Bush's blunders in Iraq
WHEN President Bush declined to answer a debate question about mistakes he made in his first term, it indicated more than a personal idiosyncracy. His unwillingness to confront past errors reflected a penchant for self-deception that has been characteristic of his administration, particularly in regard to its lethal blunders in Iraq.
A frightening example of those unacknowledged errors is the failure to prevent the theft of nearly 380 tons of powerful explosives from a well-known site in Iraq. Such blunders must be acknowledged so that similar mistakes will not be made in the future.
The three-part series published in The New York Times last week, which explored failures of planning and foresight that have led to the current plight in Iraq, performed that useful cauterizing function.
Retired military and civilian officials who served in Iraq or took part in policy making for the war and postwar period left no doubt that the administration should never have tried to secure postwar Iraq with so few troops. This was a crucial error. Senior Army generals had warned against it. They said that if the ratio of peacekeepers to populace in Kosovo were taken as a measure, more than 400,000 troops would be needed to stabilize Iraq.
The official most responsible for the refusal to commit the troops needed for postwar security in Iraq was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who kept troop levels low to demonstrate in practice his theories about streamlining the military and transforming it to fight what the Pentagon calls the network-centric warfare of the future.
Military officers who spoke to the Times made it plain there were not enough troops to police Iraq's borders or to pacify Baghdad and cities of the Sunni triangle where Ba'athists, Islamists, and criminals were able to mount what has become the current insurgency. The related failures to stop postwar looting, protect crucial infrastructure, and guard arms depots -- all these fatal mistakes may be traced back to Rumsfeld's fallacy.
Perhaps the most telling criticism came from a now-retired Army major general who was chief intelligence officer for the land-war command in 2003. James (Spider) Marks told the Times, "the insurgency was not inevitable." That insurgency was stoked by civilian administrator Paul Bremer's disastrous decision to dissolve the 350,000-man Iraqi army. The insurgents were able to coalesce and flourish because coalition forces lacked the needed human intelligence on the ground.
These failures were possible because Bush did not encourage a clash of ideas within his inner circle. Even now he refuses to acknowledge the mistakes that were made and to hold Rumsfeld and others responsible. A president who does not demand accountability discards a great advantage of democratic government. 