General Sir Mike Says U.S. Fouled Up in Iraq

What? Yet another general has added his voice to the crew who have taken the Cheney-Bush regime to task for botching postwar operations in Iraq? Yep. This time, it's not American generals like Wes Clark, Greg Newbold, Paul Eaton, John Riggs, Paul Van Riper, Charles Swannack or John Batiste doing the pounding. It's "Macho Jacko," General Sir Michael Jackson, who ran the British Army in March 2003 when Iraq was invaded. He retired last year and began writing an autobiography, Soldier, which is being serialized in Britain's Daily Telegraph. (Hat tip to Magnifico.)

^{General Sir Mike Jackson}

According to the Telegraph's story:

His attack - the first time he has revealed the depth of his anger towards the US administration - highlights the deep-seated tension between the British command and the Pentagon during the build-up to and the aftermath of the Iraq campaign in 2003.

Sir Mike, who took command of the British Army one month before US-led forces invaded Iraq, said Mr Rumsfeld was "one of those most responsible for the current situation in Iraq".

Crucially, the general writes, he refused to deploy enough troops to maintain law and order after the collapse of Saddam's regime, and discarded detailed plans for the post-conflict administration of Iraq that had been drawn up by the US State Department.

In the book, Sir Mike says he believes the entire US approach to tackling global terrorism is "inadequate" because it relies too heavily on military power at the expense of nation-building and diplomacy.

OK. Fine. All well and good. Certainly the Rumsfeld Pentagon, the White House and all their NeoCon "philosophers" deserve to be hammered for ineptitude, which they possess deep and wide. But this critique has been done multiple times before. See, for just one instance, Thomas Ricks's Fiasco.

Like so many other highly placed critics of U.S. Iraq policy, General Sir Mike is all over "incompetence" but has too little to say about how this war got concocted in the first place (although he concedes that he didn't much buy the weapons-of-mass-destruction dossier when it appeared in 2002).

While considerable worth comes from picking apart every reckless, prideful operational stupidity that went into making Iraq the debacle that it is, unless this kind of assessment is combined with a more comprehensive critique, all we're left with are the sordid details, which, by themselves, distort the big picture.  

As I and others have been saying for several years now, if the themes of "mistake" and "incompetence" are allowed sole rule over the story of what happened in Iraq, our children and grandchildren will be reading textbooks in the coming decades that take no notice of the underpinnings of this unnecessary, unjust, atrocity-ridden, greed-driven war and occupation. They will be taught simply that the whole affair was badly handled, not that it was villainously fabricated.

As in the case of Vietnam, the Iraq debacle was not some foreign policy boo-boo. It's a mistake to keep calling it a mistake. We lessen our already-scarce opportunities for preventing future wars if it all gets chalked up to incompetence instead of what it really was.