Asymmetrical Information

Convince me first that any of those actually happened.

I don't have a bunch of information on (1), but (2) and (3) are largely contradicted by the people who were actually there on the ground in the military, see, eg, Tommy Frank's book.

1): I've seen very little evidence of litmus tests. I've seen evidence that the CPA has a lot of people who are motivated Bush supporters, but of course people would be motivated to join it by strong political belief as well. If mere existence of political leaning is evidence of a litmus test in hiring, then the government and academia have a lot to answer for as well.

2)&3): Not only do those in the field strongly disagree with the assertion, but I strongly suspect that throwing a great number of troops into occupation, arresting and killing those who were planning insurgencies, especially when they were hiding in mosques, suspending their newspapers and so on, would be accused of, and very likely guilty of, feeding the insurgency itself. It's also completely obvious that the insurgency is not a major military threat. It's a major threat if it becomes popular, yes, but I remain unconvinced that substantially harsher measures BEFORE the insurgency started randomly killing Iraqi civilians wouldn't have made it more popular as a resistance movement. It's true, though, that in a lot of ways the occupation has been much lighter than, say, the Japanese occupation, and perhaps harsher treatment would have forstalled it. (Quite a few newspapers were censored or banned during the Japanese occupation, etc.)

I remain unconvinced because the same people I see advocating harsher treatment also vociferously oppose it when it is actually done.

a. Because there would no longer be a threat of the reconstruction being abandoned because of Bush losing reelection, a second term Bush administration would have much less reason to fear political costs of acknowledging and fixing mistakes

b. Because now that sovereignty has been handed over to Iraq, the reconstruction is no longer Bush's to bungle. The question becomes who is more likely to give the new Iraqi government the support they need.

Charlie (Colorado),

I think you’re quite correct most of the “questions” Jane has asked seem to have come straight from DNC-talking points which sort of defeats the purpose of this little exercise. ;)

I don't know what you mean by 1.

2) There was a calculation made that Iraqis would be able and or willing to address the insurgency to a greater extent than has been the case in reality. If it worked out, the idea was to have Iraqis fighting in the name of their own new government rather than one occupier fighting insurgent Iraqis. Clearly this would have been preferable. Rolling back time and knowing only what was knowable then, do you think we SHOULD have made a different choice?

3) As suggested by Franks and others, there are two ways to deal with 'asymmetrical warfare' (no, I didn't make that up just to be a cool kid on the AI blog): you can populate with overwhelming force and with high visibility in all areas, or you can be less present and mobilize against insurgents when they mass in the absence of a visible deterrent. Option A makes your military guards with the intent of deterring action from taking place, while Option B leverages your firepower superiority to kill anything they show you. Your troops are more in danger in Option A because you are trying to defend everywhere, while option B allows you to create tight defenses in particular areas, venturing out into danger zones in high firepower patrols who are looking for trouble anyway. Option A costs more money, and it is not obviously the better solution.

All of the above are great answers. Let me add my voice to the chorus questioning the notion that this occupation was "bungled" in any substantial way.

But beyond that, the answer is simple: Lame Duck President.

Who said that refusing to ask congress for more money and troops was a mistake. We are adding troops in Iraq daily.

Iraqi troops.

A study of the history of Iraq provides some clues as to why Bush's policy may not work. What we refer to as Iraq was created by the British foreign office after WWI. It's really more three countries than one, and it may be impossible to get Kurds, Sunni, and Shiites to live together in one nation. I think Bush's strategy is a gamble that might pay off big, or might be a complete bust.

I'm not aware of any substantive evidence backing contentions #1 or #3. Regarding the latter, given our simultaneously greater success and lighter footprint in Afghanistan, it could be argued we have too many troops in Iraq.

Regarding #2, the most difficult part of fighting a guerilla war in foreign territory is getting the enemy to stand up and fight rather than snipe away and fade into the countryside. If you can convince the enemy to congregate (eg, in "safe" areas like Falluja), our overwhelming firepower can finish them off rather quickly. Also, giving ordinary Iraqis the chance to experience life under the extremists/insurgents is doing a pretty good job of showing them why American occupation -> Free Iraq is the best path forward. Let me know if you need substantiating links (I don't know what your time budget is for this issue).

If you'll recall, we had a big insurgency in Afghanistan, too. You didn't hear about it on the news because it didn't last very long. And it didn't last very long because we bombed the ever-lovin' heck out of it.

