Posted on 11/26/2003 6:53:50 AM PST by TexKat
LONDON - The retired general who headed the first occupation government in Iraq said Wednesday the United States made major mistakes, including disbanding the Iraqi army, putting too few troops on the ground and failing to explain the goals of the war.
Jay Garner, in his most critical comments yet, said in an interview broadcast Wednesday that the series of mistakes began in April when the U.S. military did not act quickly to maintain law and order and preserve the buildings needed for the government ministries.
"If we did it over again, we probably would have put more dismounted infantrymen in Baghdad and maybe more troops there," Garner said in a British Broadcasting Corp. radio interview.
Garner admitted he had made key mistakes himself, but also criticized his successor, L. Paul Bremer, for disbanding the Iraqi army which left a large number of Iraqis jobless at a time when manpower was needed for rebuilding.
"I think it was a mistake," Garner said. "We planned ... on bringing the Iraqi army back and using them in reconstruction."
Bremer's decision to disband the Iraqi army effectively threw hundreds of thousands of breadwinners out of work and provided potential recruits for insurgency, he said. The original plan had been to pay the army to take part in reconstruction work.
"You're talking about around a million or more people ... that are suffering because the head of the household's out of work," said Garner, who arrived in Baghdad on April 21 and was replaced as head of the interim administration on May 12.
After U.S. troops swept into the capital in early April and Saddam's regime fell, looters rampaged for days, sacking businesses and government buildings. The chaos shocked many Baghdad residents, and crime remains a problem in the capital, particularly at night.
Garner said the speed of the coalition victory over Saddam Hussein's forces contributed to his administration's problems.
"I think there was a lot of thought ... on how to do postwar Iraq. I just don't think that it unfolded the way everybody expected it to unfold."
Garner said in hindsight he would have done a better job on having communications with the Iraqi people and projecting the need for more electricity. "I'd have brought in huge generators," he said.
"We should have tried to raise a government a little faster than we did."
"I think we are finally placing more trust in Iraqis, which we should have done to begin with," he said.
He also acknowledged that not enough effort was put into winning over ordinary Iraqis by getting America's message across to them after the war.
"We did a bad job of executing that. There's no excuse for that. The consequence of that is all they got to listen to was Arab-language TV station al-Jazeera," he said.
Garner also complained of bad relations between the Pentagon and State Department, saying he didn't learn of a detailed study by Secretary of State Colin Powell for post-war Iraq until just a few weeks before the war began in March.
The former lieutenant general said that after learning of the State Department plan in February he had brought in Tom Warrick, a senior planner at the State Department involved in the study. But Garner said he was forced to fire Warrick by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
"Tom was just beginning to get started with us when one day I was in the office with the secretary of defense, and he said 'Jay, have you got a guy named Warrick on your team?' I said, `yes, I do.' He said, 'well, I've got to ask you to remove him.' I said, `I don't want to remove him; he's too valuable.'
"But he said, 'This came to me from such a high level that I can't overturn it, and I've just got to ask you to remove Mr. Warrick.'"
"There's intense rivalries between all the agencies, but that didn't start with this war, that's been going on ever since we had an interagency" he said. "I mean, it's just part of Washington."
Garner rejected a suggestion that the poor communications helped strengthen opposition to the coalition presence in Iraq. Instead, he blamed hardcore supporters of Saddam's Baath party and international terrorists.
"The international war on terrorism began to be fought in Iraq," he said, with anti-American fighters coming in from other countries.
"That's not all bad," Garner said. "Bring 'em all in there, we'll kill 'em there."
I know there's a little CYA going on here, but I think mostly this article is an honest attempt to sort out how to do a better job if we ever have to do this again.
This was an historic conquest and there were few examples of how to do things right. I'm not surprised there are mistakes made and I'm not surprised it takes a few months to sort them out.
What's important is that people aren't afraid to recognize the mistakes as mistakes and correct them.
Of course if you're a Dim(bulb) Presidential Candidate then correcting a mistake must be the moral equivalent of admitting you never won the election, or some such, but who listens to them?
Shalom.
Somewhere over the imaginary rainbow is BBC's perfect little socialist utopia (not).
Jay Garner had to know what BBC would do with his comments. I'm guessing that his unedited interview is far different than either the radio show or this 'article'. Still, this dimishes the man, not the mission, imho.
Within days of his arrival in Baghdad, Bremer reversed a decision, announced by Garner only two weeks before, to put an Iraqi interim authority in place by the end of May. Overriding complaints from former Iraqi opposition leaders hoping to step quickly into positions of power, Bremer said that would be at least the middle of July, and indicated local leaders would play a greater role.
This week, Bremer decreed that as many as 30,000 top members of Hussein's Baathist Party were ineligible for government jobs, reversing initial Pentagon plans to retain high officials less tainted by ties with Hussein to aid the effort to get services quickly up and running.
This is the best justification I can think of for maintaining our presence there. Rope a dope. er, a bunch o' dopes!
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