Getting it wrong

Hilariously, the Washington Post has been running a series of opinion pieces in which leading neocons weasel and whine about their roles in the Iraq fuckup. Latest to lie through his teeth is Paul Bremer. The piece is called "What we got right in Iraq", but it's not, as you might have expected, a blank page.

Bremer says:

Looking for a neat, simple explanation for our current problems in Iraq, pundits argue that these two steps alienated the formerly ruling Sunnis, created a pool of angry rebels-in-waiting and sparked the insurgency that's raging today. The conventional wisdom is as firm here as it gets. It's also dead wrong.

But we are not looking for a simple explanation at all. We already have one. Our current problems in Iraq stem from one huge mistake: invading in the first place. Following that up by empowering Viceroy Coco the Clown just compounded teh stupid.

Bremer compares Saddam with Hitler, particularly unconvincingly; a comparison that does him no favours, because the occupation of Germany was well handled, and its army was reformed rather than disbanded.

Bremer claims that he had no choice but to rid Iraq of Saddam's security services to give it a chance of a bright future. Well, that worked. In the sense that disbanding the Metropolitan police would make London a harmonious place to live. And worse than that, of course, because one would not be sacking thousands of men with guns, and presenting them with no prospect of work.

Bremer suggests that deBaathification was essential. To some extent, this is probably true, although Hussein was a cult leader much more so than simply the figurehead of a vicious movement. The Baath party were simply Sunni Arab nationalists. Bremer overstates their influence (and lies about history more than once), particularly making far too much of their pervasiveness. Lots of people were communists in Russia, but that doesn't mean they were all involved in heinous breaches of human rights, nor does it mean that it would have been a good idea had everyone in the CP been punished when communism collapsed.

Arguably, what Iraq needed was South Africa-style reconciliation, not a post-WWII-style purge. Fair trials for the worst, yes, and a public accounting, yes, but going further than that almost certainly was a mistake, for the simple reason that whereas the Nazis shared a nationality with nonNazis, Baathists are almost all Sunnis.

Bremer says:

Our goal was to rid the Iraqi government of the small group of true believers at the top of the party, not to harass rank-and-file Sunnis.

But that is not how his actions appeared to the Iraqi people. Particularly not when he

turned over the implementation of this carefully focused policy to Iraq's politicians

by which one should read "Iraq's Shiite majority politicians". Who were, as Bremer, notes, enthusiastic supporters of deBaathification. And of militias that began executing Baathists, which -- and Bremer even noted the pervasiveness of Baathism -- meant most Sunnis.

Having accepted that he got deBaathification practically wrong, although he doesn't accept that there was a conceptual problem with entirely disempowering an ethnic group in the way he did (much more radically than he claims), he goes on to lie about history a little to smear the Baathists:

It's somewhat surprising at this late date to have to remind people of the old army's reign of terror. In the 1980s, it waged a genocidal war against Iraq's minority Kurds

This is thoroughly untrue. Iraq fought a war with Iran in the 1980s, which the Kurds involved themselves in. The Kurds saw a chance to push for autonomy and took it. Whether nations have a right to defend themselves against secession and if so, what lengths are reasonable to go to in that defence are difficult questions to answer. I'm not an apologist for Saddam, but I don't think this is clearcut. And we are not invading Turkey, which has also been fighting its Kurds for many years, using weapons we have sold them, so I find it hard to believe we had much concern for the Kurds, or even do today.

killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians

Absolutely not. It is a common, ridiculous neocon lie that Saddam was a top-league mass-murderer. It's simply echoing lies that were spread before the war, the tittletattle of those with reason to want Saddam removed.

Kurd civilians were killed, but not hundreds of thousands. Again, I am not an apologist for Saddam but I do not think we are well served by lies.

and more than 5,000 people in a notorious chemical-weapons attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja.

Both sides in the Iran-Iraq war used chemical weapons. It is entirely abhorrent but this was not out of the usual. There is considerable confusion over what actually happened, but it seems that the Iraqis attacked Iranian units in Halabja with chems. The number of civilians killed is not known.

Iraqi government documents found since the war have confirmed that Saddam authorised gas attacks against military units, and Saddam was delighted to take responsibility. No documents show that he authorised their use against civilians.

When condemning the Iraqis for using chemical weapons (which I unreservedly do, and I would gladly have seen Saddam tried for it), we should recall that the United States has used them on several occasions in Iraq. It has also used huge fuel-air bombs, which destroy and kill indiscriminately, and of course it has quite wilfully murdered many thousands of civilians.

Furthermore, we sold Saddam the technology. We knew he was dangerously unstable, and we knew he would likely use his chems against Iran. We didn't mind that. We didn't mind his attacking the Kurds either, because Turkey is much more important to us strategically than a bunch of nobodies living in the hills.

After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Iraq's majority Shiites rose up against Hussein, whose army machine-gunned hundreds of thousands of men, women and children and threw their corpses into mass graves.