See, in Afghanistan the Taliban remnants and the terrorists took refuge in deserted parts of the country. We enveloped them and pulverized them. In Iraq, the bad guys — Baath-party remnants, members of the Fedayeen Saddam and terrorists allied with al-Qaida — hid in the cities. It was a harder problem to solve.

Would more troops have been useful? Some very smart people say no. They say that putting Coalition troops on ever street corner would have accomplished nothing more than to present the enemy with a more target-rich environment.

So you see, the insurgency was not ignored and we didn't send an insufficient number of troops. Your premises behind #2 and #3 are wrong. (Good questions, though.)

Like others, I have no idea what you mean by #1.

I think that #1 happened because the State Department became involved. I am not and have never been a fan of the State Department mindset, which I view as being directly responsible for regularly killing off my friends and acquaintances, e.g., my fellow military personnel who have to go in and unf**k what the State Department folks screwed up in the first place. It is easy to read between the lines of communications (blogs, e-mails, etc.) from the military to see a few things that the CPA interfered with. Yes, from the military point of view, the CPA not only engaged in litmus tests, but also did the testing at a snail's pace, when what was needed was Iraqi leadership, ANY leadership, in place quickly. If the leadership then didn't work out, change it, but having people in leadership positions who would later fail the litmus tests would have been much better, and led to fewer problems, than continuing to have no leadership at all for an extended period of time.

#2 wasn't ignored by the military, and when the CPA decided to act, the military was ready. It's a truism that the easiest way to kill the enemy is to have them congregate in one spot--and that's what we did. What I don't know is whether the plan was intentional (Bring them on!) or just serendipitous.

#3 I haven't seen where significantly more troops would have been helpful in Iraq. But I have long felt (since during the Clinton era) that the active duty force strength was being cut way too low, even for the demands that Clinton was putting on the forces. Admittedly my viewpoint is skewed from being in the Marines rather than the Army, and I don't know how severe the Army had it what with trying to keep troops stationed in Korea, Germany, Bosnia, and Kosovo, but during the Clinton era, the average Marine spent 60% of his time deployed. That's worse than the Blue and Gold crews on the boomers, and that used to be the worst sort of duty. (Apologies to the Air Force watchstanders in the silos, but you guys and gals weren't gone away from home for 6 months at a time.)

Jane:

Were Abu Ghraib and (worse) the torture memos not sufficiently grave to make the list? If not, you should vote for Bush.

Really don't mean that to be snarky. But I think that if that doesn't trouble you, you will have a hard time understanding what Dems mean when they say that part of the capital cost in Iraq was our moral standing and the suasion it engendgered. That loss has real world political costs - the torture memos make it infinitely easier for Putin to justify whatever he does next.

I disagree with the premise that the follow-on from military to military dominance has been bungled.

I see it as a dynamic enfolding.

I believe that the administration was aware of the potentials for difficulty, but realized that the threat did not offer any alternatives other than Europeasment.

This is not to ignore the fact that public perceptions were initially led to the more optimistic side of the equation.

Quite honestly, I had my doubts early on about our ability in the short term to parry the inevitable support of insurgent activities by those in the region who, for obvious reasons, are predisposed to opposing the threat of self governance in Iraq.

It probably would have been to our advantage to begin the transfer of sovereignty sooner, but how am I to know?

I suspect, and have all along, that we would also encounter obstacles thrown by thwarters from outside the region as well. This may sound paranoid, and obviously I have no evidence, but it is a consideration.

There is one important thing to bear in mind. President Bush is being characterized as an imperialist and a bungling imperialist at the same time by those in opposition.

On one hand he's Adolph Hitler, and at the same time he's Ensign Parker from McHale's Navy.

I don't buy it.

It's crap.

The price is too high to equivocate on this.

You will notice that Hillary Clinton has remained fairly low key in this debate. No one has ever accused the Clintons of political ineptitude.

Some reasons that more troops were absolutely needed to secure Iraq. First, there are huge stockpiles of weapons throughout Iraq that REMAIN UNSECURED TODAY. Second, according to our military, up to 4000 foreign fighters cross the unsecured borders of Iraq every day. Third, we could have prevented much of the initial looting that was the beginning of the insurgency that continues to grow stronger today.

The declarations of victory in Afganistan are a joke. The 15 Afgans running against Karzai initially withdrew from the election due to wide scale fraud. The Talaban is back, Karzai wants to cut a deal to bring them into the government, but they have joined with the narco warlords to oppose us. Poppy production is up 900%. The country is more dangerous now, then prior to the invasion.

