From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (155 page)

To counter French obstructionism and an allied effort to delay war by additional inspections of Iraqi weapon sites, an agitated and increasingly impatient White House in late January assigned Powell to make the case for war. "You have the credibility to do this," Bush told him. "Maybe they'll believe you."
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Scrapping a shoddy and polemical draft prepared
in the vice president's office, Powell's aides hurriedly put together the best case they could. Although uneasy with the results and certain he was being used by the White House, the secretary played the dutiful soldier. His seventy-five-minute speech on February 5, 2003, complete with photographs, recordings, and even a small vial dramatically displayed to show how little anthrax it would take to cause enormous loss of life, warned of the "sinister nexus" between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda and detailed evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (much of it dubious and soon discredited). Powell's speech persuaded few at the UN but had a major impact in the United States, as much because of who was speaking as what was said, helping to bring some skeptics around and clinch the case for others.
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At British prime minister Tony Blair's urging, the administration in February launched a last desperate effort to secure UN support. A French veto now likely if not indeed certain, U.S. officials set out to secure nine Security Council votes for war, thus exposing France as obstructionist. They fixed a tight deadline and demanded immediate answers. "It's time for people to show their cards, let the world know where they stand when it comes to Saddam," Bush proclaimed. Competing with France for votes, U.S. officials put tremendous pressure on Chile, Mexico, and three West African nations. "What can the Americans do to us?" an African diplomat asked. "Are they going to bomb us? Invade us?"
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Nearly seven weeks of bullying and arm-twisting produced only the votes of Britain, Spain, and Bulgaria. On March 17, the United States and Britain declared the discussions ended. Two days later, President Bush announced the start of hostilities against Iraq. The United States would have its war, but without the support of close allies and the United Nations. It was a bold and risky move that would decisively affect the the Bush presidency and indeed world history.

In contrast to this inept diplomacy, Operation Iraqi Freedom proved a textbook operation, once more displaying the fearsome power of America's high-tech military machine. Washington went to great lengths to publicize the contributions of the twenty-six nations that made up its "coalition of the willing," a pointed reference to those countries who refused to fight. Aside from British operations in southern Iraq, however, it was a U.S. show. A fierce bombing campaign knocked out communications,
destroyed critical military installations, and softened up enemy forces, delivering "smart" bombs and missiles at the rate of a thousand per day.
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On March 20, U.S. Army and Marine units drove north from Kuwait along two fronts. They met only sporadic resistance from shockingly inept and demoralized Iraq forces. British troops quickly seized Basra. The first Americans reached Baghdad on April 7, less than three weeks after the war began. Four days later, Iraqis toppled Saddam's statue in Baghdad, signifying the regime's collapse. The United States suffered only 109 casualties, Britain 31. On May 10, a jubilant Bush attired in full flight regalia landed on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS
Abraham Lincoln
in San Diego Bay. Standing beneath a banner boldly proclaiming "Mission Accomplished," the commander in chief hailed the triumph of his forces.

Celebrations of victory and talk of a new U.S. imperium quickly faded amidst fears of a quagmire. The first signs of trouble came with the fall of Baghdad. Instead of sending additional troops to secure the capital, Rumsfeld and Gen. Tommy Franks canceled deployment of the First Cavalry Division. The coalition did not have enough forces to maintain order, producing an orgy of lawlessness, violence, and looting, including the theft or destruction of priceless antiquities from the national museum. While U.S. troops stood by helplessly, looters picked the city clean, even pulling the copper pipe and electrical wire out of walls. Iraqis lost faith in U.S. authority. The one protected building was the oil ministry, confirming their suspicions that the invaders were mainly interested in seizing the nation's most valuable resource. Rumsfeld's typically brusque remarks that freedom was "untidy" and "stuff happens" were as insensitive as they were irresponsible.
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The occupiers did no better at providing essential services. In Baghdad, electricity worked only several hours a day, if at all. Telephones were dead, water in short supply and unsafe, sewage ran into the rivers, and hospitals were filled with patients and short of qualified workers and medical supplies. "It would be a tragic irony," wrote
New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman, "if the greatest technological power in the history of the world came to the cradle of civilization with its revolutionary ideas and found itself defeated because it couldn't keep the electricity on."
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Anarchy evolved into sustained guerrilla opposition. Elite Republican Guard soldiers melted away and armed themselves from huge stashes of guns and ammunition systematically scattered throughout the country before the invasion. By June, the number of attacks on U.S. troops and their Iraqi collaborators increased sharply. Bush's brash reaction to the insurgency—"Bring 'em on!"—seemed as foolhardy and inflammatory as Rumsfeld's response to the looting.

