over 700!!! scholars signing this
U.S. Policy in Iraq Repeatedly Faulted in Recent Studies
By Charles J. Hanley
The Associated Press
Sunday 17 October 2004
The blood of Fallujah, the thunder of Baghdad and the daily struggles of life have been distilled in
columns of numbers and pages of dry prose. The experts have taken a hard look at Iraq, and they
don't like what they see.
Recent in-depth studies – by official auditors and unofficial watchdogs, by economists and lawyers,
by pollsters, political scientists and ex-Pentagon aides – find a few good economic signs and some
cause for hope in January's planned elections. Even more, however, they find dashed expectations
and rising fears, missed deadlines, mismanaged money and grand schemes lost in the smoke of car
bombs and airstrikes.
With Iraq so unstable, "there are questions about what options and contingency plans are being
developed to address these ongoing and future challenges," the Government Accountability Office
observes in a report to Congress.
Anthony Cordesman, a former Pentagon official and aide to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is more
blunt. In many ways the U.S. occupation has been "a dismal failure," the veteran national security
analyst says.
His colleagues at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies – in a separate,
102-page analysis – note that "failure" and "success" are sensitive words as the presidential election
nears. Nonetheless, they conclude, Iraq "will not be a 'success' for a long time."
The Associated Press reviewed a dozen such status reports against the backdrop of nonstop
violence in Baghdad and sharpening rhetoric in Washington. The studies were conducted by U.S.
government agencies and private international and U.S. research organizations, in some cases drawn
from months of work and hundreds of interviews inside Iraq.
Again and again, their focus falls on what the authoritative International Crisis Group calls Iraq's
"vicious circle."
"Lack of security leads to lack of reconstruction, which leads to lack of jobs, which leads back to
lack of security," the European-based ICG finds.
Perhaps 60 percent of Iraq doesn't have work. With no jobs, more Iraqis turn to armed resistance,
out of resentment of the occupiers and sometimes for money. Insurgents will pay a man up to $100 to
attack a U.S. patrol, the CSIS says.
Security has spiraled downward since the U.S.-British invasion of March 2003. Iraqis see and hear
it around them – in the car bombings, kidnappings and highway banditry, and in the unrelenting
mortar, rocket and roadside-bomb attacks on the U.S. military. From a handful a day in mid-2003,
those anti-U.S. assaults have multiplied drastically – to more than 70 on average every day last
month.
The GAO report, "Rebuilding Iraq," describes what happened:
"The insurgents' targets expanded. . . . The group of insurgents grew. . . . The areas of instability
expanded" – from Fallujah and the Iraqi heartland to Mosul in the north and to Najaf and Basra in the
south.
Along the way, the total of U.S. military dead rose to 1,086, and of wounded above 7,100. Last
month, U.S. deaths averaged three a day. More and more, Iraq's U.S.-supported interim government
is also a target. An estimated 750 Iraqi policemen have been killed.
Iraqi civilians have suffered the most. Washington's Brookings Institution notes that unofficial
estimates range from 13,000 to 30,000 civilians killed by acts of war since the invasion, by both U.S.
coalition forces and anti-U.S. fighters and terrorists. No reliable count exists for insurgents killed.
The studies, issued between June and September, repeatedly suggest that two steps taken by the
Bush administration last year fed the uprising: the disbanding of Iraq's 400,000-man military and the
stripping of government and other jobs from 30,000 members of the old regime's Baath Party.
"Abruptly terminating the livelihoods of these men created a vast pool of humiliated, antagonized
and politicized men," says Faleh Jabar of the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington. "Serious policy
blunders," concludes Carl Conetta of the Cambridge, Mass.-based Project on Defense Alternatives.
Go to Original
Security Scholars Give Bush Foreign Policy a Failing Grade
Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy
Tuesday 12 October 2004
Newark, Delaware - Over 650 foreign affairs specialists in the United States and allied countries
have signed an open letter opposing the Bush administration's foreign policy and calling urgently for a
change of course.
The letter was released today by "Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy," a nonpartisan
group of experts in the field of national security and international politics.
The letter asserts that current U.S. foreign policy harms the struggle against Islamist terrorists,
pointing to a series of "blunders" by the Bush team in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. "We're
advising the administration, which is already in a deep hole, to stop digging," said Professor Richard
Samuels of M.I.T.
The scholars who signed the letter are from over 150 colleges and universities in 40 states, from
California to Florida, Texas to Maine. They include many of the nation's most prominent experts on
world politics, including former staff members at the Pentagon, the State Department and the National
Security Council, as well as six of the last seven Presidents of the American Political Science
Association. "I think it is telling that so many specialists on international relations, who rarely agree
on anything, are unified in their position on the high costs that the U.S. is incurring from this war,"
said Professor Robert Keohane of Duke University.
The text of the letter:
October, 2004
An Open Letter to the American People:
We, a nonpartisan group of foreign affairs specialists, have joined together to call urgently for a
change of course in American foreign and national security policy. We judge that the current
American policy centered around the war in Iraq is the most misguided one since the Vietnam period,
one which harms the cause of the struggle against extreme Islamist terrorists. One result has been a
great distortion in the terms of public debate on foreign and national security policy—an emphasis on
speculation instead of facts, on mythology instead of calculation, and on misplaced moralizing over
considerations of national interest. [1] We write to challenge some of these distortions.
Although we applaud the Bush Administration for its initial focus on destroying al-Qaida bases in
Afghanistan, its failure to engage sufficient U.S. troops to capture or kill the mass of al-Qaida fighters
in the later stages of that war was a great blunder. It is a fact that the early shift of U.S. focus to Iraq
diverted U.S. resources, including special operations forces and intelligence capabilities, away from
direct pursuit of the fight against the terrorists. [2]
Many of the justifications offered by the Bush Administration for the war in Iraq have been proven
untrue by credible studies, including by U.S. government agencies. There is no evidence that Iraq
assisted al-Qaida, and its prewar involvement in international terrorism was negligible. [3] Iraq’s
arsenal of chemical and biological weapons was negligible, and its nuclear weapons program virtually
nonexistent. [4] In comparative terms, Iran is and was much the greater sponsor of terrorism, and
North Korea and Pakistan pose much the greater risk of nuclear proliferation to terrorists. Even on
moral grounds, the case for war was dubious: the war itself has killed over a thousand Americans and
unknown thousands of Iraqis, and if the threat of civil war becomes reality, ordinary Iraqis could be
even worse off than they were under Saddam Hussein. The Administration knew most of these facts
and risks before the war, and could have discovered the others, but instead it played down, concealed
or misrepresented them.
Policy errors during the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq have created a situation in Iraq worse
than it needed to be. Spurning the advice of Army Chief of Staff General Shinseki, the Administration
committed an inadequate number of troops to the occupation, leading to the continuing failure to
establish security in Iraq. Ignoring prewar planning by the State Department and other US government
agencies, it created a needless security vacuum by disbanding the Iraqi Army, and embarked on a
poorly planned and ineffective reconstruction effort which to date has managed to spend only a
fraction of the money earmarked for it. [5] As a result, Iraqi popular dismay at the lack of security,
jobs or reliable electric power fuels much of the violent opposition to the U.S. military presence, while
the war itself has drawn in terrorists from outside Iraq.
The results of this policy have been overwhelmingly negative for U.S. interests. [6] While the
removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime was desirable, the benefit to the U.S. was small as prewar
inspections had already proven the extreme weakness of his WMD programs, and therefore the small
size of the threat he posed. On the negative side, the excessive U.S. focus on Iraq led to weak and
inadequate responses to the greater challenges posed by North Korea’s and Iran’s nuclear programs,
and diverted resources from the economic and diplomatic efforts needed to fight terrorism in its
breeding grounds in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the Middle East. Worse, American
actions in Iraq, including but not limited to the scandal of Abu Ghraib, have harmed the reputation of
the U.S. in most parts of the Middle East and, according to polls, made Osama Bin Laden more
popular in some countries than is President Bush. This increased popularity makes it easier for
al-Qaida to raise money, attract recruits, and carry out its terrorist operations than would otherwise be
the case.
Recognizing these negative consequences of the Iraq war, in addition to the cost in lives and
money, we believe that a fundamental reassessment is in order. Significant improvements are needed
in our strategy in Iraq and the implementation of that strategy. We call urgently for an open debate on
how to achieve these ends, one informed by attention to the facts on the ground in Iraq, the facts of
al-Qaida’s methods and strategies, and sober attention to American interests and values.
There are 729 signatures as of 6:00 PM on 13 October 2004. If you are a scholar of international
affairs and would like your signature added, please e-mail us at sensibleforeignpolicy@gmail.com. |
