Harlan Cleveland: Postwar Planning ... Too Little, too Late
“The ambitious plans that the president announced to transform American defense proved to be at odds with his bold plan to transform a region.”
“The violent chaos that followed Saddam’s defeat was not a matter of not having a plan but of adhering too rigidly to the wrong one.”
These nuggets of practical wisdom are among many to be found in Cobra II, the inside story of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, published earlier this year. It’s written by Michael R. Gordon, chief military correspondent for The New York Times, and Bernard E. Trainor, a Marine Corps lieutenant general who “retired” twenty years ago and has since been a productive military analyst at the Times, at Harvard’s JFK School of Government, and most recently for NBC and PBS television. (Disclosure: Gen. Trainor is my neighbor at Falcons Landing, our retirement community in Sterling, VA.)
Their story, a sober and well-written indictment, comes in five fascinating counts: the misreading of the foe (for example: “the CIA in particular was not only wrong on WMD, but failed to identify the importance of the Fedayeen [guerillas] or to uncover the tons of arms that had been cached in the cities and towns of southern Iraq”); an overreliance on technology; the failure to adapt to what happened in the early battles; the “dysfunction of American military structures” (the Joint Chiefs of Staff “were pushed to the margins,” Donald Rumsfeld insisted on a “hopeful and unrealistic plan,” Colin Powell was “the odd man out”); and “the Bush administration’s disdain for nation-building.”
I’ll comment here on only a small fraction of this story — the confusion about postwar planning in Iraq. (I had a much earlier, yet eerily comparable, experience as a civilian executive of the Allied Control Commission, the military government of Italy in World War II. Instructed by Roosevelt and Churchill “to give Italy back to the Italians” just as soon as possible, we managed to get that mostly done even before V-E Day 1945. Then with a massive aid program — three shiploads a day - that morphed into a huge UN relief and rehabilitation effort, we jump-started Italy’s rapid postwar economic recovery.)
The Cobra II authors’ summary comment on U.S. plans for invading and occupying Iraq is succinct, and devastating: “The war planning took about eighteen months. The postwar planning began in earnest only a couple of months before the invasion. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Tommy Franks [the theatre commander, at CENTCOM] spent most of their time and energy on the least demanding task - defeating Saddam’s weakened conventional forces - and the least amount on the most demanding - rehabilitation of and security for the new Iraq.”
A good deal of early postwar planning had been done, in the State and Justice Departments. But it was jettisoned when the postwar task was entrusted to the Pentagon. As soon as Baghdad “fell” in April 2003, the instructions from on high to the military commanders who had won the war were clear: “prepare to pull out within sixty days. New units would arrive to help stabilize the country but most would stay no longer than 120 days. . . . expect some form of functioning Iraqi government in thirty to sixty days.”
The forlorn hope underlying this extraordinary miscalculation was that, as soon as the “war” was over, U.S. allies who had been opposed to or ambivalent about the invasion would be promptly inspired to provide forces to handle the “post-war.” That didn’t happen. The few units that did come to help were small and came slowly, their reluctance reflected in their cautious rules of engagement.
When Baghdad was (more or less) conquered, the postwar planning unit, headed by a retired general, Jay Garner, was still in Kuwait. It had been planning for humanitarian aid and the handling of a massive flow of refugees that never happened.
According to plan, “the team of postwar advisers and administrators were not to arrive until sixty days after the war.” In an interview Condoleezza Rice, then the president’s National Security Advisor, explains: “The concept was that we would defeat the army, but the institutions would hold, everything from ministries to police forces. You would be able to bring new leadership but we were going to keep the body in place.”
Garner managed to get his team up to Baghdad by April 18. But he soon found that the ministries had been “ransacked and looted;” communications were “in shambles;” the police had “abandoned their posts” and their police stations had been “picked clean.” An earlier proposal by the State and Justice Departments for a minimal 5,000-man police unit to be sent to Iraq had been turned aside by Defense and the White House in the hope that others - the allies, the Iraqis - would do the heavy lifting once the war was “over.” They wouldn’t - and of course the war wasn’t “over,” either.