The reconstruction of Iraq has been minimal. The US has used only about 5% of the funds allocated for reconstruction. Alleli is Saddam without the uni, he represents the same Sunni Baathist intrests Saddam did. A month ago, Rummy claimed to have trained over 200,000 Iraqi troops, 3 weeks ago it was revealed that there only 5000 fully trained Iraqi troops.

"according to our military, up to 4000 foreign fighters cross the unsecured borders of Iraq every day." Instead, they could be blowing up any tourist spot around the world where you might find Americans (or Aussies, Brits, and anyone else with the backbone to stand up against Islamic terror), and trying to infiltrate into the US itself. In battles with them and whatever Iraqis are against us, we lose about two troops a day. Sounds like Bush picked a very good place to fight.

Even if we accept the truth of #1, Jane doesn't explain why it is problematic. Is she trying to say that only Democrats are capable of post-war reconstruction? Does she have any evidence to show that the Republicans who presuambly were selected in lieu of Democrats were any worse at their jobs? I don't think so.

Let me add, vis-a-vis #3, the Bush DID ask for more money ($87 biliion ring a bell?). And the troops level in Iraq is not a Congressional decision -- Congress doesn't vote on whether there should be 137,000 American troops in Iraq or 237,000.

Now perhaps Jane doesn't think that our military doesn't have enough troops overall - i.e., that our force structure of approx. 1,200,000 troops is too small. That's a question worth discussing. But I'm not certain that the Bush administration wouldn't ask for an increase in overall size of the military if it thought it could free up enough troops via, e.g., moving troops out of Germany and SKorea. And certainly JKerry hasn't addressed this substantively.

Somecallmetim and Begbee, when exactly did you become Bush supporters?

Hey, Jack... this is a personal appeal from me (I'm nobody, but I'm paying attention to these threads) to let Begbee post in (relative) peace. His or her opposition viewpoint sometimes brings out great supporting points that I'm benefiting from hearing, as I continue to stock my own "war room" against the arguments of my several moveon.org friends. (A couple of them actual bona-fide Austin, TX, Bush-haters - fun but uncomfortable dinner parties! Duck the flying china!)

Oops, I mean "somecallmetim and Begbee."

Jack:

"Somecallmetim and Begbee, when exactly did you become Bush supporters?"

About 3hrs after DRB entered comments on Q1, 30 min after Rex entered comments on Q1, 3.5 hrs after Jamie and DRB entered comments on Q3, 2.5 hrs after Shamus entered comments on Q3, 30 min after Rob Read entered comments on Q3, 20 min after Rex entered comments on Q3, 3.5 hrs after marc entered comments on Q5, and 3 hrs after Shamus entered comments on Q5.

None of the above appeared to be Kerry supporters, so I assumed that either I had misunderstood the rules of the road or that the rules had changed. But, yeah, if I could pull the above comment, I would. (And a couple of the entries cited above, like Rex's question on Q1, are genuinely worthwhile, and would be coded differently if I could be bothered to come up with a simple formal system for distinguishing them).

Im registered independent. I didnt vote for Gore, and I voted Bush sr once.

We are attracting a whole new element of muslims to Iraq. Before Iraq, the average muslim didnt hate us, only the radicals. But by occupying Iraq we attract nearly every Koran observing muslim to Iraq. One of the five pillars of Islam is to wage jihad against foreign occupiers. Most of these new foreign fighters would have never acted against the US in the US.

Explain to me how our presence in Iraq prevents terrorism in the US, when Al Qaeda is a multinational group with cells in over 60 countries? Since our invasion of Iraq, Al Qaeda has been more active, and has staged larger terror events on three different continents.

Dude, the 5 Pillars of Islam are:

#1: Professing the faith that there is 1 (and only 1) God, and Mohammed is a true prophet of God.

#2: Praying to God ("Allah,") preferably 5 times a day.

#3: Charity (giving alms to the poor.)

#4: Fasting during Ramadan

and

#5: Making pilgrimage to Mecca, if at all possible.

This "jihad" excrement IS NOT, and NEVER HAS BEEN, one of the 5 pillars.
All the more reason to exterminate, with extreme prejudice, those self-appointed "Jihadis" who disgrace Islam by pretending to fight for it.
They fight for their own false pride.

And
(as if everyone but them didn't know:)
"they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind."

From an article dated July 7, 2003
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jul2003/n07072003_200307075.html

"However, much has been accomplished in restoring Iraq's infrastructure, he noted. For example, Strock pointed out, on April 12 Baghdad had no electrical power. Today, 39,000 Iraqi electrical workers are back on the job, and about 3,200 megawatts are being produced.

