In Iraq, It's Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't

Jun 18, 07:27 PM

Current Headlines: Iraq is on the brink of a genocidal civil war, says the man who led the initial US effort to reconstruct Iraq after the war.

Stabilizing Iraq could take as long as a decade, says the present US commander in Baghdad.

"A mixed picture, but certainly not a hopeless one", is how the US ambassador to Iraq describes the situation.

Do these remarks make Iraq a failure? And will the efforts of the US and the Iraqi government to restore peace and bring democracy to the people bear fruit? Only if the US changes course and allows a three-way federal structure, says Jay Garner, the former US general appointed two months before the invasion to head reconstruction in Iraq. Or else, the Iraqi government will fall apart. Garner has also urged talks with Iran and other regional players.

But even if the Iraqi government doesn't fall apart, General David Petraeus says it could take as long as 10 years to stabilize the country. "In fact, typically, I think historically, counter- insurgency operations have gone at least nine or 10 years. The question is, of course, at what level."

Petraeus' comments came on the eve of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's meeting with Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari in Washington yesterday. Insurgents pushing back on newly aggressive coalition military forces have led to continued violence in Iraq, says the general, describing an ebb-and-flow of sectarian killings in Baghdad.

"The fact is that as we go on the offensive, the enemy is going to respond," he says. "That is what has happened." He describes a "stunning reversal" in Anbar province, a former Al-Qaida stronghold west of the city where tribes have begun to help fight the terror organization.

A Pentagon report released last week concluded that violence in Iraq edged higher during a four-month period between February and May - despite the US-led security push in Baghdad. It raised questions about Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's ability to fulfill a pledge made in January to prohibit political interference in security operations and to allow no safe havens for sectarian militias.

But Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador in Baghdad, is not as pessimistic. Iraq is "a mixed picture, but certainly not a hopeless one", he says. He has seen frustrations among signs of progress, and has cautioned against withdrawing troops too soon.

Also a day before Rice's meeting with Zebari, the Senate's top Republican said the Iraqis need to step up their own efforts as the US scales back troops in the wake of rising violence in and around Baghdad. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky expressed disappointment with the Iraqi government's progress in stemming violence, and said the US presence there "will be different in the fall".

"I don't think we'll have the same level of troops, in all likelihood, that we have now," McConnell said. "The Iraqis will have to step up, not only on the political side, but on the military side (as well) to a greater extent. We're not there forever."

Petraeus' comments came on Fox News Sunday, while Crocker was interviewed from Baghdad on NBC's Meet the Press. McConnell appeared on CBS' Face the Nation.

Congress is waiting for another progress report, due in September, on whether the increase in US troops in Iraq has been successful.

In an interview in Newsweek, Al-Maliki avoided being drawn into the debate between the Bush administration and Congress. The US "helped us by toppling the regime and accomplishing many steps of the political process but they still can leave," Al-Maliki said. "If the consequences of staying are bigger than the consequences of leaving, they will leave."

But there has to be proper coordination in the US administration to decide that. And if Jay Garner is to be believed, even before the 2003 war, coordination between the various US departments and military had been disjointed. Donald Rumsfeld, then defense secretary, prevented Thomas Warrick, the US state department official in charge of post-war planning, from joining his team, Garner says. He was shocked by the Pentagon's decision then to reduce troop levels and disband the Iraqi army.

"The problem from my standpoint within the US was that there had been a lot of planning done by each element... by the CIA, the state department, the treasury department, defense department," Garner has told the Future of Iraq Commission.

"But the problem with that planning is that it had been done in the vertical stovepipe of that agency and the horizontal connection of those plans did not occur".

The Guardian disclosed, in an interview on Saturday, that Andrew Bearpark, the British director of operations for the body that took over from Garner, the Coalition Provisional Authority, discovered the plan to boost Iraq's post-war electricity production ran to just one page. He has said those who failed to plan for the post-war period were guilty of "criminal irresponsibility".

In a Channel 4 documentary to be screened later this week, Tony Blair's foreign policy advisor David Manning admits he does not know why more was not done to plan for the war's aftermath.

He says: "Well it's hard to know exactly what happened over the post-war planning. I can only say that I remember the prime minister raising this many months before the war began. He was very exercised about it.... But it isn't a question I find easy to answer."

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, a former British ambassador to the UN, tells the program that Blair was tearing his hair out asking: "What are the Americans up to?"

Garner, too, concedes he spent two frantic days in February 2003 trying to find out what post-war plans existed, and how they related to one another.

He says: "I asked Tom Warrick... to join our organization which he did the following Monday, and then about Thursday of that week I was told to remove him from the organization. So I argued with that. I told Secretary Rumsfeld I didn't want to do that. I went to see Stephen Hadley, the number two at the National Security Council and said I don't want to do that but I was told I had to."

Garner admits to not having seen several of the plans prepared by the Bush administration and does not know why. He says that he rang Rumsfeld to tell him to stop reducing US troop deployment and warn him that the consequent power vacuums were filling up with "fundamentalists".

And he admits to being stunned by the decision in mid-May 2003 to disband the Iraqi army, saying that at one stroke it created a 200,000-strong armed opposition.

The Guardian and Agencies

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