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| Iraq-Jordan |
| Not enough troops in Iraq: Bremer |
| 2004-10-05 |
| THE United States did not have enough troops in Iraq immediately after the removal of Saddam Hussein and "paid a big price" for it, the former head of the US occupation there said. L. Paul Bremer said he arrived in Iraq on May 6, 2003, to find "horrid" looting and a very unstable situation. "We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness," Mr Bremer said during an address yesterdat in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, to an insurance group, which reported his comments. "We never had enough troops on the ground." But Mr Bremer said he was "more convinced than ever that regime change was the right thing to do". Despite the daily reports of violence, "I am optimistic about the future in Iraq", he said. In a statement last night to The Washington Post, Mr Bremer said he fully supported the Bush administration's strategy in Iraq. "I believe that we currently have sufficient troop levels in Iraq," he said in the e-mailed statement, according to today's edition of the Post. He said references to troop levels related to the situation when he first arrived in Baghdad "when I believed we needed either more coalition troops or Iraqi security forces to address the looting". |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #16 TGA, Bremmer's plan for introducing capitalism into Iraq interests me. Although I'm sure that your right about his plan being half baked, I think that introducing true capitalism into the Middleast is as critical as introducing democracy. I find Walter Williams' argument that property rights are more important to prosperity than democracy to be most convincing. |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2004-10-05 10:28:04 PM |
| #15 The only thing they cannot do is remain within their old units. fair enough. |
| Posted by: 2b 2004-10-05 9:40:32 PM |
| #14 BH: Come on ZF - nothing is ever all or nothing. And it is ridiculous to conclude that you could not have used the opportunity to "vet" them on the borders. Apparently by your logic - the bad apples who allowed them to slip through the border would be less effective than there being no one there at all. At least they could have limited the open access and forced the rats to used friendly trails - making it easier to see which units actually managed to stop the flow and which did not. Plus - the intelligence information that could have been gathered by monitoring the units that did allow the rats through, would have been a gold mine. I am obviously not getting through to you. Like I mentioned earlier, any one of Saddam's army who wants to join up with the Iraqi security forces is free to do so. No one is stopping them. But having entire units serve is a waste of time. It did not work in any of the cities in which it was tried, it did not work in Palestine (where the entire PLO structure returned from exile) and it wouldn't have worked in Iraq. The paymasters and the senior officers need to be clean. Saddam's units were chosen for their personal loyalty to him. The entire Iraqi army isn't fighting against us. They are inflicting 2 or 3 military dead a day on our men. In Vietnam, it took perhaps 100,000 Vietcong to kill about 2 dozen GI's a day. If you do the math, it looks like there are no more than 10,000 to 20,000 guerrillas in Iraq (allowing for the inferiority of Iraqi guerrillas compared to their Vietcong counterparts, who had decades of experience fighting the French). |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2004-10-05 4:09:54 PM |
| #13 Vetting does no good when the whole carcass is corrupt. Come on ZF - nothing is ever all or nothing. And it is ridiculous to conclude that you could not have used the opportunity to "vet" them on the borders. Apparently by your logic - the bad apples who allowed them to slip through the border would be less effective than there being no one there at all. At least they could have limited the open access and forced the rats to used friendly trails - making it easier to see which units actually managed to stop the flow and which did not. Plus - the intelligence information that could have been gathered by monitoring the units that did allow the rats through, would have been a gold mine. |
| Posted by: 2b 2004-10-05 11:14:54 AM |
| #12 TGA: BTW, keeping the regular Iraqi army enlisted does not mean keeping them in the same units as before... with the same commanders. Anyway, those guys could have been controlled easier than disbanding them, sending them home humiliated, penniless and frustrated, with access to huge weapon caches. This is a bogus argument. They could have joined and continue to be able to join the Iraqi security forces any time they want to. The only thing they cannot do is remain within their old units. As to those huge weapons caches, I don't see it - why aren't they able to inflict more casualties on US troops if they have these huge caches? More weaponry means more IED's. Supply convoys run every single day. They don't even have to attack the base camps. Why only two or three American KIA daily? Surely, they should be able to detonate dozens of artillery shells against American units passing by instead of the onesies and twosies they're able to trigger today. (This was partially how so many men were lost daily in Vietnam - supply convoys were ambushed all the time). |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2004-10-05 3:13:36 AM |
