Text 12849, 119 rader
Skriven 2005-05-20 16:12:21 av Alan Hess
     Kommentar till en text av Ed Connell
Ärende: Re: Cannes
==================
Whilst masticating on <May 17 05>, Ed Connell (1:379/1.6)
wrote to Jeff Binkley:

EC> Here's a column by Ann Coulter.  I'm really getting to like her 
EC> work.  Just the right amount of jocularity as Father Mukahee used 
EC> to say. ==========================================

EC> EVER HAVE ONE OF THOSE MILLENNIA?
EC> by Ann Coulter
EC> May 11, 2005

EC> It's always important to get liberals to stop complaining long 
EC> enough to make a hard prediction. This week we will review 
EC> liberal predictions on bringing democracy to Iraq.
EC> When they weren't claiming the Iraq elections would not take 
EC> place at all - and, even if they did, the people wouldn't 
EC> participate - liberals were telling us that if we let those crazy 
EC> Arabs vote, the Iraqi people would elect extremist Islamic 
EC> mullahs hostile to the United States. Well, the Iraq National 
EC> Assembly completed filling out the cabinet this week, and it can 
EC> now be said that this was liberals' laughably wrong prediction 
EC> No. 9,856. (Or No. 9,857 if you count their predictions of 
EC> ruinous global cooling back in the 1970s, which I don't because 
EC> that could still happen.)

And here's a column from Trudy Rubin, who sees things differently than Ms.
Coulter:


http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.rubin20may20,1,849924.sto
ry?coll=bal-oped-headlines
Analyze mistakes that led to Iraq mess


By Trudy Rubin

May 20, 2005

PHILADELPHIA - If you want to understand why things are going so badly in Iraq,
read the profile of Douglas Feith, the No. 3 man at the Pentagon, in the May 9
issue of The New Yorker.

Mr. Feith, who will soon step down as undersecretary of defense for policy, was
the Pentagon's man in charge of planning for postwar Iraq. He disagrees that
the bitter Iraqi insurgency might have been preventable and denies the
administration thought the postwar would be easy. He insists that the Pentagon
foresaw the "chilling contingencies" that could follow the war.

OK. Never mind that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told me in November
2002 that he would be "astonished" if there were instability in postwar Iraq
and said the operable historical analogy would be post-World War II France.

Never mind that the State Department's useful Future of Iraq project was
shunted aside and the Pentagon's plan for administrating the postwar started
only weeks before the invasion.

Never mind that Maj. Isaiah Wilson III, the official Army historian of the Iraq
campaign, has written that the U.S. military invaded Iraq without a plan for
occupying and stabilizing the country.

Never mind that a brutal insurgency is still killing Iraqis and tying down
140,000 U.S. troops, even as it undermines the reconstruction of the country
and the newly elected Iraqi government.

If - despite all this - the Pentagon's chief planner for the postwar thinks he
was so farsighted, why is Iraq in such a mess?

The answer is crucial to understanding what can be done to improve the
situation. U.S. officials must analyze past mistakes to move forward.

Mr. Feith notes that "the Marshall Plan didn't get going until 1948" and it's
only two years since Baghdad fell, implying there is a parallel to the U.S.
occupation of Germany, where troops remain after six decades.

The parallel is false: Nazi Germany was wholly defeated by the allies; its
prostrate people had to accept U.S. occupation. Iraq's Baathists were not
wholly defeated, and U.S. policies have fueled an insurgency made up mostly of
Baathists and other disaffected Sunnis, along with radical Arab Islamists.

So what are the errors that must be corrected to stabilize Iraq and avoid
making the same mistakes elsewhere?

The original sin was the lack of U.S. preparedness to secure the country
postwar. The massive plague of postwar looting set the stage for the
insurgency: Former Baathists and Islamists saw this as the signal that the
Americans were unprepared to restore law and order.

Nation-building takes mega-manpower. There weren't enough U.S. troops then;
it's impossible to send more now.

The second major U.S. mistake was the lack of a Sunni strategy. Top U.S.
officials disbanded Iraqi security forces without pensions and pursued
large-scale de-Baathification. This alienated many Sunnis who had committed no
crimes and might have been wooed had they not lost jobs and hope.

The Bush administration belatedly recognizes this error. Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice just went to Baghdad to urge the new Shiite-led government to
reach out to Sunnis. Shiite officials and religious leaders are willing, but it
is harder now to heal the breach. The worst insurgents, Arab terrorists who
deliberately blow up civilians, are trying to provoke Shiite-Sunni civil war.

The third mistake was to misunderstand how little time they had before Iraqis
came to resent the U.S. presence. For now, Shiite leaders want U.S. troops to
stay because they have no viable army and fear a Baathist comeback. But the
U.S. presence also angers many ordinary Iraqis - killing and wounding innocents
while pursuing insurgents.

There is a limited time for U.S. troops to stabilize the country and draw down,
before they become more of a problem than an asset. While Mr. Feith writes his
memoirs, the current Bush team has to compensate for Pentagon errors. Will we
ever read about that?

Trudy Rubin is a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Her column appears
Tuesdays and Fridays in The Sun.

Copyright + 2005, The Baltimore Sun

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