Saturday, April 19, 2008

NDU report on the Iraq War debacle

A recently-released paper released by the National Defense University, Choosing War: The Decision to Invade Iraq and Its Aftermath by Joseph Collins (April 2008). It was reported in Pentagon institute calls Iraq war 'a major debacle' with outcome 'in doubt' by Jonathan Landay and John Walcott, McClatchy Newspapers 04/17/08.

Juan Cole quoted this portion of the report:

The report said that the United States has suffered serious political costs, with its standing in the world seriously diminished. Moreover, operations in Iraq have diverted "manpower, materiel and the attention of decision-makers" from "all other efforts in the war on terror" and severely strained the U.S. armed forces.

"Compounding all of these problems, our efforts there (in Iraq) were designed to enhance U.S. national security, but they have become, at least temporarily, an incubator for terrorism and have emboldened Iran to expand its influence throughout the Middle East," the report continued.
TPM Muckraker also featured a story on it. Mother Jones' MoJo blog also highlighted it.

Now, it's true and notable that the military colleges strive for academic quality and therefore wind up producing some excellent work that by no means always agrees with the official government position of the moment. Papers like this one by Collins are not official endorsed by the university. But they are part of the academic environment which generates critical thinking and examination of military operations and doctrines. It may seem surprising to those not familiar with this background that a paper published by the NDU might be very critical of the current administration's policy.

But in this case, it may be that the paper in question is less than meets the eye. In his introductory summary, Collins writes:

As this case study is being written, despite impressive progress in security during the surge, the outcome of the war is in doubt. Strong majorities of both Iraqis and Americans favor some sort of U.S. withdrawal. Intelligence analysts, however, remind us that the only thing worse than an Iraq with an American army may be an Iraq after the rapid withdrawal of that army. The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq’s future stability said that a rapid withdrawal "almost certainly would lead to a significant increase in the scale and scope of sectarian conflict in Iraq, intensify Sunni resistance to the Iraqi government, and have adverse consequences for national reconciliation." The NIE goes on to say that neighboring countries might intervene, resulting in massive casualties and refugee flows. No one has calculated the psychopolitical impact of a perceived defeat on the U.S. reputation for power or the future of the overall war on terror. For many analysts (including this one), Iraq remains a "must win" ... (my emphasis)
Since Gen. Petraeus' testimony to Congress last fall, it's been common for war supporters to admit that things went badly up until The Surge. He goes on to refer to "the obvious progress under General David Petraeus and the surge".

To be fair to Collins, his paper is not an overall evaluation of the Iraq War. In fact, its focus is on the decision-making leading up to war and how decision-making for the occupation was affected. He summarizes his conclusion at the end as follows:

[T]he war in Iraq and its aftermath have exposed a flawed decisionmaking process and weak decision execution mechanisms. In planning for and executing operations in Iraq, basic organizations, organizational cultures, operational procedures, and legislative support systems all have been found wanting and in need of fundamental reform. Our National Security Council staff, Cabinet departments, and especially our Congress have not yet adapted to the demanding requirements of 21st-century complex contingencies. One hopes that, for all of its problems, the decision to invade Iraq and subsequent operations there may point the way to national security reform. (my emphasis)
Given his findings that decision-making systems in our national security institutions are so badly deficient, one wonders how he could look with optimism on the continuation of a counterinsurgency war for years into the future.

I highlighted his comment "especially our Congress" there because it's a sign of his very conventional assumptions about the use of Executive power in matters of war and peace.