A war whose first stage was fought so effectively went sour so quickly because detailed planning for military operations was not matched by equally thorough preparation for the critical postwar period. To be sure, U.S. agencies and private charitable organizations spent months in planning. Some studies predicted the likelihood of looting and even a possible insurgency. But the president assigned responsibility to the Defense Department. As a result of crippling bureaucratic rivalries, bad advice, and fantastical assumptions, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith dismissed out of hand work produced elsewhere. An especially bitter struggle between State and Defense ensured that the former's massive and in many ways prophetic study would be tossed aside. Pentagon civilians began planning late and with inadequate staff and had no time to test their ideas. The neo-cons were also hoodwinked by the artful con-man Chalabi, who fed their illusions and manipulated them to advance his own interests. They believed their own wildly optimistic rhetoric that GIs, as in World War II, would be welcomed as liberators. One official spoke of a "cakewalk." The "planners" were confident that U.S. forces could overthrow the regime, turn over the government to Iraqi exiles, and get out within three months.
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Overly optimistic assumptions and a refusal to listen to others also produced gross miscalculations of what would be required to maintain the peace. Recent experience in the Balkans stressed the importance of going in heavy and trimming down. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki insisted that several hundred thousand troops would be needed for postwar duties. Then at the height of his power and determined to validate his theories about the efficacy of small forces, Rumsfeld cut the figure in half and eased Shinseki into retirement. The coalition lacked sufficient forces to do the job.
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The U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) made three early mistakes that immeasurably worsened an already bad situation. Headed by
J. Paul "Jerry" Bremmer, a hard-driving career diplomat, the organization was filled with young, zealous Republicans, eager to spread democracy but notoriously lacking in overseas experience and knowledge of Iraq. Most served only three months.
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The CPA's de-Baathification project, designed to eradicate "Saddamism" by removing members of his ruling party, eliminated many of the people who had run the country. A decision to disband the Iraqi army and police force left thousands of soldiers and police officers angry, without employment, and
with
weapons. "That's another 350,000 Iraqis you're pissing off, and they've got guns," snorted one CIA operative.
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Bremmer's decision to delay turning over the government to Iraqis provoked more anti-Americanism and fueled the insurgency.
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By the fall of 2003, U.S. troops faced a full-fledged and increasingly lethal opposition. The number of fighters was estimated as high as ten thousand. Foolishly dismissed by Rumsfeld as "dead-enders," their ranks included not only Baathist party members and Sunni Muslims who had backed Saddam and expected to be displaced under a new regime but also disaffected Shiites, the Sunnis' bitter rivals and the majority religious group, whose support Americans had expected. Jihadists from across the world slipped into the country to join the fight. By November, attacks numbered thirty-five per day; the insurgency spread from Baghdad throughout the country. Insurgents shifted from sniper attacks on individual GIs to ambushes of entire convoys and shooting down helicopters with rocket-propelled grenades and handheld missiles. To undermine international support, they attacked other coalition members and killed the chief UN envoy. Unprepared to deal with an insurgency, the U.S. Army struck back with conventional air and ground assaults that inflicted heavy civilian casualties and infuriated the population. The widespread violence further set back already glacial progress in reconstruction. The CPA increasingly huddled behind twelve-foot concrete barriers, the so-called Green Zone, "a bit of Belfast here, a bit of Cyprus there, here and there a sprinkling of the West Bank," one journalist described it.
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United States military leaders admitted by late 2003 that they were fighting a classic guerrilla war; Rumsfeld conceded a "long, hard slog."