| #11 BTW, keeping the regular Iraqi army enlisted does not mean keeping them in the same units as before... with the same commanders. Anyway, those guys could have been controlled easier than disbanding them, sending them home humiliated, penniless and frustrated, with access to huge weapon caches. |
| Posted by: True German Ally 2004-10-05 2:54:58 AM |
| #10 ZF, I'm not talking about Fallujah (that's another story), I'm talking about March/April 2003. Remember what Patton wanted to do. Enlist the remaining Wehrmacht and march on to Moscow... Now that wasn't possible, but it worked very well with German police. The U.S. let them do their work and only pulled out the worst apples they could find. Germany didn't sink into chaos because of that. But ZF, with all respect. "We are handing control over a democratic Iraqi government in 3 months". Sorry, but this is wishful thinking for now. And didn't the U.S. "hand over power" already? /sarcasm off Even if Iraq somehow manages to stage some sort of elections in three months, the new government's "power to boot the U.S. out" will be a theoretical one. The U.S. cannot let Iraq sink into chaos just because the next Iraqi government prefers this to U.S. presence. If Iraq ever was about U.S. security (and I think it was), it will not be the Iraqi government to decide on that security. |
| Posted by: True German Ally 2004-10-05 2:50:53 AM |
| #9 TGA: Fully agree with Old Spook. Put them under U.S. pay, send them to guard the border in the desert while weeding out those with real blood on their hands. Most of the army members were young men who didn't have a choice but to serve, neither Saddam fanatics nor Islamists. Give them a good cause and decent remuneration and they are with you. The guys in Fallujah were being paid $220 a month. They ended up fighting on the side of the guerrillas. Sending entire units of these guys into the desert would have given them another source of revenue for turning a blind eye as terrorists slipped by unnoticed. TGA: But to send them packing, jobless, moneyless, humiliated, with a galore of unsecured weapon caches, was simply not a bright idea, period. Anyone who wants to join the Iraqi security security forces is free to do so. But they cannot remain en masse with unit designations intact. That makes it impossible to vet them (i.e. figure out who the good guys are). TGA: I would go further (and maybe Rantburgers won't agree here). Iraq's economy had a downright socialist structure (almost everyone worked for the government and performance did not matter much. Bremer wanted to solve that problem with a libertarian capitalist shock therapy. That may look good in theory but you need to take people along with you. If not done carefully, many people lose their jobs and existence... and they will not blame it on the previous administration but on the Americans. This is a development you can even see in East Germany... and their "shock therapy" was so much milder and sugarcoated with a transfer of about a trillion (!) Euros from West to East in 15 years (of course parts of it flowed back to the West). The tiny fraction of former Iraqi troops that are now fighting US forces can sign up with the Iraq security forces any time. But the privileges they once had are gone, forever. We are handing control over a democratic Iraqi government in 3 months. That government has the power to boot US forces out. We cannot afford to have Iraq's security beholden to entire units of Saddam's former military. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2004-10-05 2:30:58 AM |
| #8 A4336: Bremer had to work within Powell's insane alliance with the Sunni clerics. Bush's "faith based" theocracy butchered every secular movement in Iraq, and created a power vacuum that Wahabi and Khomeni clerics filled. Future generations, will treat Bush like the American Quisling that he is. Bush screwed up! Boris, time for your medication. Say arrhh... |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2004-10-05 2:21:45 AM |
| #7 OS: The unit in Fallujah was bad - and it was NOT one of the divisions that was surrendered. It was a composite from local shieks, controlled by an old Saddam commander. That makes no sense at all. Anyone who wants to join the Iraqi military can join. They just can't join under the aegis of their old units. Germans who served in the Waffen SS weren't allowed to join the new German army under their old unit designations. OS: Placing them ON THE BORDER (pay attention to what I said - details matter) would have effectively removed them and provided better security than the complete absence of it. And the vetting could have provided weaponry and troops that would ahve been useful in the cities after retraining. These portions of the border would have been sieves through which weapons and foreign guerrillas flowed without any interruption. Vetting does no good when the whole carcass is corrupt. You are saying that the units that surrendered and disbanded are the units that are fighting us. I am saying that the units that are fighting us are the units that did not so much surrender as reconfigure themselves into irregular combat units. If these people want to serve in the new Iraqi military, there is nothing stopping them from signing up. The problem is that even the *subset* of these people that are signing up are proving to be politically unreliable. Can you imagine having to vet out an entire unit that is this way? They'd kill anyone who was pro-coalition and blame any problems on him. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2004-10-05 2:20:05 AM |
