by Barbara Ferguson
WASHINGTON: A new report by Army historians levels tough, candid criticism against Pentagon leadership for its failure to plan beyond the initial invasion of Iraq.
“On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign” – which outlines the 18 months following the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime – says too much focus was placed on a military victory, and not enough on post-war planning, due in part to optimism by the White House and the Pentagon that civilian agencies would take care much of the country’s post war rebuilding.
“In many ways, ‘On Point II’ is a book the Army did not expect to write because numerous observers, military leaders, and government officials believed, in the euphoria of early April 2003, that US objectives had been achieved and military forces could quickly redeploy out of Iraq. Clearly, those hopes were premature,” the report says in its introduction.
The story of the American occupation of Iraq has been the subject of numerous books, studies and memories, but now the Army has entered the highly charged debate with this 696-page detailed account.
The unclassified study, the second volume in a continuing history of the Iraq conflict, is an attempt by the Army to tell the story of one of the most contentious periods in its history to military experts – and to itself.
The “On Point” report carries the imprimatur of the Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth.
The study is based on 200 interviews conducted by military historians and includes long quotations for active or recently retired Army officers.
The significant problem, the study says, was the lack of detailed plans before the war for the postwar phase of the conflict, a deficiency that reflected the general optimism in the White House and in the Pentagon, led by then secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, about Iraq’s future, and the assumption that civilian agencies would assume much of the burden.
Another problem was linked to the basic assumption that tied the military’s planning was that Iraq’s ministries and institutions would continue to function even after Hussein’s government was toppled.
“We had the wrong assumption and therefore we had the wrong plan to put into play,” said Gen. William Wallace, who led the V Corps during the invasion and currently heads the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, so Army units were forced to adapt.
But organizational decisions made in May and June 2003 complicated that task as Paul Bremer, who replaced Gen. Jay Garner as the chief civilian administrator in Iraq, issued decrees to disband the Iraqi army, and ban thousands of former Ba’athists from working for the Iraqi government, orders that the study asserts caught U.S. field commanders “off guard” and “created a pool of disaffected and unemployed Sunni Arabs” that the insurgency could use.
It cites an incident where Gen. Tommy Franks surprised supervisors by restructuring the Baghdad-based command shortly after the invasion and saying that major fighting was over.
“The move was sudden and caught most of the senior commanders in Iraq unaware,” the report states. It also said the staff for the new headquarters was not initially “configured for the types of responsibilities it received,” and could be changed “at the snap of your fingers.”
In other criticism of the planning effort, the report says: “The transition to a new campaign was not well thought out, planned for, and prepared for before it began.”
“Additionally, the assumptions about the nature of post-Saddam Iraq on which the transition was planned proved to be largely incorrect,” it states.
The study describes defense chiefs in Washington as ambivalent from the start about a “ponderous, troop-heavy, logistics intensive and costly” ongoing campaign to restore stability. “The (department of defense) did commit resources to the planning of post-invasion operations,” it says. “In retrospect, however, the overall effort appears to have been disjointed and, at times, poorly coordinated, perhaps reflecting the department’s ambivalence towards nation-building.”
A hotly contested debate continues to rage over blame for Iraq’s sustained bloodletting. Britain’s former chief of general staff, Sir Mike Jackson, suggested in his memoirs last year that Rumsfeld’s “intellectually bankrupt” management undermined post-war planning by the State Department.
Colleagues of Rumsfeld, such as his former under-secretary Douglas Feith, have suggested that the Pentagon was let down by poor intelligence from the CIA. Since standing down in 2006, Rumsfeld has been working on a book of his own.
Col. Thomas Torrance, commander of an artillery division, told the authors: “I can remember asking the question during our war gaming and the development of the plan, ‘OK, we are in Baghdad. What next?’ No real good answers came forth.”