So postwar planning started all over again. Gen. Garner was supplanted by Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, a senior foreign service officer with no prior experience in the Middle East, who became head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). One of his first moves, to assure “unity of command,” was to persuade President Bush to rule off the course an Arabic-speaking presidential envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, who had been assigned to talk with Iraqi political leaders about arranging a new government.
Cobra II picks up the story: “Khalilzad learned he had been excluded just minutes before Bremer’s appointment was announced on May 6. At the State Department, Colin Powell was stunned by the decision . . . . The matter had never been discussed in interagency meetings. Powell called Rice and asked for an explanation. Khalilzad, Powell said, was the only guy who knew the Iraqi players well and who was regarded by them as a trusted representative of the White House. Rice replied that she had nothing to do with the move. Here was another example,” the authors add, “of how the national security apparatus was sidestepped.”
It was far from the only example. The biggest decision on Bremer’s watch was the formal abolition of the Iraqi army, the Defense Ministry, and Iraq’s intelligence services. CPA’s Order No. 2, “The Dissolution of Entities,” was issued without consulting the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the president’s national security advisor - who later told author Gordon it was intended that “some of these decisions could be made in the field.” But the net effect of having too few American troops in Iraq and having no Iraqi forces to work with right away, created “a much larger security vacuum.”
Starting from scratch, the Coalition Provisional Authority did manage to cobble together an interim government, and formally turn over sovereignty to it, after a dramatic and busy year that Paul Bremer has chronicled in another 2006 book, My Year in Iraq. Zalmay Khalilzad was thereafter reincarnated, as U.S. Ambassador to Iraq.
This story, like the war, is not yet “over.” To finish their book on an appropriately indecisive note, the authors of Cobra II quote Richard Armitage, who was Colin Powell’s top deputy at the State Department. He was back from a fact-finding mission to Iraq, and gave his “unvarnished assessment” to the National Security Council in November 2004.
” ‘We are not winning,’ Armitage stated. The president seemed taken aback.
” ‘Are we losing?’ Bush asked.
“Armitage’s reply was not reassuring: ‘Not yet.’ “
Read entire article at International Leadership Forum
“The violent chaos that followed Saddam’s defeat was not a matter of not having a plan but of adhering too rigidly to the wrong one.”
These nuggets of practical wisdom are among many to be found in Cobra II, the inside story of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, published earlier this year. It’s written by Michael R. Gordon, chief military correspondent for The New York Times, and Bernard E. Trainor, a Marine Corps lieutenant general who “retired” twenty years ago and has since been a productive military analyst at the Times, at Harvard’s JFK School of Government, and most recently for NBC and PBS television. (Disclosure: Gen. Trainor is my neighbor at Falcons Landing, our retirement community in Sterling, VA.)
Their story, a sober and well-written indictment, comes in five fascinating counts: the misreading of the foe (for example: “the CIA in particular was not only wrong on WMD, but failed to identify the importance of the Fedayeen [guerillas] or to uncover the tons of arms that had been cached in the cities and towns of southern Iraq”); an overreliance on technology; the failure to adapt to what happened in the early battles; the “dysfunction of American military structures” (the Joint Chiefs of Staff “were pushed to the margins,” Donald Rumsfeld insisted on a “hopeful and unrealistic plan,” Colin Powell was “the odd man out”); and “the Bush administration’s disdain for nation-building.”
I’ll comment here on only a small fraction of this story — the confusion about postwar planning in Iraq. (I had a much earlier, yet eerily comparable, experience as a civilian executive of the Allied Control Commission, the military government of Italy in World War II. Instructed by Roosevelt and Churchill “to give Italy back to the Italians” just as soon as possible, we managed to get that mostly done even before V-E Day 1945. Then with a massive aid program — three shiploads a day - that morphed into a huge UN relief and rehabilitation effort, we jump-started Italy’s rapid postwar economic recovery.)