"By the end of this month, he added, power production will reach about 4,000 megawatts, about what was available before the war. More power will become available, he said, as additional investment is made."

From an article dated 9/21/2004

http://www.grd.usace.army.mil/news/releases/reconsep18.html

"Today 'Zeeb' and more than 76,000 Iraqis make the daily trek into the electricity plants, water treatment plants and job sites across the country to rebuild the nation in the wake of three decades of dictatorship.

"Current electricity production hovers around 5,000 Megawatts, 600 more than before the war and slightly above the level produced in Wisconsin."

"Iraqi and U.S. engineers have brought three rehabilitated generators and one new generator online this month, adding 47 Megawatts to the national electrical grid. Last month, seven generators were brought on line, adding 202 Megawatts to the grid - a total that now fuels 606,000 Iraqi homes and brings the available electricity to a level that far exceeds the 4,400 Megawatts available before the war."

Of course mismanagement is not the only reason for Iraq's underwhelming rate of progress. There are also the problems of terrorist attacks on the infrastructure, and the abduction and beheading of contractors who are working on the various projects. Are more American troops the answer? Probably not at this point. But if there had been more when we first invaded, we might have been able to provide the security that would have encouraged middle-class Iraqis to cut themselves loose from dead-end Baathists and violent extremists. Instead we made Saddam look good because he protected Iraqis from free-lance kidnappers, looters and rapists. This lawlessness made it easier for the insurgency to take hold.

No use dwelling on the past, right? But what reason do we have to think that the Bush administration will make wiser decisions in the future?

Mcclain that was a factual error on my part, my bad, I appreciate the somewhat restrained correction.

About the reconstruction in Iraq. Recent audits expose serious failures in American oversight of Iraq's revenues and U.S. reconstruction funds, said a report by the Open Society Institute's Iraq Revenue Watch project.

The analysis of the data suggests that of $1.5 billion in contracts, the CPA awarded U.S. firms 74 percent of the value of all contracts paid for with Iraqi funds. Together with its British allies, U.S. and U.K. companies received 85 percent of the value of all such contracts. Iraqi firms, by contrast, received just 2 percent of the value of contracts paid for with Iraqi funds. "Government favorites such as Kellogg, Brown and Root benefited at the expense of Iraqi companies whose workers badly need jobs," said Tsalik.

The report finds that 60 percent of the value of all contracts paid with Iraqi funds went to Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR)-the same company that Pentagon auditors in December 2003 found had overcharged the U.S. government for as much as $61 million for fuel imports into Iraq. A criminal investigation of KBR was launched by the Department of Defense in February 2004.

The CPA-IG audits confirm the findings of previous ones. A report released in July 2004 by the International Advisory and Monitoring Board, the watchdog body set up by the United Nations, found numerous problems in the CPA's control and use of Iraqi oil assets during the occupation. These include the absence of oil metering to control theft, poor record-keeping on oil sales, an absence of oversight of spending by the Iraqi ministries, the use of noncompetitive bidding procedures for some contracts, and the CPA's refusal to transmit crucial information to the UN-mandated body.

A recent Pentagon audit of KBR's billing system, which shows that systematic deficiencies in the company's accounting and billing procedures incurred significant costs to U.S taxpayers and to Iraqi oil revenues, is further proof of mismanagement.

Iraq's private companies routinely pay bribes to get reconstruction contracts – often to Iraqi officials but sometimes to employees of US contractors. That's one of the allegations that has been made by a special investigation undertaken by public radio's Marketplace and the Center for Investigative Reporting, and funded by The Economist magazine. The result, according to experts monitoring the situation, is almost 20 percent of the billions of American taxpayers dollars being spent to rebuild Iraq is being lost to corruption.

Meanwhile, the report also documents the failure of the US government to effectively oversee expenditures in a reconstruction effort that the reports says costs 10 times more per capita than the Marshall Plan (the US-led effort to rebuilt Germany after WWII).

04/23/04

'Kofigate' threatens US aims in Iraq

04/21/04

Watching Pakistan's antiterror efforts

04/20/04

Jordan's king snubs Bush, cancels meeting



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Begbee wrote: "We are attracting a whole new element of muslims to Iraq. Before Iraq, the average muslim didnt hate us, only the radicals. But by occupying Iraq we attract nearly every Koran observing muslim to Iraq."

