Was it really just two weeks ago that administration and military leaders were crowing about the
great results of Saddam's capture?
Guerrilla attacks on the 150,000 U.S.-led coalition soldiers in Iraq have dropped sharply since the Dec. 13 capture of Saddam Hussein, and the number of troops killed and wounded has fallen as well.
The figures appear to show the capture of Saddam has taken some of the sting out of the Iraqi insurgency. That's because more Iraqis are willing to provide intelligence on the insurgency, confident that Saddam will not return to power to persecute them.
"The information we're receiving from those who are no longer fearful is helping us in our raids," said Lt. Col. Dan Williams, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad. "The information is leading us right to them."
Such boastful claims. So, so wrong.
January tunred out to be the second-deadliest month since "major combat operations" ceased, to be replaced with -- our troops in the field were glad to hear it -- "minor" combat operations. We lost 45 soldiers to Bush's folly, and the Brits another five. 196 US soldiers were wounded.
And the situation on the ground is going from bad to worse. Over 200 were killed or wounded earlier today when suicide bombers attacked the headquarters of the two largest Kurdish parties. The attacks also killed top-ranking Kurdish officials. Over 600 Iraqi policemen have been killed since April. Who knows how many civilians are dead.
Meanwhile, the Shiites continue to bide their time, pushing for free elections even as the US fights back, knowing that such elections would hand the country to the Shiites to the consternation (and probable armed resistance) of the Sunnis and Kurds.
As Iraq burns, we must ask ourselves why Bush was so desperate to go in? Despite desperate attempts to change the rationale to humanitarian grounds, the obvious reason for war was WMD, and their imminent threat to the U.S. and its allies. Nevermind our allies didn't seem as concerned -- their intelligence services simply didn't grasp the severity of the threat.
Ours did. Or maybe it didn't. So Rumsfeld created a brand new intelligence agency in the bowels of the Pentagon to rubber stamp the administration's anti-Iraq rhetoric. As the Washington Post wrote way back in October of 2002:
At a news conference yesterday, Rumsfeld denied suggestions that the initiative was meant to compete with the CIA or other intelligence agencies. He said it was intended simply to assist policymakers in assessing the intelligence they receive.
"Any suggestion that it's an intelligence-gathering activity or an intelligence unit of some sort, I think would be a misunderstanding of it," Rumsfeld said.
But the effort comes against a backdrop of persistent differences between the Pentagon and CIA over assessments of Iraq. Rumsfeld and senior aides have argued that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has strong links to international terrorism, poses an imminent threat and cannot be constrained from eventually unleashing weapons of mass destruction. The CIA's publicly released reports have painted a murkier view of Iraq's links to al Qaeda, its weapons capabilities and the likelihood that Hussein would use chemical or biological weapons unless attacked.
"The Pentagon is setting up the capability to assess information on Iraq in areas that in the past might have been the realm of the agency," said Reuel Gerecht, a former CIA case officer who has met with the people in the new Pentagon office. "They don't think the product they receive from the agency is always what it should be."
So despite the anti-CIA cacophony we are hearing from the Right, the CIA never claimed Iraq had ties to terrorists, or had WMDs posing a threat to the US or its allies. Everyone may have thought Iraq had some mustard gass lying around from its Iraq/Iran War days, but that's a far cry from any "
imminent" threat.
And regardless of how we got in, how do you excuse this level of mismanagement and lack of planning?
The limits of future knowledge, Feith said, were of special importance to Rumsfeld, "who is death to predictions." "His big strategic theme is uncertainty," Feith said. "The need to deal strategically with uncertainty. The inability to predict the future. The limits on our knowledge and the limits on our intelligence."
In practice, Feith said, this meant being ready for whatever proved to be the situation in postwar Iraq. "You will not find a single piece of paper ... If anybody ever went through all of our records--and someday some people will, presumably--nobody will find a single piece of paper that says, 'Mr. Secretary or Mr. President, let us tell you what postwar Iraq is going to look like, and here is what we need plans for.' If you tried that, you would get thrown out of Rumsfeld's office so fast--if you ever went in there and said, 'Let me tell you what something's going to look like in the future,' you wouldn't get to your next sentence!"
Let that sink in for a moment -- according to Rumsfeld, if you can't predict the future, then don't bother planning for the possibilities.
So why are our men and women dying in Iraq? Because of Bush's irrational obsession with taking out Saddam. Because of lies of WMDs. Because of an administration that didn't feel compelled to plan for a difficult post-war governance. Incompetence all around.
It's breathtaking, and given the results, heartbreaking.