The Cobra II authors’ summary comment on U.S. plans for invading and occupying Iraq is succinct, and devastating: “The war planning took about eighteen months. The postwar planning began in earnest only a couple of months before the invasion. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Tommy Franks [the theatre commander, at CENTCOM] spent most of their time and energy on the least demanding task - defeating Saddam’s weakened conventional forces - and the least amount on the most demanding - rehabilitation of and security for the new Iraq.”
A good deal of early postwar planning had been done, in the State and Justice Departments. But it was jettisoned when the postwar task was entrusted to the Pentagon. As soon as Baghdad “fell” in April 2003, the instructions from on high to the military commanders who had won the war were clear: “prepare to pull out within sixty days. New units would arrive to help stabilize the country but most would stay no longer than 120 days. . . . expect some form of functioning Iraqi government in thirty to sixty days.”
The forlorn hope underlying this extraordinary miscalculation was that, as soon as the “war” was over, U.S. allies who had been opposed to or ambivalent about the invasion would be promptly inspired to provide forces to handle the “post-war.” That didn’t happen. The few units that did come to help were small and came slowly, their reluctance reflected in their cautious rules of engagement.
When Baghdad was (more or less) conquered, the postwar planning unit, headed by a retired general, Jay Garner, was still in Kuwait. It had been planning for humanitarian aid and the handling of a massive flow of refugees that never happened.
According to plan, “the team of postwar advisers and administrators were not to arrive until sixty days after the war.” In an interview Condoleezza Rice, then the president’s National Security Advisor, explains: “The concept was that we would defeat the army, but the institutions would hold, everything from ministries to police forces. You would be able to bring new leadership but we were going to keep the body in place.”
Garner managed to get his team up to Baghdad by April 18. But he soon found that the ministries had been “ransacked and looted;” communications were “in shambles;” the police had “abandoned their posts” and their police stations had been “picked clean.” An earlier proposal by the State and Justice Departments for a minimal 5,000-man police unit to be sent to Iraq had been turned aside by Defense and the White House in the hope that others - the allies, the Iraqis - would do the heavy lifting once the war was “over.” They wouldn’t - and of course the war wasn’t “over,” either.
So postwar planning started all over again. Gen. Garner was supplanted by Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, a senior foreign service officer with no prior experience in the Middle East, who became head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). One of his first moves, to assure “unity of command,” was to persuade President Bush to rule off the course an Arabic-speaking presidential envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, who had been assigned to talk with Iraqi political leaders about arranging a new government.
Cobra II picks up the story: “Khalilzad learned he had been excluded just minutes before Bremer’s appointment was announced on May 6. At the State Department, Colin Powell was stunned by the decision . . . . The matter had never been discussed in interagency meetings. Powell called Rice and asked for an explanation. Khalilzad, Powell said, was the only guy who knew the Iraqi players well and who was regarded by them as a trusted representative of the White House. Rice replied that she had nothing to do with the move. Here was another example,” the authors add, “of how the national security apparatus was sidestepped.”
It was far from the only example. The biggest decision on Bremer’s watch was the formal abolition of the Iraqi army, the Defense Ministry, and Iraq’s intelligence services. CPA’s Order No. 2, “The Dissolution of Entities,” was issued without consulting the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the president’s national security advisor - who later told author Gordon it was intended that “some of these decisions could be made in the field.” But the net effect of having too few American troops in Iraq and having no Iraqi forces to work with right away, created “a much larger security vacuum.”
Starting from scratch, the Coalition Provisional Authority did manage to cobble together an interim government, and formally turn over sovereignty to it, after a dramatic and busy year that Paul Bremer has chronicled in another 2006 book, My Year in Iraq. Zalmay Khalilzad was thereafter reincarnated, as U.S. Ambassador to Iraq.
This story, like the war, is not yet “over.” To finish their book on an appropriately indecisive note, the authors of Cobra II quote Richard Armitage, who was Colin Powell’s top deputy at the State Department. He was back from a fact-finding mission to Iraq, and gave his “unvarnished assessment” to the National Security Council in November 2004.
” ‘We are not winning,’ Armitage stated. The president seemed taken aback.
” ‘Are we losing?’ Bush asked.
“Armitage’s reply was not reassuring: ‘Not yet.’ “