And your supporting evidence for this assertion is -- what? The famously reliable public opinion surveys in totalitarian regimes? (Go ahead, tell us what you really think. We'll just take down your name and address so we can send you some lovely thank-you gifts.") Or perhaps you culled your data from the annual Census of the Jihadis?

No, Begbee, that assertion is simply extracted from your posterior orifice. Quite a feat, considering that it seems your cranium is lodged in the same location. And more amusing given your claimed disdain for speculation in a different thread, above.

Don, you seem to have an unhealthy fixation on heads and rear ends. Grab your ears, pull your head out of your rear, then read this-

But the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University said that instead of striking a blow against Islamic extremists, the Iraq war "has created momentum for many terrorist elements, but chiefly al-Qaida and its affiliates."

Jaffee Center director Shai Feldman said the vast amount of money and effort the United States has poured into Iraq has deflected attention and assets from other centers of terrorism, such as Afghanistan.

The concentration of U.S. intelligence assets in Iraq "has to be at the expense of being able to follow strategic dangers in other parts of the world," he said.

Shlomo Brom, a retired Israeli army general, said the U.S.-led effort was strategically misdirected. If the goal in the war against terrorism is "not just to kill the mosquitos but to dry the swamp," he said, "now it's quite clear" that Iraq "is not the swamp."

Instead, he said, the Iraq campaign is having the opposite effect, drawing Islamic extremists from other parts of the world to join the battle.

"On a strategic level as well as an operational level," Brom concluded, "the war in Iraq is hurting the war on international terrorism."

In other findings, Jaffee Center experts disagreed with the Israeli government's statements that its four-year struggle against Palestinian militants is part of the world fight against Islamic terrorism.

Heres some more for you Don-

In more than a dozen interviews, experts both within and outside the U.S. government laid out a stark analysis of how the war has hampered the campaign against Al Qaeda. Not only, they point out, did the war divert resources and attention away from Afghanistan, seriously damaging the prospects of capturing Al Qaeda leaders, but it has also opened a new front for terrorists in Iraq and created a new justification for attacking Westerners around the world. Perhaps most important, it has dramatically speeded up the process by which Al Qaeda the organization has morphed into a broad-based ideological movement -- a shift, in effect, from bin Laden to bin Ladenism. "If Osama believed in Christmas, this is what he'd want under his Christmas tree," one senior intelligence official told me. Another counterterrorism official suggests that Iraq might begin to resemble "Afghanistan 1996," a reference to the year that bin Laden seized on Afghanistan, a chaotic failed state, as his new base of operations.

Even Kenneth Pollack, one of the nation's leading experts on Iraq, whose book The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq made the most authoritative case for overthrowing Saddam Hussein, says, "My instinct tells me that the Iraq war has hindered the war on terrorism. You had to deal with Al Qaeda first, not Saddam. We had not crippled the Al Qaeda organization when we embarked on the Iraq war."

The damage to U.S. interests is hard to overestimate. Rohan Gunaratna, a Sri Lankan academic who is regarded as one of the world's leading authorities on Al Qaeda, points out that "sadness and anger about Iraq, even among moderate Muslims, is being harnessed and exploited by terrorist and extremist groups worldwide to grow in strength, size, and influence." Similarly, Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of counterterrorism at the CIA under presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, says the Iraq war "accelerated terrorism" by "metastasizing" Al Qaeda. Today, Al Qaeda is more than the narrowly defined group that attacked the United States on September 11, 2001; it is a growing global movement that has been energized by the war in Iraq.

This turn of events is a dramatic shift from the mood in the months following the 9/11 attacks. When the United States went to war against the Taliban, it was understood by many in the global community, including many Arabs and Muslims, as a just war. The war in Iraq not only drained that reservoir of goodwill; it also dragged the United States into what many see as a conflict with the Muslim world, or ummah, in general. Samer Shehata, a professor of Arab politics at Georgetown University, says the Iraq war has convinced "many Muslims around the world, perhaps a majority, that the war on terrorism is in fact a war against Islam." Jason Burke, author of the authoritative 2003 book Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror, adds that the Iraq war "appears to be clear evidence to many that the perception of the militants is in fact accurate and that the ummah is engaged in a war of self-defense. This has theological implications -- jihad is compulsory for all Muslims if the ummah is under attack."

Ah, so you can cite at least three other people who agree with the assertion. That doesn't magically turn it into a fact. Neither do the quotation marks. It's pure speculation.

Don, theres more than 3 people that agree with me in the above quotes, and they happen to be former Bush sr/Reagan appointees, current senior intell analysts, and leading academic experts.

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