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Rumsfeldâs War, Powellâs Occupation
EFLRumsfeld wanted Iraqis in on the action â right from the beginning. The latest post-hoc conventional wisdom on Iraq is that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld won the war but lost the occupation. There are two problems with this analysis (which comes, most forcefully, from The Weekly Standard). First, itâs not Rumsfeldâs occupation; itâs Colin Powellâs and George Tenetâs. Second, although itâs painfully obvious that much is wrong with this occupation, itâs simple-minded to assume that more troops will fix it. More troops may be needed now, but more of the same will not do the job. Something different is needed â and was, right from the start. A Rumsfeld occupation would have been different, and still might be. Rumsfeld wanted to put an Iraqi face on everything at the outset â not just on the occupation of Iraq, but on its liberation too. That would have made a world of difference. Rumsfeldâs plan was to train and equip â and then transport to Iraq â some 10,000 Shia and Sunni freedom fighters led by Shia exile leader Ahmed Chalabi and his cohorts in the INC, the multi-ethnic anti-Saddam coalition he created. There, they would have joined with thousands of experienced Kurdish freedom fighters, ably led, politically and militarily, by Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani. Working with our special forces, this trio would have sprung into action at the start of the war, striking from the north, helping to drive Baathist thugs from power, and joining Coalition forces in the liberation of Baghdad. That would have put a proud, victorious, multi-ethnic Iraqi face on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and it would have given enormous prestige to three stubbornly independent and unashamedly pro-American Iraqi freedom fighters: Chalabi, Talabani, and Barzani. Jay Garner, the retired American general Rumsfeld chose to head the civilian administration of the new Iraq, planned to capitalize on that prestige immediately by appointing all three, along with six others, to head up Iraqâs new transitional government. He planned to cede power to them in a matter of weeks â not months or years â and was confident that they would work with him, not against him, because two of them already had. General Garner, after all, is the man who headed the successful humanitarian rescue mission that saved the Kurds in the disastrous aftermath of Gulf War I, after the State Department-CIA crowd and like thinkers in the first Bush administration betrayed them. Kurds are not a small minority â and they remember. The heroâs welcome they gave General Garner when he returned to Iraq last April made that crystal clear. Finally, Secretary Rumsfeld wanted to cut way down on the infiltration of Syrian and Iranian agents and their foreign terrorist recruits, not just by trying to catch them at the border â a losing game, given the length of those borders â but by pursuing them across the border into Syria to strike hard at both the terrorists and their Syrian sponsors, a move that would have forced Iran as well as Syria to reconsider the price of trying to sabotage the reconstruction of Iraq. snip Posted by: Sherry 2004-04-30 |
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