In general, his review of the prewar decision-making process not only doesn't offer much fresh insight. It's surprisingly reticent about some well-established problems. The most surprising is his insistence, which is in line with the Cheney-Bush and Republican positions, that there is no good evidence of administration doctoring of intelligence. The falsehoods about WMDs were all the fault of those deficient intelligence agencies, just like the neocons say, according to his findings:

On the eve of the 2003 war, all disputes on such details as aluminum tubes and uranium oxide from Niger aside, most international intelligence agencies believed, as did former President Clinton, that Saddam still possessed a major chemical weapons stockpile, a significant missile force, and active R&D programs for biological and nuclear weapons. I find nothing in credible sources to support the notion that the WMD threat was concocted by U.S. Government officials and then sold to a gullible public, nor do I believe that any one Iraqi source tricked us into our beliefs. No special offices within OSD or cabals of neoconservatives created the dominant perception of the danger of Iraqi WMD. We now know that there were many holes in our knowledge base, but senior officials and analysts were almost universally united in their core beliefs.
The "lie factories" in the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President (OVP) are well-documented. The intense bureaucratic warfare waged by Cheney and Rummy to get the most dubious, fake intelligence claims into Bush's speeches and the public discussions of the war are also well-documented in what's in the public record at this point. Collins' conclusion essentially brushes all that evidence aside. His conclusion on this point is just not credible.

His position on the connections between Saddam's regime and terrorism also wouldn't much bother the editors at the neocon Weekly Standard. He essentially swallows the prewar administration claims about the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK)and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. I wonder if it's registered with him that the US is also using MEK in anti-Iranian activities. He even pulls in the Clinton administration's belief that "Saddam had tried to assassinate the elder President Bush", not bothering to note that this was in 1993, and the accuracy of those reports has never been convincingly established in the public record in any case. Saddam was a bad man and a tyrant. But there is no evidence that he was sponsoring anti-American terrorism prior to the US invasion in 2003.

The worst part of Collins' account on Saddam and terrorism is his statement, "The vast majority of Bush administration officials did not believe that Saddam had anything to do with 9/11". Since the October 2002 Congressional war resolution authorized war on Iraq only if it were demonstrated that Saddam was involved in anti-American terrorism including the 9/11 attacks, that may be the most striking statement in Collins' paper. If he realizes that he's saying the administration had good reason to believe they were violating the Congressional war resolution on that point, he doesn't specify it. On the two main requirements of the war resolution, dealing with Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction" and his sponsorship of anti-American terrorism, Collins essentially makes a case for the administration's position, as noted above.

His account of the decision-making process is obviously seriously marred by his dismissal of the neocon hyping of phony and exaggerated intelligence claims. He also doesn't bring forward anything particularly notable in either facts or analysis in that regard. Rummy pictured the Afghanistan War as a model for the Iraq War and insisted on keeping the troop number low for the Iraq invasion. The generals recommended more troops at various times but eventually agreed on the war plans. Cheney and Rummy were buddies and collaborated closely. Cheney and the OVP had unprecedented power in this administration.

All those are well-known. But even in dealing with such well-established factual matters, his treatment is sometimes surprisingly weak. For instance, he writes:

For their part, the Joint Chiefs of Staff—statutory military advisors to the Secretary of Defense, the President, and the National Security Council - also met with the President twice on the war plan, the last time in January 2003 - in this author’s assessment, around the time that the President finally decided in his own mind to go to war. (my emphasis)
He was careful enough to qualify that point by specifying he's judging what Bush had decided "in his own mind". But in a study focusing on decision-making, it seems to me that this is the most important decision of all. But he doesn't explain his thinking on this. The "Downing Street memo" indicates that Bush had made a clear decision to attack Iraq by July 2002 at the latest, a piece of evidence he doesn't mention. And there are indications that it was even earlier. A difference of seven months in the key decision-point is a matter of some significance for a study that focuses on prewar decision-making.

He also states that the perception that Iraq was hiding WMDs and related programs "was aided and abetted by Saddam himself, who wanted the great powers and his hostile neighbors to believe that he had WMD programs and stockpiles." But he doesn't explain how that squares with the fact that from the time Saddam agreed to admit UN inspectors in November 2002, he was saying publicly and consistency that he had no WMDs. I actually think the two things could go together, but it does require some explanation, and Collins doesn't provide it. (UN lead inspector Hans Blix addresses that point in his 2004 book Disarming Iraq.)

