1) Disbanding Saddam's army was a terrible blunder. Garner immediately recognized that, and went to Rumsfeld to tell him it was not too late to reverse the decision. Rumsfeld blew him off, obviously considering the decision a good one.
Having a stable standing army, with members being paid and fed, would have greatly reduced the immediate instability and looting, and removed a vast source of recruiting both for the insurgency and rising militias. We've essentially spent the time since then attempting to recover from this disasterous mistake, and have made little progress.
2) Logistical/Planning errors.
These errors were significant and costly. The logistical errors included the inability to properly supply our troops in the first months, resulting in hardship to the very troops the right claims to support. Some fighting men were going weeks at a time, in combat, on one meal a day and with limited ammunition.
The other logistical error was in the arming and protection of our troops. Inadequately armored vehicles, and a lack of personal body armor, was a disgraceful slap in the face of our troops. When families need to spend their own money to buy and ship body armor, and when our troops have to rummage through garbage heaps for metal to strap onto their vehicles, someone screwed up the logistics.
3) There was also incompetence in the planning tasks. It was obvious that there was little or no occupation plan, and the parts that were slapped together were woefully inadequate. Add to that the neocons attempt to create a privatization utopia using ideologues who had little or no experience in their assigned tasks, and it is no wonder that most Iraqis believed that the mistakes of the early occupation were deliberately punitive. They could not believe that the most successful nation on Earth could be incompetent accidentally; it had to be a punishment.
Powell and his department fought the neocons tooth and nail. Powell finally bailed because he tired of the BS and incompetence. Powell had warned that we would have an nation ownership problem; he and General Shinseki were right, and Rumsfeld and Dick 'Flowers in the Street' Cheney were wrong. The insurgency is not near its last throes, and there is no end in sight.... |
