Quote Originally Posted by Steve Blair View Post
The utility lies just where CavGuy said it does in his original post...to provoke discussion. It's not intended to be all-encompassing (at least I would HOPE that one PowerPoint slide isn't intended to be that way....), but rather to get folks talking and (hopefully) thinking about what the slide suggests and doesn't suggest. He didn't put it forward as being definitive in any way, and we should keep that in mind when we discuss it.
OK, understood, however my big beef w/ the slide is that it absolves us of our central role in the Iraqi insurgency by implying that the insurgency always had this long range political/strategic goal and plan. Nothing I have ever seen suggests this to be true with possible exception of AQ. OIF II, III, IV etc. did not need to occur had WE acted correctly. What is needed is an internal review focus, not an external one.
How did we create the insurgency? Too few troops to begin with, bypassing large numbers of fighters and weapons, Disbanding the Iraqi Army, Criminalizing Baath Party membership, The CPA, Bremmer’s free market experiment, Not supporting local experiments in democracy, etc etc….
The too few troops I put as a minor factor, but it did allow a large number of Iraqi soldiers to keep there weapons and contributed to our inability to create law-and –order during the riots and to find and secure the weapons caches.
All of the above were exaggerated by the complete disbanding of the Iraqi Army, leaving a large number of Iraqi Soldiers with at least some military training and no means of making an income to join in the dis-order and later the insurgency. This also made it so that anger or frustration could not be re-directed to the Iraqi leadership since it did not exist. It also created a condition were any Iraqi’s working in the new security forces were automatic stooges of the U.S. since the U.S. created those security bodies.
Criminalizing Baath Party Membership had a similar effect. Most of the professional classes in Iraq, such as Doctors, were required to be Baath members to practice there profession. The majority of Baath party members were also Suni, and this would contribute to there feelings of being discriminated against that would have violent repercussions later as the country nearly slipped into Civil War.
The CPA as a concept was a bad choice, even outside of the myriad of bad choices the CPA made. By not having a truly Iraqi interterm government, it meant that an Iraqi did not have the choice of working for the Nation of Iraq, they could either work for or against the occupying forces. Guess what many Iraqi’s chose? Even a neutered interterm Iraqi government would have been able to deflect anger away from the coalition forces, and would have made support feel more like Iraqi’s pulling themselves back up on there feet rather then an insulting handout.
Breemers free market experiment justified many educated Iraqi’s fears that the US and allies were doing a resource grab. It may also be the key reason that the Iraqi economy, including it’s oil, were so slow to recover.
I could go on, but the point is the insurgency was a reaction to our actions and was preventable from the get-go and was not created by some far thinking insurgent generalissimo. Yes AQ seems to think more on the long-term side, but perhaps a military solution is not ideal for dealing with AQ.
Reed