The author cites not a single war that has ever gone better, much less a single occupation. What a clueless, mindnumbed dolt.
There, fixed it.
Ah well, at least their delightful irony is as permanent a feature as their hubris.
The "uprising" is nothing more than the Baathist thugs deciding that they would fight a guerrilla war after the conventional battlefield showdown defeated their regular forces.
That is nothing new in military history except that the news media wants us to be defeated by it.
The author cites not a single war that has ever gone better, much less a single occupation. What a clueless, mindnumbed dolt.
"Success has a thousand fathers; failure is a orphan." If the author has defended his country's and ours' efforts in Iraq, let him claim whatever credit he likes. If not, screw him.
This makes it seem like no UN involvement was entirely our idea. But the UN was there, and scooted away, after one bombing. Subsequently they made it clear that they would NOT come back "unless the security situation improved". So speaking as if "UN involvement" was there on the table for the US to simply refuse, is highly dishonest.
You want someone to blame for no UN involvement, why not go complain to Mssrs. Chirac and Annan.
"We asked, 'What about international legitimacy?' The answer was, 'Legitimacy arises from the act of removing Saddam Hussein.' "
That's swell and everything that the Brits were concerned about "international legitimacy" whatever that is. But let's say that we had done it the British way. And BOOM we got it, we got "international legitimacy".
How exactly would that have reduced the insurgency and attack frequency? In explicit terms now. How?
Gen Garner had drawn up his plans to deal with the wrong scenario. Based on the experience of the 1991 war against Iraq, he prepared for the mass movement of refugees displaced by war - not mass looting or the wholesale collapse of government.
This criticism does seem to be valid and accords with much else that I have read.
America believed, or convinced itself, that it would inherit a working bureaucracy, and that the Iraqi armed forces would defect to its side.
Hm. I wonder who the author means by "America". I certainly never believed or convinced myself that. If you had asked me to make predictions on this subject in February of 2003 I'd have said (1) the bureaucracy will collapse and (2) much of the armed forces will go home. I'd have gotten a lot else totally wrong, mind you :-) (i.e. they'd use WMD against us) but not those two things.
US officials say the Pentagon banned Gen Garner from enlisting Thomas Warrick, a State Department official who had worked for more than a year on the "Future of Iraq project" - in which groups of exiles drew up detailed reports on a host of issues ranging from creating a new justice system to economic reform.
Interesting. And Warrick's advice (not described) would have led to an improvement because...?
Gen Garner planned to hand power to an exile-led provisional government in June last year. But he was abruptly replaced by President George W Bush because of the chaos in Baghdad, and within Gen Garner's own staff.
Ah. What might have been. Yes, good thing Bush replaced Garner, to stave off all the chaos.
Paul Bremer, a former diplomat with links to the Republican party, was brought in as a political heavyweight. Mr Bremer took all power into his own hands, ruling that the exiles were "not representative of the Iraqi people". Within days of his arrival, the UN Security Council adopted a resolution recognising America and Britain as "occupying powers".
Weird sequence of events here. So the UNSC started purring once Bremer got in there and Garner got out.
The difference seems to be that Garner was going to stick with the exile government. These UN types really have it in for those exiles, don't they?
Inspired by the example of America's occupation of Germany and Japan, one of Mr Bremer's first and most controversial decisions was formally to disband all Saddam-era security forces, and to ban tens of thousands of the most senior Ba'ath party members from government jobs.
Still haven't made up my mind what to think about that decision. Doesn't help that administration critics were criticizing Bush for keeping Baathists around and then (later) criticizing him for disbanding them....
Having resisted the idea of handing power to Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi National Congress leader whom they distrusted, the British now worried about the occupation lasting too long.
Thanks a lot Brits. So you resist handing power quickly to the INC, then you gripe that the occupation "lasts too long". Well, who do you have to blame? This anti-Chalabi sentiment is really strong.
One said: "We might have had an interim government a year ago if they had listened to us and brought the UN in from the start."
Or if they hadn't resisted Chalabi.
"August 27 2003
After the terror attacks of August, the car-bombing of the Jordanian embassy, the blowing up of the oil pipeline to Turkey and the water main in Baghdad, and the truck-bombing of the U.N. headquarters, it is clear that Iraq's fate rests with the Iraqi people.
If 25 million Iraqis are not willing to fight for a democratic future, 139,000 U.S. soldiers cannot win it for them. If President Bush cannot persuade Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds to enlist in this guerrilla war – which is about their future, not ours – he should start bringing the troops home now."
THE UN RAN