As the insurgency worsened, the rationale for war crumbled. No evidence was found to support administration claims of connections between
Iraq and al Qaeda. Inspectors scoured the country for weapons of mass destruction and came up with nothing. In the meantime, critics discredited evidence employed to justify the nation's first preventive war. Often-used documents provided by a shadowy source called Curveball purporting to show that Saddam had attempted to buy uranium from Niger for nuclear weapons proved fabrications. United States spokespersons now claimed that removing Saddam had eliminated a bloody tyrant and made the world safer. A once invincible administration's credibility took a beating.
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The U.S. image was further tarnished by spring 2004 revelations of abuse of enemy detainees, especially at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison. By scrapping at the start of the conflict the 1949 Geneva Conventions setting standards for treatment of prisoners of war, the Bush administration opened the way for lower-level misconduct. As in so many other areas, the army's failure resulted from a hastily improvised reaction to unexpected events. Confronting an insurgency about whose sources and scale it knew next to nothing, it dumped into prisons thousands of captives, some mainly for interrogation. In Abu Ghraib, they were supervised by a demoralized reserve military police company that had expected to be home by late 2003. The unit perpetrated rampant abuse, graphically captured in photos taken by its members. Prisoners were left naked and chained to cells, piled naked on top of each other, made to wear women's underwear, and forced to simulate sexual acts. They were tortured in interrogation. The practices at Abu Ghraib violated a long U.S. tradition of humane treatment of prisoners. The pictures created a worldwide sensation. The army conducted a perfunctory investigation and punished only low-level people. The refusal to hold any top officials accountable became a Bush administration trademark, further tainting the war. "When you lose the moral high ground, you lose it all," one army general sadly reflected.
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The insurgency grew into a complex and, to Americans, unfathomable phenomenon made up of numerous often competing groups. Baathists and Sunni Muslims who had dominated the country for years fought furiously against what they saw as a U.S. effort to impose Shiite rule. They shifted from costly direct attacks against U.S. forces to improvised explosive devices (IED), which they used with deadly effectiveness against GIs and Shiites. Shiite militias also resisted U.S. rule. Foreign jihadists established in Iraq a
new training ground for terrorism. After 2006, the insurgency was joined by rising sectarian violence. Kurds sought to create an autonomous region in the north. In Baghdad and other cities, Shiites mounted ethnic cleansing campaigns against Sunnis. The Bush administration finally admitted the existence of a civil war, but even those words did not convey the complexity of the struggle. Shiites fought each other and Sunnis; Sunnis fought the coalition and in some cases al Qaeda; the jihadists fought both. There was widespread criminal violence. A Shiite-dominated police force was infiltrated by militias who operated as death squads to force Sunnis out of Baghdad.
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An estimated two million Iraqis fled the country to escape the violence, many of them middle-class people needed to get the country in operation. As many as two million more Iraqis became internal refugees.

The United States could not contain the rising violence or build a stable government. Saddam Hussein was finally captured in late 2003, tried by an Iraqi court, and later executed. The CPA nominally turned over the government to Iraqis in the summer of 2004. Elections were held, a National Assembly convened, a constitution drafted and approved, and a parliament established. But the new government was riddled with corruption and could not bring the disparate factions together or curb the violence. Iraqi troops remained untrained and generally unreliable and often participated in sectarian violence themselves.

Public support for the war at home began to decline in the spring of 2004 following the Abu Ghraib revelations and fierce fighting across Iraq. The drop occurred faster than in Korea and Vietnam, although the casualties were far fewer, mainly because Americans saw less at stake in Iraq than in these earlier wars. Once Saddam's weapons of mass destruction were not found, the ostensible reason for war evaporated. United States citizens were not enthused about spending blood and treasure to bring democracy to Iraq, the administration's public fallback rationale and the real reason for war in the minds of certain top officials.
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By August 2007, three of four expressed pessimism about the conflict, six in ten believed the United States should have stayed out of Iraq, and only 23 percent approved Bush's handling of the war.