A BRITISH VIEW OF FAILURE IN IRAQ

[Zlatko Waterman]

(Matthew Parris in THE TIMES ONLINE-- personal note: I love the expression "cock-up.")

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0, ... 49,00.html


Time for the neocons to admit that the Iraq war was wrong from the start
Matthew Parris



HARK — CAN YOU hear it? Borne on the wind, can you hear the sounds of construction — of hammers hammering and woodsaws sawing? And do you detect a note of panic? I do. The good ship Neocon is going down. She has struck the Iraqi rocks, the engine room is awash, and on the deck in anxious pursuit of something to float them away is a curious assembly.
Her Majesty’s Brigade of Neocon Columnists and Leader Writers mingles with much of the elite of British politics. The new Labour Cabinet and its courtiers and most of the Opposition’s front bench rub shoulders with Fleet Street’s finest. Is that David Aaronovitch I see, hammer in hand? Jack Straw is handing him the nails. There’s Michael Gove scribbling notes while Danny Finkelstein rips a blank sheet from a discarded do-it-yourself regime change manual, and ponders a hastily sketched design. Willie Shawcross has the saw and Tim Hames and Margaret Beckett are ripping planks from the deck. Gordon Brown skulks behind the mast as those unlikely bedfellows, Matthew d’Ancona, of The Spectator, and Johann Hari, of The Independent, assemble what timber they can find.



They are building a lifeboat for their reputations. The task is urgent. It is no small thing to find oneself on the wrong side of an argument when the debate is about the biggest disaster in British foreign policy since Suez; no small thing to have handed Iran a final, undreamt-of victory in an Iran-Iraq war that we thought had ended in the 1980s; no small thing to have lost Britain her credit in half the world; no small thing — in the name of Atlanticism — to have shackled our own good name to a doomed US presidency and crazed foreign-policy adventure that the next political generation in America will remember only with an embarrassed shudder.

It is no small thing to have embellished the philosophy, found the prose and made the case for the most almighty cock-up in politics that we are ever likely to witness. They meant for the best, these politicians, dreamers and writers. They didn’t think it would end like this. But it has: more killed than even Saddam could boast, and nothing to show for it but an exhausted British Army and the global energising of violent Islamism on a scale of which Osama bin Laden never dreamt.

Our British neocons have invested heavily in this ill-fated craft, and the wreck is total. How shall they be saved? Never fear. They’ve been working on the elements of a rescue plan. By Christmas all will be singing from the same sheet. All together, now, warrior-columnists and soon-to-be-former Cabinet ministers: one, two three . . .

“The principle was good but the Americans screwed up the execution.”

Oh diddums, guys. Damned awful luck. You had this fantastic plan for invading a foreign country and harnessing a grateful populace behind your ideas for rebuilding an Arab nation along better lines — and then along come the Americans and make a mess of it. Now why in Heaven’s name would they do a thing that? Vandals.

Funny, because I don’t quite recall most of you saying it at the time — some of you wrote columns and some of you delivered speeches declaring that Iraq was making giant strides; most of you blamed the difficulties on “Saddam loyalists and foreign fighters”, and some of you actually visited and returned rejoicing at the progress — but let’s overlook that. Let’s for the sake of argument grant that you worried from the start that the US just didn’t have the hang of this nation-building business. Now, you declare, we know that’s the reason the whole strategy hit the rocks.

Crap. The strategy failed because of one big, bad idea at its very root. Your idea that we kick the door in. Everything has flowed from that.

We were not invited. We had no mandate. There were no “good” Iraqis to hand over to. We had nothing to latch on to, no legitimacy. It wasn’t a question of being tactful, respectful, munificent, or handing sweets to children. We were impostors, and that is all.

So now the liferaft: “Tut-tut, no post-invasion strategy.” Well there certainly was a post-invasion strategy, and just because it didn’t work does not mean a different strategy would have made the difference. The post- invasion strategy was minimalist, based on the belief that Iraqis had the human and financial resources to set up their own administration without too much delay, if given full security back-up.

It didn’t happen. But look at two different strategies that armchair neo- imperialists are now saying would “of course” have done the trick if only the stupid Americans had realised it. First there is what is now said to have been Colin Powell’s preference: to smother the country with troops and bulldozers and bricklayers and engineers. In fact, in the early months huge reconstruction was attempted, much was spent — and more than 100,000 troops is hardly derisory as a military presence — and I have yet to hear why airlifting British soldiers to Basra to shovel up garbage in a city perched on one of the world’s richest oilfields would have swung it for us. Our own troops’ famously sensitive “hearts and minds” tactics turned out to make not a jot of difference when the chips were down. Leaping from their burning armoured vehicle with uniforms in flames didn’t leave British soldiers much time to wave at Iraqi kids.

But what if there had been twice the troop numbers, twice the candy, the dollars and the engineers? Iraqi resentment might have been even greater. When I was there two years ago no Iraqi suggested that they wanted to see more Americans. Such a policy, had it failed, would today have the single-malt sippers at the Travellers’ Club in Pall Mall opining that the mistake the Americans made was not to leave it to the Iraqis, or keep a lower profile.

The other strategy which is now said to have been “obviously” wiser is to have left the Baathist administration and Civil Service more or less intact. You may ask why in that case the huge expense of occupying the place, instead of just murdering Saddam, or inviting him to Switzerland with £20 billion and an amnesty.

