latest report on Iraq

(full .pdf report here) Here is a piece from Salon.com covering the report, which was compiled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a non-partisan think tank in Washington. If you’re not familiar with CSIS, they produce very good work. I read their publications regularly. (an excerpt from the Salon article)

"Denial as a method of warfare" A new report offers scathing criticism of America's strategy in Iraq. - - - - - - - - - - - -

By Dan Glaister Dec. 23, 2004 America's handling of the occupation of Iraq came in for scathing criticism Wednesday, with government officials accused of living in a "fantasyland" and failing to learn from mistakes made in Vietnam. A report issued by the independent Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington charged that the occupation had been handled by "ideologues" in the Bush administration who consistently underestimated the scale of the problems they were facing and that this had contributed to a culture in which facts were willfully misrepresented. The report lists a litany of errors on the part of the United States. "Their strategic assessments of Iraq were wrong," it says. "They were fundamentally wrong about how the Iraqi people would view the United States invasion. They were wrong about the problems in establishing effective governance, and they underestimated the difficulties in creating a new government that was legitimate in Iraqi eyes.

"They greatly exaggerated the relevance and influence of Iraqi exiles, and greatly underestimated the scale of Iraq's economic, ethnic, and demographic problems."

The report lays responsibility for these errors with the policymakers in Washington. "The problem with dealing with the Iraqi army and security forces was handled largely by ideologues who had a totally unrealistic grand strategy for transforming Iraq and the Middle East," the report says.

Under the heading "Denial as a method of counterinsurgency warfare," it notes that the United States "failed to honestly assess the facts on the ground in a manner reminiscent of Vietnam."

In the long run, what’s important here? To me what’s important is that everybody realizes HOW we got to the invasion of Iraq in the first place. The Bush administration hoodwinked the American public. They hyped threats and used rhetoric to manufacture public consent for their war. And they got what they wanted. The American people need to know this. This administration has pushed faulty assessments since the day they came into office. And not just about Iraq. They lie, and they lie BIG. The CSIS report refers to “ideologues” in the Bush administration. Specifically, neoconservatives within the administration that pushed so hard to overthrow Iraq for the past decade, safely behind their desks at places like the Project for New American Century. Right now the PNAC is calling for the invasion of Iran, and is still trying to get people to believe that things in Iraq are going wonderfully. Don’t be tricked into thinking that the administration was misled by the CIA. That is subterfuge. These assessments came from Bush’s own disinformation campaign located in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans (OSP). The OSP is a newly-created office that was populated with idealogues, who shunned intelligence that proved the Bush administration wrong, and pushed faulty intelligence to bolster the administration’s case. In some cases they resorted to forging intelligence. These lies and forgeries led directly to the deaths of all of these people, and these people, and these people. I'm not OK with that. (by the way, be careful with the last link as it contains graphic images). For more reference see "the lie factory". If a true threat existed in Iraq, one that actually impacted American citizens, then even I could dismiss some casualties as necessary losses. But a true threat didn't exist, and hordes of people were trying to tell the administration this long before we went to war. Why did the administration so carefully avoid the word 'imminent' when describing the threat from Iraq? Because they KNEW this was a flagrant misrepresentation that could never be legitimized by our own intelligence apparatus. If you like Bush, I don’t expect you to change your views on him. I don’t understand why you like him, but I respect the fact that you do. That’s not the point of this post. The point is that AS A COUNTRY, we need to understand how we got to Iraq in the first place. Who misled us? What are we doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again? What are the REAL threats we face as a country? What needs to be done to keep Americans safe? And who is responsible for doing it? Americans have still not been told that terrorism is a byproduct of hopelessness in the undeveloped world, and it is spiked by Saudi Arabian/Muslim madrassas(schools) that teach Arab children that martyrdom is rewarded with a ticket to heaven, and that the West is evil and imperialistic. How do you think we are perceived in the Middle East now? Since we’ve been killing the same Iraqis that last year we ‘liberated’? Perception and perspective is EVERYTHING. These are factors that determine whether or not a Middle Eastern man decides to strap a bomb to himself and enter an Israeli nightclub, or hijack 4 airplanes and crash them into American landmarks. One very real problem facing the Bush administration is, through the process of honestly diagnosing where they went wrong, Americans will realize that they were misled, and in a big way… and that’s hard to swallow. Well... the truth is quite often difficult to swallow. Maybe Americans should suspend their disbelief, get over it, and start swallowing. Because while we sit pondering whether we could have possibly been lied to, innocent people continue to die.