on Iraq with his generals,
Mr. Bush made it clear that he was not interested in any ideas that would
simply allow American forces to stabilize the violence. Gen. James T. Conway,
the Marine commandant, later told marines about the president’s message. “What I want to hear from
you is how we’re going to win,” he quoted the president as warning his
commanders, “not how we’re going to leave.” Sectarian Killings Escalate When 2006 began, the United
States military did not have a systematic means of tabulating sectarian
attacks in Iraq. The Sunni-led insurgency was the focus of Mr. Bush’s
statements, and its destruction the focus of American military strategy. The Bush administration was
jolted on Feb. 22 when Al Qaeda blew up the Askariya Mosque in Samarra, a
carefully plotted effort to fan sectarian passions, prompt Shiite retaliation
and make Iraq ungovernable. The day of the explosion,
Shiites in Sadr City poured into the streets carrying banners and flags. Men,
some dressed in black, the traditional dress for the Shiite militia in the
area, piled into open back trucks, carrying weapons and shouting slogans of
loyalty to Shiite saints. In Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, the American
ambassador to Iraq, went to Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari to insist that
the Iraqi government impose a 24-hour nationwide curfew. Mr. Jaafari, a
member of the Shiite Dawa Party, was not persuaded. “You’ve been here six
months, and all of a sudden you know my country better than I do,” Mr.
Jaafari replied, according to an official who witnessed the exchange. But
even some Iraqi leaders, including the current national security adviser,
Mowaffak al-Rubaie, echoed Mr. Khalilzad’s advice. “I remember saying to him:
‘this is going to be the trigger of an all-out civil war,’ ” Mr. Rubaie said. Mr. Jaafari insisted that he
had a plan, which involved closing the Sunni television stations in the
country, though as the violence grew he belatedly imposed a curfew that
evening. It was the beginning of a debilitating pattern. The Shiite-dominated
government did too little to protect Sunni citizens. Shiite militias took
matters into their own hands. And the American military struggled to hold the
city together with overstretched units. It was clear that the
retaliation was highly organized. Sunnis in the eastern portion of Baghdad,
in an area called Rusafa, reported that Shiites in SUV’s were pulling up,
knocking on doors, and seeking specific people. Bodies surfaced in sewers and
garbage heaps days later. When the killing abated,
President Bush and his top aides declared that the worst had passed. Both
Sunnis and Shiites had “looked into the abyss and did not like what they
saw,” the president said. Renegade militias were a
concern but “not a major long-term problem as long as the Iraqi armed forces
and the Iraqi police continue to be loyal to the central government, as they
have been,” Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said
in a March 5 appearance on the NBC News program “Meet the Press.” Sectarian-inspired
executions, however, rose from almost 200 in January to more than 700 in
March, and continued upward, according to the Pentagon. Even as the violence grew,
General Casey, the top American commander in Iraq, appeared confident. He had
served as a senior aide for the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, where
he gained the confidence of Mr. Rumsfeld before being sent to Baghdad in
2004. At 58, the four-star general reported directly to the defense
secretary. Mr. Rumsfeld had mused
publicly that history showed that it could take a decade or so to defeat an
insurgency. He was eager to turn over responsibility for the war to the
Iraqis and to reduce the American footprint in Iraq as quickly as possible. General Casey and Gen. John
P. Abizaid, head of the United States Central Command, appeared to be
like-minded. During the summer of 2005, General Casey had forecast “fairly
significant reductions” in American troops by the summer of 2006, an
assessment that the commander said reflected “feelers” from Sunni insurgents
that they might be willing to negotiate and lay down their arms. Some of General Casey’s
aides have said that in developing troop withdrawal plans they were cognizant
that the Bush administration had not taken any steps to expand the American
military presence despite a persistent insurgency, and seemed to have little
appetite for substantially expanding the war effort. No Wish to Stay Indefinitely For his part, General Casey
said that his plan was aimed at showing Iraqis that the United States did not
want to perpetuate its role as an occupier indefinitely, and stressed that he
was following a strategy to match the “convoluted” political and military
situation in Iraq, and not seeking to advance his career with plans that
suited the Bush administration’s political agenda. “I have worked very hard to
ask for what I need, for what I thought I needed to accomplish the mission,”
he said Friday. “It’s always been my view that a heavy and sustained American