Anyway, the idea that you can simply decapitate a regime like his is dubious — as if there had been a Whitehall-style mandarinate there, with a cadre of Sir Humphreys in a Baghdad club, awaiting a memo that a new government had taken over. But the coiled spring driving the clockwork of both the civil and the military parts of Baathist administration was terror and brutality from top to bottom. At the apex was one monstrous dictator. Remove him and all would have fallen into chaos and corruption. An occupying power that tried to slip its bottom smoothly into the driver’s seat while leaving the vehicle (the existing police, army and Civil Service) intact would have found the machine impossible to drive. And today everyone would be grandly pronouncing that of course our mistake was not to have removed at once Saddam’s bloodstained, corrupt and hated state machine.

The former hawks of press and politics now scramble for the status of visionaries let down by functionaries. This is a lifeboat that will not float. Let these visionaries understand that occupation is always brutal and usually resisted; that occupying armies are always tactless, sometimes abusive and usually boneheaded; that in the argument between hands-on and hands-off you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t; and that the first, original and central cause of the Iraq fiasco was not the bad manners of this or that poor, half-educated squaddie from Missouri, nor the finer points of this or that State Department doctrine of neocolonial administration.

The reason for failure was not the post-invasion strategy. It was the strategy of invasion. Blame the vision, not the execution.

[jimboloco]

according to knip
they're probably just getting homesick over there

we couold've sent in thebulldozers and construction equipement
without the troops
an they could've rebuilt the country
without a war
and without throwing money at hellyburton

[mnaz]

it just made no sense, from day one.... President Bush started an unnecessary war, and it diminishes us all. I don't know why people couldn't see this.... I really don't.

[jimboloco]

exactly
why couldnot they see that we were being led into a huge war?

well, according to cheney and rumsfield
it was to be an easy victory
so that's why everybody followed along
somany lemmings
and furthermore
a whole bunch of them
believe it's fulfilling bible prophesy
and they will continue to want more and more and more to
follow

but enough folks will tip the scale
or not?
one can only hope
to rock the vote
and know that stopping the neo-cons is the first priority
towards unravveling the imperial machine.

[mtmynd]

Those that start wars based on lies and deceit are doomed to lose.

[stilltrucking]

Name me a war that was not based on lies and deceit.?

[jimboloco]

the Balkan intervention
OK
the Afghanistan intervention
OK
parts of both I demurred, but were true coalition efforts
alth the treatmenof afghani prisoners is another lie.

not much else lately
vietnam was started on the falseness of the gulf of tonkin and the presumptions that a police state wanted our help and much coveruppiing attempted after

panama was a cover-up we wasted the poor neighborhoods around Noriega's headquarters

Grenada was a diversion from the bombings of Marines in Lebanon

Desert Storm was a lie about the intent or capability of the Iraqis to expand beyond that and also false testimony was delivered by a Kuwaiti woman PR about supposed Iraqi soldiers stealing dialysis machines and robbing neo-nate nursery rhymes.

iraq was such a scripted scenario, unbelieveable.

[mnaz]

I write sometimes about history being skewed by deep-wallets corporate types, about hard lessons of war that never quite seem to translate fully across the generations. World War 2 is a prime example.... Saddam compared to Hitler, etc., by the likes of Bush's incorrigible speechwriters, and the utter disaster of world war somehow failing to sink in, to give us all fair warning.... or so it seems. It wasn't that long ago...

[jimboloco]

plus the first bush administration
essentially set-up saddamn to invade kuwait in the first place
somehow listening to his complaints about the kuwaitis drilling diagonally into iraqi oilfields
and then of course
not telling them they couldn't do it
allowing it to happen in the first place
a set up deal
and they did not allow any iraqi soldiers, the mass of them, to surrender,
instead in a gory allaying the curse of the vietnam syndrome, slaughtered eighty thousand on the highway to hell
gunning them from tactical fighters, attack choppers, artillery barrages
gunshipz,
all after b-52's bombed them into a frantic retreat

we need a national confession about the absolute collusion between the uSa and saddamn in gassing the kurds back in the heyday uS and saddamn's unfininished biz


my dad flew co-pilot bombers age 19 ww dos
i am still friends with his old pilot the commandante a quaker
he says the current condition sucks
voted for granny D up in new hampshire

an americano korean war vet has made friends with a chinese korean war vet

POWELL, Wilson "Woody", TWO WALK THE GOLDEN ROAD, 2000 (320 pages). Powell, an American Korean War veteran, and Zhou Ming-fu, a Chinese Korean War veteran, meet in China in 1983 and establish a friendship that transcends the futilities of war as they open their respective Pandora’s boxes of memories and yearnings for a more humane world. This writing makes clear the struggle of two men, microcosms of survivors of all wars, who somehow come to terms with what they had to become in order to survive at all and then recover a decency in themselves they had feared was gone irretrievably. (available through http://www.goldnroad.com/)

where i get my hope as well as here to validate our struggle and path

karl rove is the mastermind of strategic fear mongering of the curreent administration
(hopefully someday to be looked back upon as the tragic days gone by)
i guess who else
or he is the tactician who dreams up all the scheming that promotes a political arena of fear.
and his hands are clean once again
which is why the republickanz are scared that the democrats might gain a majority in either chambercause the democrats would then be in charge of the various committees and have promised
to pursue further, open up the investigations into the president's involvement in the valerie palme biz
and his abuse of intell
in his PR driven scheme to invade IraQ
also to open up investigations into fraud within the militario-industrial complex
private contracters fraud
at least pursue an agenda that stops the intell-pigs abuse of power
and makes it a necessary condition for a ceasing of this dysfunctional
warmongering etc

and hey the sandinistas may finally have a victory in nicaragua
mercy