This is also not true. No mass graves on this scale have been found, and very few Iraqis are prepared to say that these massacres happened. Yes, there was a revolt. Yes, people were killed. But again, no one is well served by simply lying about the numbers.

Bremer continues to lie:

Moreover, any thought of using the old army was undercut by conditions on the ground. Before the 2003 war, the army had consisted of about 315,000 miserable draftees, almost all Shiite, serving under a largely Sunni officer corps of about 80,000.

This is not quite true. You can figure out for yourself how likely an army with one officer for every four men is, and how likely an army with absolutely no noncommissioned regulars is.

The Shiite conscripts were regularly brutalized and abused by their Sunni officers.

But they were paid.

When the draftees saw which way the war was going, they deserted and, like their officers, went back home. But before the soldiers left, they looted the army's bases right down to the foundations.

In truth, the soldiers were in their homes, having read American leaflets that told them that if they stayed home, they would not be targets. The American administrators had believed that they would actually stay in their garrisons -- effectively guarding them -- but they did not, and the barracks and, importantly, ammo dumps were thoroughly looted.

So by the time I arrived in Iraq, there was no Iraqi army to disband.

This simply is not true, and it's astonishing that Bremer would lie so. The army may not have been in the field, but we had its lists, and had we recalled it, the army could easily have been re-formed.

Disbanding the army sent out a signal to the Iraqis. In plain terms, the message was "You're fucked". We took away any semblance of security, and put many thousands of armed men out of work.

Some in the U.S. military and the CIA's Baghdad station suggested that we try to recall Hussein's army.

Because the military and the CIA are not stuffed full of political appointees, they still had people who could think.

We refused, for overwhelming practical, political and military reasons.

Which you will have to try not to laugh when you read them.

For starters, the draftees were hardly going to return voluntarily to the army they so loathed

No, they'd much prefer to be unemployed.

we would have had to send U.S. troops into Shiite villages to force them back at gunpoint.

This is just ridiculous. You have to remind yourself that Bremer did not even try to recall the army, so this is just so much bullshit. The likelihood is that simply reforming the officer corps would have made the idea of return much more palatable. The Iraqis, it should be noted, were furious that the Americans did this. The Americans were seen as vindictive, dishonourable.

And even if we could have assembled a few all-Sunni units, the looting would have meant they'd have no gear or bases.

Bremer tries to have it both ways: earlier he claimed that the soldiers looted their own barracks; now he claims they would not have any equipment because of the looting. However, much of the looting happened after his order to disband the army, as people realised that they could simply help themselves to anything that wasn't nailed down.

Moreover, the political consequences of recalling the army would have been catastrophic. Kurdish leaders made it clear to me that recalling Hussein-era forces would make their region secede, which would have triggered a civil war and tempted Turkey and Iran to invade Iraq to prevent the establishment of an independent Kurdistan.

This is total bullshit. It's impossible to believe that the Kurds said any such thing. They had already gained an autonomous, mostly peaceful region. They may have liked to see the hated Iraqi army humbled, but they are not stupid.

Many Shiite leaders who were cooperating with the U.S.-led forces would have taken up arms against us if we'd called back the perpetrators of the southern killing fields of 1991.

Name them. I mean, really. No one was going to be upset by maintaining security except those with something to benefit from chaos. But deep in here lays a kernel of truth.

What did Bremer do when he took power? He picked sides. We picked sides. We sided with the Shiites and allowed the Sunnis to suffer. So what is he saying here? Some of the people on our side, arseholes to the man, didn't want us to stand in the way of their punishment of the Sunni minority. Of course they didn't want the army recalled. They didn't want the Sunnis to have jobs and they didn't have any use for security. And still don't. The likes of Maliki, Chalabi, Talabani, al-Sadr, these men do not want a secure, stable Iraq. They want chaos, in which they and their buddies can enrich themselves, and in which they can carve out petty fiefdoms. The new tribal Iraq suits these men fine.

Finally, neither the U.S.-led coalition nor the Iraqis could have relied on the allegiance of a recalled army.

Bremer forgets that these are "the Iraqis". He means that they would not necessarily have been personally loyal to the Shiite strongmen we backed. But why should this have been a policy goal of ours? And why should it have been a concern? All that really would have mattered would have been that Iraq was reasonably secure, so that reconstruction could proceed.

Bremer talks about the Fallujah Brigade, recalled by the Marines, but later disbanded. What he does not mention is that the Marines did not so much recall an Iraqi army brigade as form a brigade out of the people it had just been fighting! Furthermore, he does not mention that the Marine commander of the attack on Fallujah a/ did not want to attack Fallujah (Bremer ordered him to), b/ did not want to leave Fallujah before finishing the job (Bremer ordered him out) and c/ did not want to arm the Fallujah Brigade but was ordered to do it. Arming former insurgents is not what we mean by recalling the army, of course.

Eventually, Bremer accepted that he had badly fucked up, and tried to create a new army. But the genie was out of the bottle by then. The Americans were not trusted, and many of the Sunnis who might have helped secure Iraq had joined in the civil war that is making it hell.

posted by Dr Zen @ 3:29 pm