military presence was not going to solve the problems in Iraq over the long
term.” By late 2005, the White
House accepted the main tenets of the hand-over strategy. “Casey and Abizaid
had what seemed like a plausible plan at the time,” Mr. Hadley recalled. “It
was well thought out, and after the elections in January looked like the direction
we were headed in.” President Bush promoted the
strategy in a speech to cheering midshipmen at the United States Naval
Academy in Annapolis, Md., on Nov. 30, 2005: “We will continue to shift from
providing security and conducting operations against the enemy nationwide to
conducting more specialized operations targeted at the most dangerous
terrorists. We will increasingly move out of Iraqi cities, reduce the number
of bases from which we operate, and conduct fewer patrols and convoys.” Yet not everybody at the
Pentagon shared General’s Casey’s confidence. The Defense Intelligence Agency
had briefed the White House in early 2006 that the insurgency was winning in
Iraq, according to a former military officer. The briefing, which chronicled
the steady rise in the number of attacks, prompted a counter-briefing from
General Casey’s intelligence chief, who prepared an analysis tracing the
positive trends in Iraq. Data gathered by General
Casey’s own command, which showed a steady increase in weekly attacks and
civilian casualties, lent support to the Defense Intelligence Agency
assessment. At the State Department,
skepticism about General Casey’s strategy ran deep. Philip D. Zelikow, the
counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice until he resigned in
December, went to Iraq in late 2005, and returned with a recommendation that
the first part of 2006 be devoted to a big push - military, economic and
political - to boost the soon-to-be-formed Iraqi government. His approach
contradicted the commitment to reductions. Still, the general was
reluctant to abandon his basic strategy. According to a senior administration
official, General Casey told the White House in April, May and June of 2006
that the American military was having success against Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia
and the Sunni-based insurgency, and that sectarian violence could be managed. Calls for a Review of Strategy By May 2006, uneasy
officials at the State Department and the National Security Council argued
for a review of Iraq strategy. A meeting was convened at Camp David to
consider those approaches, according to participants in the session, but Mr.
Bush left early for a secret visit to Baghdad, where he reviewed the war
plans with General Casey and Mr. Maliki, and met with the American pilot whose
plane’s missiles killed Iraq’s Al Qaeda leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He
returned to Washington in a buoyant mood. The visit meant that the
reconsideration of strategy was not as thorough as some officials hoped. Later in June, General Casey
flew to Washington to give briefings on the latest version of his troop
reduction plan at the Pentagon and White House. The number of American combat
brigades, which then totaled 14, would be reduced by two in September and
might shrink to 10 by December, if conditions allowed. If the Iraqis
continued to assume more responsibility for their security, there would be
only five or six combat brigades in Iraq by December 2007. Yet already President Bush
was signaling to top aides that he wanted to re-evaluate how to keep
stability before proceeding with troop withdrawals. His caution matched a
growing unease among American field commanders in Iraq, and officers on the
streets of Baghdad, who said they were surprised by General Casey’s continued
advocacy of withdrawals and consolidating bases. They said that American
forces should be focusing on a greater counterinsurgency effort, which would
require that a substantial number of troops be dispersed to protect that
population against insurgent and militia attacks. Events overtook the White
House. In early August, the United States was forced to reverse course and
add troops in Baghdad. On reflection, Mr. Hadley said, “Finally the patience
of the Shia had worn thin,” and, “By the time the unity government took over
the cycle of sectarian violence had begun. And they and we have not been able
to get ahead of it .” The administration’s summer
strategy seemed simple: American and Iraqi forces would clear selected
neighborhoods of insurgents and militia leaders, hold them with the Iraqi
police, and win over the population with job-creating reconstruction
programs. But carrying out the
strategy proved maddeningly difficult. The American troop commitment was
modest at best. With the addition of roughly 7,000 troops the American
military force assigned to carry out the operation in Baghdad was brought to
some 15,000. (During one discussion of the operation in August, President
Bush asked General Casey whether he had sufficient troops to secure Baghdad;
the general assured him that he did.) The Iraqis never delivered
four of the six Iraqi Army battalions that they had committed to the effort.
Some of the Iraqi police units proved to be so infiltrated by Shiite militias
that they had to be pulled off duty for retraining. Weaknesses in the Iraqi Forces In the Sunni stronghold of
Dora, in southwestern Baghdad, American troops were forced to clear thousands
of homes twice: the Iraqi security forces who moved in behind them were too
few, and too little dedicated to the task, to keep the insurgents from
returning. In neighborhoods like Baya,
the Shiite-dominated Iraqi National Police set up menacing checkpoints on the
routes Sunnis used to seek medical attention or buy fuel. “They were trying to
dominate the Sunni population and terrorize them to the point that they would
leave Baghdad or leave the neighborhood,” recalled Lt. Col. James Danna, who
had led the Second Battalion, Sixth Infantry Regiment, which oversaw those
areas. He said that like the first Baghdad security operation, the second
also failed. As the American elections approached, White House officials say,
they believed it would amount to political suicide to announce a broad
reassessment of Iraq strategy. But they recognized that unless they began
such a review, they would be forced to accept the conclusions of the final report
of the Iraq Study Group - headed by James A. Baker III, the former Republican
secretary of state, and Lee H. Hamilton, the former Democratic congressman. The effort started in
September, around the time Mr. Bush decided to oust Mr. Rumsfeld. In the days
before the election, Mr. Bush suggested during an interview that Mr. Rumsfeld
could stay until the end of his term - a deliberately misleading statement
that Mr. Bush said later was necessitated by the political season. Similarly,
it was days after the election that the White House revealed that a major
Iraq review was under way. In public, Mr. Bush
continues to insist that he and Mr. Maliki share the same vision. In private,
one of his former aides said, “he questions whether Maliki has the will or
the power” to make good on any commitments. American military officers
have also wondered if the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government and the Americans
share the same vision. Were the Iraqis not pulling their weight because they
did not have the capability to provide security and proceed with
reconstruction? Or did the Iraqi authorities have a sectarian agenda? As security efforts in
Baghdad faltered, a confidential briefing on possible “end states” in Iraq
was prepared by officials under the command of Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarielli,
who until a few weeks ago led the day-to-day operations in Iraq. It suggested
the dark vision of a divided nation that haunts the administration. Unless the United States
persuaded the Iraqi government to change course, those who prepared the
briefing foresaw an Iraq run by a relatively weak central government, which
would include a largely autonomous nine-province Shiite region in the south
and a Shiite-dominated Baghdad. The Kurds would retain their autonomy in the
north. The Sunnis would essentially be relegated to the western Anbar
Province and other enclaves. The briefing posed a
question: was this an outcome the United States could live with? If so, what
could the United States do to minimize the bloodshed? If not, what should be
done to alter this course? Mr. Bush still insists on
talking about victory, even if his own advisers differ about how to define
it. “It’s a word the American people understand,” he told members of the Iraq
Study Group who came to see him at the White House in November, according to
two commission members who attended. “And if I start to change it, it will
look like I’m beginning to change my policy.” David E. Sanger and Michael
R. Gordon reported from Washington, and John F. Burns from Cambridge,
England, and Baghdad. Reporting was contributed by James Glanz, Sabrina
Tavernise and Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi from Baghdad. Copyright 2007 The New York
Times Company External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/washington/02war.html |