This is also a remarkable statement by Collins: "When in the following month [mid January 2003 to mid-February 2003] UN inspections came to naught, the die was cast for war without the public blessing of most key U.S. allies or the UN Security Council." Actually, the UN inspections were proceeding well up until the time Bush warned that they had to be pulled out prior to the invasion. They "came to naught" in terms of findings WMD stockpiles because the WMDs weren't there. Making the statement even more strange, if he believes Bush decided in January that he was going to war, wasn't the "die ... cast for war" in January, not February? For that matter, exactly what was it that happened in mid-February that cast that die for war that wouldn't be initiated for another full month?

His section on "Errors in Decision-Making and Execution" begins on p. 16 of the paper (p. 28 on the PDF file). Collins leans toward the idea that a rapid transition from an occupation regime to an Iraqi regime would have greatly improved the situation:

Still, psychologically, a rapid, even if partial, turnover of power to an Iraqi entity would have helped to preserve the coalition’s image as a liberator and made it harder for insurgents and al Qaeda terrorists to win over adherents. In Afghanistan, the presence of an interim government from the start and the absence of a foreign occupation have made a huge difference on the ground in that nation’s foreign affairs and in the perceived international legitimacy of the enterprise. The cases of Iraq and Afghanistan were different, but judging from Afghanistan, some sort of Iraqi authority could have been useful and would probably have greatly helped our policy.
In other words, he thinks that would have worked because its claimed to have worked in Afghanistan. A questionable assumption, but he leaves the assumption vague. Worse, he seems to assume that the process was entirely an American choice. Ali Sistani, the most influential Shi'a cleric, successfully rejected viceroy Paul Bremer's initial scheme for putting in an Iraqi regime and capitulated to Sistani's demand for elections. Collins' suggestion is vague enough that one can't say its impossible. But it's too vague to see how it was feasible, as well.

His list of faulty assumptions is a decent one, but nothing particularly new or insightful. And he doesn't give any clear conclusions about how decision-making went so wrong. Taking note of numerous pre-invasion warnings about the problems the US eventually encountered, he writes, "Why senior decisionmakers did not fully integrate these warnings into postwar planning is puzzling." He proceeds to offers some speculative reasons (or excuses):

Perhaps the most senior officials were concerned that too much overt attention to the postwar phase might dampen congressional ardor for the war. Perhaps they were too busy, or the details of these studies or estimates were lost in the cloud of static that surrounds them. Perhaps, having other future operations on their mind, they did not want to maintain a major troop presence in Iraq. In the end, whether due to faulty intelligence or personal preferences, most senior national security officials behaved as if they had internalized the core assumption: the war would be hard, the peace relatively easy, and the occupation short and inexpensive. (my emphasis)
Perhaps they were too busy?

Here we see a basic problem of Collins' paper. He brushes aside the evidence of bad faith acts in the lead-up to the war and is left "puzzled" at how the administration and the military could screw things up this badly. "Perhaps they were too busy"? Good grief!

We don't need a perhaps to know that many of the major players in the Executive decision-making for the Iraq War were arrogant, ideologically dogmatic, dishonest, and incompetent. Without taking account of those factors, it does wind up just being "puzzling", I guess. "Perhaps they were too busy".

Collins has a number of suggestions for various bureaucratic improvements in interagency cooperation and war planning. This kind of organizational change is an ongoing process and such measures are needed to minimize mistakes. Even with a disaster like the Iraq War - maybe especially in such a disaster - there are lessons to be learned about many things and the military tries to institutionalize the process of learning such lessons. And, no surprise, he recommends spending more money and loosening restrictions on the military doing what it wants in counterinsurgency wars.

But on the larger picture, no organizational tinkering is going to prevent an unchecked Executive operating on Cheney's "unitary Executive" theory of absolute power over national security matters, dominated by an authoritarian-minded political party, and determined to wage wars of aggression from doing enormous damage.

And we'll never be able to understand how the Iraq War happened if we assume good faith on the part of all the major players.

Tags: ,

No comments: