Rumsfeld’s War, Powell’s Occupation

The latest post-hoc conventional wisdom on Iraq is that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld won the war but lost the occupation.

There are two problems with this analysis (which comes, most forcefully, from The Weekly Standard).

Second, although it's painfully obvious that much is wrong with this occupation, it's simple-minded to assume that more troops will fix it.

More troops may be needed now, but more of the same will not do the job. Something different is needed — and was, right from the start.

Rumsfeld wanted to put an Iraqi face on everything at the outset — not just on the occupation of Iraq, but on its liberation too. That would have made a world of difference.

Rumsfeld's plan was to train and equip — and then transport to Iraq — some 10,000 Shia and Sunni freedom fighters led by Shia exile leader Ahmed Chalabi and his cohorts in the INC, the multi-ethnic anti-Saddam coalition he created.

There, they would have joined with thousands of experienced Kurdish freedom fighters, ably led, politically and militarily, by Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani.

Working with our special forces, this trio would have sprung into action at the start of the war, striking from the north, helping to drive Baathist thugs from power, and joining Coalition forces in the liberation of Baghdad.

That would have put a proud, victorious, multi-ethnic Iraqi face on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and it would have given enormous prestige to three stubbornly independent and unashamedly pro-American Iraqi freedom fighters: Chalabi, Talabani, and Barzani.

Jay Garner, the retired American general Rumsfeld chose to head the civilian administration of the new Iraq, planned to capitalize on that prestige immediately by appointing all three, along with six others, to head up Iraq's new transitional government.

He planned to cede power to them in a matter of weeks — not months or years — and was confident that they would work with him, not against him, because two of them already had.

General Garner, after all, is the man who headed the successful humanitarian rescue mission that saved the Kurds in the disastrous aftermath of Gulf War I, after the State Department-CIA crowd and like thinkers in the first Bush administration betrayed them.

Kurds are not a small minority — and they remember. The hero's welcome they gave General Garner when he returned to Iraq last April made that crystal clear.

Finally, Secretary Rumsfeld wanted to cut way down on the infiltration of Syrian and Iranian agents and their foreign terrorist recruits, not just by trying to catch them at the border — a losing game, given the length of those borders — but by pursuing them across the border into Syria to strike hard at both the terrorists and their Syrian sponsors, a move that would have forced Iran as well as Syria to reconsider the price of trying to sabotage the reconstruction of Iraq.

None of this happened, however, because State and CIA fought against Rumsfeld's plans every step of the way.

Instead of bringing a liberating Shia and Sunni force of 10,000 to Iraq, the Pentagon was only allowed to fly in a few hundred INC men.

General Garner was unceremoniously dumped after only three weeks on the job, and permission for our military to pursue infiltrators across the border into Syria was denied.

General Garner was replaced by L. Paul Bremer, a State Department man who kept most of the power in his own hands and diluted what little power Chalabi, Talabani, and Barzani had by appointing not six but 22 other Iraqis to share power with them.

This resulted in a rapidly rotating 25-man queen-for-a-day-type leadership that turned the Iraqi Governing Council into a faceless mass, leaving Bremer's face as the only one most Iraqis saw.

By including fence-sitters and hostile elements as well as American friends in his big, unwieldy IGC and giving them all equal weight, Bremer hoped to display a kind of inclusive, above-it-all neutrality that would win over hostile segments of Iraqi society and convince them that a fully representative Iraqi democracy would emerge.

Many saw a foreign occupation of potentially endless length, led by the sort of Americans who can't be trusted to back up their friends or punish their enemies.

Iraqis saw, too, that Syria and Iran had no and were busily entrenching their agents and terrorist recruits into Iraqi society to organize, fund, and equip Sunni bitter-enders like those now terrorizing Fallujah and Shiite thugs like Moqtada al Sadr, the man who is holding hostage the holy city of Najaf.

Despite all the crippling disadvantages it labored under, Bremer's IGC managed to do some genuine good by writing a worthy constitution, but the inability of this group to govern-period, let alone in time for the promised June 30 handover — finally became so clear that Bremer and his backers at State and the CIA were forced to recognize it.

Their last minute "solution" is to dump the Governing Council altogether, and give U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's special envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, the power to appoint a new interim government.

The hope is that U.N. sponsorship will do two big things: 1) give the Brahimi government greater legitimacy in the eyes of the Iraqi people; and 2) convince former allies to join us and reinforce our troops in Iraq in some significant way.

Putting a U.N. stamp on an Iraqi government will delegitimize it in the eyes of most Iraqis and do great damage to those who are actively striving to create a freer, more progressive Middle East.

Iraqis may distrust us, but they have good reason to despise the U.N., and they do.

For 30 years, the U.N. ignored their torments and embraced their tormentor, focusing obsessively on a handful of Palestinians instead.

Then, when Saddam's misrule reduced them to begging for food and medicine, they saw U.N. fat cats rip off the Oil-for-Food Program money that was supposed to save them.

The U.N. as a whole is bad; Lakhdar Brahimi is worse. A long-time Algerian and Arab League diplomat, he is the very embodiment of all the destructive old policies foisted on the U.N. by unreformed Arab tyrants, and he lost no time in making that plain.

In his first press conferences, he emphasized three points: Chalabi, Talabani, and Barzani will have no place in a government he appoints; he will condemn American military action to restore order in Iraq; and he will be an energetic promoter of the old Arab excuses — Israel's "poison in the region," he announced, is the reason it's so hard to create a viable Iraqi interim government.

Men like Chalabi, Talabani, and Barzani have nothing but contempt for Mr. Brahimi, the U.N., and old Europe.

They know perfectly well who their real enemies are, and they understand that only decisive military action against them can create the kind of order that is a necessary precondition for freedom and democracy.

They see, as our State Department Arabists do not, that we will never be loved, in Iraq or anywhere else in the Middle East, until we are respected, and that the month we have wasted negotiating with the butchers of Fallujah has earned us only contempt, frightening our friends and encouraging our mortal enemies.

The damage Brahimi will do to the hope of a new day in Iraq and in the Middle East is so profound that it would not be worth it even if empowering him would bring in a division of French troops to reinforce ours in Iraq.

Behind all the bluster and moral preening, the plain truth is that the French have starved their military to feed their bloated, top-heavy welfare state for decades.

They couldn't send a division like the one the Brits sent, even if they wanted to (they don't).

Belgium doesn't want to help us either, nor Spain, nor Russia, because these countries are not interested in fighting to create a new Middle East.

They're fighting to make the most advantageous deals they can with the old Middle East, seeking to gain advantages at our expense, and at the expense of the oppressed in Iraq, Iran, and every other Middle Eastern country where people are struggling to throw off the shackles of Islamofascist oppression.

It is not yet too late for us to recognize these facts and act on them by dismissing Brahimi, putting Secretary Rumsfeld and our Iraqi friends fully in charge at last, and unleashing our Marines to make an example of Fallujah.

And when al Jazeera screams "massacre," instead of cringing and apologizing, we need to stand tall and proud and tell the world: Lynch mobs like the one that slaughtered four Americans will not be tolerated.

Order will restored, and Iraqis who side with us will be protected and rewarded.

"WHY???" ~ Ernest_at_the_Beach

The State Department’s War With the White House
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1125170/posts

“The State Department is in Kerry pre-inauguration mode,” a senior Bush administration official tells NewsMax, warning that the department’s bureaucracy is desperate to get President Bush out of the White House.

How desperate?

Well, last year the State Department invited billionaire financier George Soros, President Bush’s archenemy, to be its keynote speaker at an internal program known as “The Secretary’s Open Forum.”

Soros is giving tens of millions of dollars to a shadowy network of 527 organizations to help defeat Bush. After GOP senators got wind of the invitation, the department played down the Soros event but did not cancel it.

Controversy over Bob Woodward’s new book, as well as claims that Secretary of State Colin Powell has been frozen out of major policy decisions over Iraq, have obscured the enormous clout the entrenched State Department bureaucracy still wields and how ardently it wants to help defeat President Bush this November.

Though Powell has been described as the ultimate “good soldier” – disagreeing in private but supporting the president and his policies in public – he has left the State Department bureaucracy on automatic, without any check on its efforts to undermine the White House.

Please Don’t Betray Me

Even President Bush has made light of the problem, according to our source, telling political appointments he made to the State Department, “Don’t go native on me over there.”

On major issues a deep divide remains between the White House and bureaucrats at Foggy Bottom, including:

Weapons of Mass Destruction: The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) has been at the forefront challenging the administration’s claims to have had legitimate intelligence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. INR is believed to be the source of leaks intended to counter administration claims.

Senior Bush officials have seen so many obvious INR leaks published in the New York Times, it has becoming a running joke that some INR analysts must have Times reporters on their speed dials.