| #6 Bremer had to work within Powell's insane alliance with the Sunni clerics. Bush's "faith based" theocracy butchered every secular movement in Iraq, and created a power vacuum that Wahabi and Khomeni clerics filled. Future generations, will treat Bush like the American Quisling that he is. Bush screwed up! |
| Posted by: Anonymous4336 2004-10-05 2:07:17 AM |
| #5 Fully agree with Old Spook. Put them under U.S. pay, send them to guard the border in the desert while weeding out those with real blood on their hands. Most of the army members were young men who didn't have a choice but to serve, neither Saddam fanatics nor Islamists. Give them a good cause and decent remuneration and they are with you. But to send them packing, jobless, moneyless, humiliated, with a galore of unsecured weapon caches, was simply not a bright idea, period. I would go further (and maybe Rantburgers won't agree here). Iraq's economy had a downright socialist structure (almost everyone worked for the government and performance did not matter much. Bremer wanted to solve that problem with a libertarian capitalist shock therapy. That may look good in theory but you need to take people along with you. If not done carefully, many people lose their jobs and existence... and they will not blame it on the previous administration but on the Americans. This is a development you can even see in East Germany... and their "shock therapy" was so much milder and sugarcoated with a transfer of about a trillion (!) Euros from West to East in 15 years (of course parts of it flowed back to the West). |
| Posted by: True German Ally 2004-10-05 1:42:57 AM |
| #4 The unit in Fallujah was bad - and it was NOT one of the divisions that was surrendered. It was a composite from local shieks, controlled by an old Saddam commander. Plus, the difference is in deployment - Saddam did have one thing right - he never deployed a unit near the home towns from which it was raised. That stops the tribalism that cost the Fallujah unit its effectiveness. Placing them ON THE BORDER (pay attention to what I said - details matter) would have effectively removed them and provided better security than the complete absence of it. And the vetting could have provided weaponry and troops that would ahve been useful in the cities after retraining. As for the "General", he was equivalent in span of command to a Major in the US Army. Remember, Iraq, as do other Arab armed forces, grossly inflate ranks, and shrink the span of command. UNits that woudl typically be led by NCOs in the West are usually headed by Captains or Lieutenants in the Arab armies. Likewise their Colonels are not commander of much anything larger than a partial battalion in many cases, and their Generals seldom if ever command anything larger than a battalion combined arms team. So, yes, Bremer screwed up, and no, you cannot brush off the utility of the 4 regular army divisions that were disbanded without any care to securing their weapons or men, instead of being sent to the Iranian and Syrian borders. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2004-10-05 1:14:33 AM |
| #3 OS: Bremer is a jackass - he screwed things up by disbanding the divisions the Iraqi Army was ready to turn over to US command - divisions that could have secured the borders and provided cadre to the new Iraqi Army after they had been properly vetted. You mean like the units in Fallujah? And the general who was recently arrested for working with the insurgency? I think we need to break with cookie cutter prescriptions from WWII. The situation was completely different in so many ways, it's difficult to keep count. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2004-10-05 12:58:11 AM |
| #2 Old Spook, I am hardly a Bremer fan, but it looks to me like this news agency have mined a long address for the best anti-Bush nugget they could find. In the short term I agree that the Iraqi army would have been helpful, but in the long term I think the Iraqis are better with the guys they are getting who are being grown from personnel that are being battle-tested against the insurgency. As for the "we needed more troops" crowd, there were no more troops. Can you imagine the death toll if we had dumped green draftees "in country" with all the kooks running about? |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2004-10-05 12:51:51 AM |
| #1 Bremer is a jackass - he screwed things up by disbanding the divisions the Iraqi Army was ready to turn over to US command - divisions that could have secured the borders and provided cadre to the new Iraqi Army after they had been properly vetted. If nothing else they could have at least transferred their weapons and ammo to secured areas instead of leaving it out for anyone that wanted it. Bremer screwed the pooch - and like a typical state dept weenie, he points the finger at the military. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2004-10-05 12:39:17 AM |