KnightRidder: Iraq chaos a result of blinkered arrogance

"With the formal end of U.S. occupation, it's time to examine why things have gone so wrong over the past 15 months.
I've just completed my third trip to Iraq since the war, and the situation was the worst I've seen. Neither U.S. nor Iraqi intelligence has made much headway in tracking the source of the suicide bombs that paralyze Iraq's recovery. U.S. and Iraqi officials fully expect the violence to get worse as insurgents try to influence U.S. elections.
Meantime, Iraqi anger increases at the abrasions of occupation. Security is so bad that 130,000 U.S. troops will stay on indefinitely along with thousands of South African, Nepalese, and other security contractors, causing continuous friction with the Iraqi public. Only $3.7 billion of the $18 billion for reconstruction has been spent, with little trickle-down effect since most goes to huge U.S. firms. Tales of corruption and kickbacks are widespread.
What's most infuriating about this sorry state of affairs is that it is the direct outcome of the arrogant and blinkered policies of the Bush team.
Top administration officials now express their shock, their astonishment, that the insurgency is so strong and Iraq's infrastructure so broken. But prewar warnings of postwar violence and disrepair were legion, from generals, Iraq experts, the State Department and CIA. Bush officials didn't want to listen. So they were totally unprepared for what came after the war.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told me that postwar Iraq would resemble post-World War II France. He expected the London opposition - headed by Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi - to come back and establish a democracy. Like De Gaulle. He believed the likelihood of postwar violence was virtually nil.
In a whitewash of history, Wolfowitz told the House Armed Service Committee last week: "Contrary to what I see over and over again in the newspapers, Chalabi was not a favorite of the Pentagon." Excuse me? The Pentagon airlifted Chalabi into southern Iraq early in the war along with his private militia. In the spring of 2003 the Pentagon assigned a senior civilian staffer named Harold Rhode as full time liaison to Chalabi; Rhode lived at Chalabi's headquarters and berated journalists who wrote unfavorably about the Pentagon's man in Baghdad.
Why does this matter now? Because the expectation that liberation would be easy, a la Chalabi, meant the Pentagon never prepared for occupation. The consequences of that blindness are being felt now.
The disarray we see today was shaped by the Pentagon's initial errors. The first 30 days of any occupation are critical, according to Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, former commander of the 101st Airborne in Mosul. He was sent back Baghdad this month by President Bush to try to reshape Iraq's hapless security forces at the 11th hour.
From his experience in Bosnia and elsewhere, Petraeus developed a strategy for postwar planning. In Mosul, Petraeus trained new Iraqi security forces and established stability in those first 30 days, and he used Iraqis (not big U.S. contractors) to rehab factories and infrastructure. The Petraeus model brought relative calm to Mosul while he was there.
But in Baghdad, the Pentagon-led occupation did no such thing. Looting and mayhem in Baghdad were left unchecked and infrastructure ruined so badly that much remains unrepaired today. The looters - including thousands of criminals released from Saddam's jails - have formed a mafia that helps the insurgency. But at the time, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld mocked those who called on him to intervene.
And in the biggest mistake of all, Pentagon planners ensured that Iraqis would be unprepared to fight. Ignoring State Department warnings, they abolished the Iraqi army in May of 2003. And they deliberately chose not to train new Iraqi forces to combat a domestic insurgency. That would not be necessary, I was told by a top occupation official in Baghdad last October, because the United States could handle the problem.
So removed from reality was the Pentagon that it sent tens of thousands of U.S. reservists to Iraq without adequate body armor or armored vehicles. They weren't expected to face combat. Tell that to the widows.
And so we find ourselves today with an insurgency raging and Iraqis untrained to take it on. But instead of admitting to error, Wolfowitz extols the coalition's "flexibility" because U.S. officials are belatedly retraining Iraqi security forces.
What he doesn't say is that time is running out. Iraq is not occupied Japan or Germany, which had no choice but to accept the U.S. presence. No Arab Muslim country can long endure Western military occupation. Iraq's best hope is that Petraeus can work miracles and retrain Iraqis quickly, and that new Prime Minister Iyad Allawi can motivate them to fight the bombers in their midst.
No thanks is due the Bush administration for "flexibility." Chalk up the dispatch of Petraeus to belated realism brought on by a pending presidential election.
Did I say realism? Wolfowitz last week blamed the Iraq bad news on cowardly journalists who "sit in Baghdad and publish rumors."
When the secretary leaves his security bubble and visits the mosques and markets of Baghdad and beyond - as journalists do daily - he might finally learn something. But that won't relieve him of responsibility for the needless deaths of Iraqis and Americans."