Posted on 03/13/2006 8:30:48 PM PST by jmc1969
Senior British diplomatic and military staff gave Tony Blair explicit warnings three years ago that the US was disastrously mishandling the occupation of Iraq, according to leaked memos.
John Sawers, Mr Blair's envoy in Baghdad in the aftermath of the invasion, sent a series of confidential memos to Downing Street in May and June 2003 cataloguing US failures. With unusual frankness, he described the US postwar administration, led by the retired general Jay Garner, as "an unbelievable mess" and said "Garner and his top team of 60-year-old retired generals" were "well-meaning but out of their depth".
That assessment is reinforced by Major General Albert Whitley, the most senior British officer with the US land forces. Gen Whitley, in another memo later that summer, expressed alarm that the US-British coalition was in danger of losing the peace. "We may have been seduced into something we might be inclined to regret. Is strategic failure a possibility? The answer has to be 'yes'," he concluded.
The British memos identified a series of US failures that contained the seeds of the present insurgency and anarchy.
Mr Sawers, in a memo titled Iraq: What's Going Wrong, written on May 11, four days after he had arrived in Baghdad, is uncompromising about the US administration in Baghdad. He wrote: "No leadership, no strategy, no coordination, no structure and inaccessible to ordinary Iraqis."
He said the US needed to take action in Baghdad urgently. "The clock is ticking." Sawers, who is now political director at the Foreign Office, and Gen Whitley see as one of the biggest errors a decision by Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, and General Tommy Franks, the overall US commander, to cut troops after the invasion.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
what is march 20th?
The third anniversary of the start of the war.
They must work overtime. But on this one, I have little problem. And Garner was replaced by Bremmer who goofed up a bit. We can face facts squarely. No one is perfect. But yes, as the government shall be formed soon, with the driving mission being formation of a national unity government, and the US troops and Iraqi troops continue to decimate the remaining foreign elements and the local yocals give up and start aiding the Iraqi army and US in ridden even more, obviously all is going exceedingly well in Iraq dispite the fat boys and Hakim and Iranian influences within the government. Our goals are being meet within the projected original time frames. L/MSM have to go into frenzy mode as you are very well aware.
Yeah, I'm supposed to believe assessements made by the buggery Brits that can't wipe their butts without approval from Parliment.
Ask me that question in 1789 and I'd have said these silly 13 colonies were too different, too hostile, with too many competing interests to form a nation, and that the people trying to make it happen were amateurs and incompetents. Which most of them were, after all...
All I can say is that sometimes democracy looks like this. The whole Iraq thing could fall apart tomorrow...but it hasn't yet.
People here often say that when we attack Iran we shouldn't do nation building this time around.
But, the real problem at the start of the war as I have always saw it as we didn't want to do nation building in Iraq. We wanted to take down Saddam's regime and then get out.
But, the lesson is you can't topple a regime without planning to do lots of nation building or you leave a security vaccume in its place.
The lesson for the current sitution in Iraq is the Army needs to have a monopoly over the use of military force in a state.
Well, give them credit: the British have had the Colonial Office (?) for pretty long time.
in all fairness, iraq is being held together by external political design and OIL. As an ethnic entity, Iraq would make 3 separate countries and if allowed and the oil revenue control question were not extant I bet majorites of all 3 ethnic groups would elect to separate. Honestly I see no compelling internal reason to force them to be a single country.
History will judge how creating a shiite-majority government in iraq to replace hussein works as a trade-off, particularly given the iranian nuclear program being close to fruition (months, years? who knows).
Once you get down to the hypothetical question of who will control and/or administer the oil fields, funds, etc., in a breakup then there is an entirely different element to this picture.
barf alert
"The British diplomat is particularly scathing about the US Third Infantry Division, which he describes as "a big part of the problem" in Baghdad. He accused its troops of being reluctant to leave their heavily armoured vehicles to carry out policing and cites an incident in which British Paras saw them fire three tank rounds into a building in response to harmless rifle fire."
The Guardian doing what it does best - bash US.
Why don't the Britsh Generals and diplomats talk about how they have turned Basra, their turf, over to Islamist Shiite militias who impose Sharia law at gunpoint.
No duh. That's why we booted Garner after a couple of months.
I remember listening to Naills Ferguson at this time, and reading one of his books. He was afraid because the United States had no experience in nation-building, since we traditionally avoided it like the plague.
We definitely were deceived into believing Iraq was much better off as a country than they really were.
If they want the oil to make them a living they're going to have to work together. Any one of them can screw it up for the other two and alternatively all have so far. The only time they've made a profit is when they don't. And they can't practically wipe one another out for all the noise to the contrary.
They don't have to like one another, and they won't. But the Shi'ites can prevail if they accept the rule of the Iranians, and for a hundred historical reasons they're not going to do that. The Sunni's used to rule but with the best overt help Syria can give and covert help certain Saudis can give, they're still not in the position to run a police state as they used to. The Kurds are the wild card - they've had a taste of real freedom and it simply isn't in the Kurdish nature to let that go. But they can't market the oil by themselves (and the Turks won't let them if they're allowed to interfere).
So there we go. It isn't really up to the U.S. anymore, which isn't, I think, what anyone expected but is what we've been working for. Iraq is on the cusp and they're going to choose their own fate. This is geopolitics played at a very high level and the game's still very much in flux. Fascinating stuff.
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