Some INR bureaucrats in this supposedly objective “intelligence organization” make no bones about their dislike for the Bush White House, and have posted demeaning cartoons about the president in their offices.

INR is a media favorite among the agencies that complete the U.S. intelligence community.

See No Evil

As one official put it: “[INR] never sees any evil and objected to all WMD findings against Iraq. It also objected to WMD findings against Iran, Cuba and North Korea.”

INR reflects the perennial liberalism of the State Department and its close ties with the Democratic Party.

INR is viewed as so clearly biased that even liberal experts are reluctant to cite it. For example, Ken Pollack, a former Clinton National Security Council official, noted in January’s Atlantic Monthly that INR is not taken seriously in Washington because it makes knee-jerk objections to everything and even disputed Iraqi WMD findings before the first Iraq war. [ See: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/int2004-01-13.htm ]

Syria: Related to the WMD controversy is Syria’s involvement in those weapons.

Though some U.S. intelligence and Israeli sources have evidence that Saddam’s regime moved its WMDs to Syria shortly before the U.S. invasion in March 2003, the State Department has opposed making any public charges against Syria.

North Korea: Administration officials such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were outraged when State Department officials kept from them vital information about North Korea’s atomic weapons program.

In April 2003, the North Koreans told a U.S. government delegation in Beijing, “[A]s we had previously told you in New York, we have finished reprocessing all 8,000 of our plutonium fuel rods.”

The North Korean statement floored the Bush administration because the State Department had kept these revelations from the White House National Security Council and the Pentagon.

Because of this and other acts of defiance, decision-making on North Korean matters has been removed from the State Department.

Still, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and State’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs are pushing for a quick Clinton-style deal with North Korea that would get a promise on paper from the communist regime, with no full verification clauses.

Libya: The White House was so fearful the State Department would “mess up the Libya account,” our source says, that the White House was placed in charge of the developing detente between Col. Moammar Gadhafi and the U.S.

Even so, the administration has had its hands tied.

Our administration source says the White House is salivating for a second term to clean house at the State Department.

At the same time, State bureaucrats are dragging their feet on Bush’s initiatives, hoping to hold out until a Kerry administration.

For the moment Powell has enormous public, media and congressional support, and any effort by the White House to seek his early departure would not be smart politically. But the administration knows it has its hands tied because it cannot implement policy.

Powell has resisted many Bush political appointees suggested for State, and has sharply limited the number of political appointees that the president can make as ambassadors.

Additionally, early in the administration, Condoleezza Rice, the president’s national security adviser, agreed to fill many of the top positions in the White House’s National Security Council with State Department career foreign service officers and career federal appointees, many of whom were promoted during the Clinton years.

Richard Clarke was just one of many such pro-Clinton bureaucrats who came to fill out the Bush administration’s national security team.

‘Strategic Error’

“It was a strategic error,” Dr. Constantine Menges said of the Bush administration’s decision to keep so many State Department officials and Clinton holdovers at the NSC.

State’s agenda is often at odds with the president’s, confirmed Menges, who served on President Reagan’s NSC as Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and who authored “Inside the National Security Council.”

“It is a mistake to appoint career State Department foreign service officers to virtually all the senior regional positions in the NSC, as was done by Dr. Rice,” Dr. Menges said. “The president needs to have independent advice about international affairs and also about what is happening within the administration from competent foreign policy experts of his own party.”

The decision to populate the senior NSC staff with so many State Department officials, Menges argued, “created ‘two State Departments,’ and that does not provide any president with the range of information and ideas he needs.”

But a second may bring significant changes, an administration source tells NewsMax.

Powell’s retirement in the event of Bush’s re-election, which has long been rumored, is a certainty, Parade magazine reported Sunday.

Its selection as Powell’s most likely replacement: Condoleezza Rice.

This was Bush I's Bay of Pigs: a craven act through and through. He, once he passes from this earth, along w/JFK, Johnson and Carter should be exhumed yearly, and beaten w/their own bones sometime close to the Fourth of July.

Kurds are not a small minority — and they remember. The hero's welcome they gave General Garner when he returned to Iraq last April made that crystal clear.

The Kurds love of this man was written all over their faces and plain for all the world to see, upon Garner's arrival in Iraq.

Rumsfeld has about 50 IQ points on Colin Powell. Along w/that contrast Powell's procliivity to play the Media Whore, and Rumsfeld's procilivity to tell it like it is, and leave the
ass-sniffing to generals like the General.

How is it possible that GW, after exhibiting enormous foresight (sp?) finds himself in this unenviable position?

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