exiles stunned Bush seemed unaware of Sunnis and Shiites existence

If Only …
The lessons of our Iraqi bungles.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Monday, March 20, 2006, at 6:23 PM ET


A question worth mulling, on this third anniversary of the war that President Bush told us was over and won two years and 10 months ago, is this: Were the fiascos inevitable—built-in products of the nature of the war itself—or could they have been avoided, or at least might their impact have been minimized, if President Bush and his top advisers had made smarter decisions?

This isn't the stuff of parlor games; it's a vital question. If the disasters were inescapable, then we shouldn't get involved ever again in this sort of war. If they were preventable, then maybe these broader issues of war and peace can't be settled by this particular conflict, but we can draw the lesson that we should elect less dogmatic leaders; and the officers and advisers who counseled against those decisions, who turned out to be right all along, can draw the lesson that they should speak out more boldly, perhaps even resign in protest, if they find themselves mired in such catastrophes again.

So, let us review the key strategic bungles of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the pivotal moments in this anguishing chronicle—not the decisions that seem mistaken only in hindsight (a too-easy enterprise), but those that some senior officials saw and warned about as mistaken at the time.

The failure to understand Iraqi society. Many of the Bush administration's top officials, not least the president himself, seemed to think that once Saddam Hussein was toppled and the Baathist regime deposed, freedom would gush forth like uncorked champagne. They didn't realize that centuries-old tensions between Sunnis and Shiites—suppressed like everything else during Saddam's rule—would also reignite. If they had appreciated the depth of these tensions, they might have concluded that a new and democratic Iraq would not emerge automatically, that it would have to be carefully crafted; and they might therefore have understood the need to plan for postwar "stability operations." Instead, the Pentagon went into a war without any such plans because Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of U.S. Central Command, didn't think they would be necessary.

Some officials did know, but they seem not to have told the president. A story by George Packer in the New York Times Magazine of March 2, 2003 (a couple of weeks before the war began), recounted a January meeting in the Oval Office between President Bush and three Iraqi exiles. The exiles spent much of the meeting explaining to Bush the difference between Sunnis and Shiites; they were stunned that he seemed unaware of the two groups' existence. A story by David Sanger in the following day's Times quoted "an administration insider" saying, "Of course, in our internal discussions, we raise the Yugoslavia analogy"—the possibility that Iraq could fall apart in the wake of Saddam's ouster—"but this isn't the moment for the president to be talking about that risk." This was, in fact (and it should have been obvious), the best conceivable moment for the president to be discussing just that.

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INVASION.

OCCUPATION.

Of a people who were not doing anything whatsoever to anyone.

We KILLED their MOTHERS. We KILLED their FATHERS, SONS, BROTHERS. We KILLED their BABIES.

WE STILL ARE. EVERY DAY.

In an illegal "supreme crime" WAR OF AGGRESSION.

That's why wars of aggression are illegal and a crime against humanity. So no, we probably really shouldn't do any more of them.

Sometimes, Kaplan, you really deserve a good kick in the arse.

They ones who demanded the war, that is. They have caused enough problems already with their drum-banging for ever more war. Now I am inviting them to leave. Saddam is gone, which is what they wanted. They can take Iraq from here.

And, you're right, let them deal with the aftermath.