This is the first part of my summary of Anthony Cordesman's Iraq's Evolving Insurgency, last updated as of June 23. As I mentioned to WoC reader JC, I tend to think that Cordesman agrees with much of what myself and Bill have written with respect to the constitution of the insurgency as opposed to, for instance, everyone's favorite University of Michigan professor Juan Cole. Moreover, Cordesman has actually been to Iraq so his opinion carries a great deal of weight to me.
One of the reasons I tend to like Cordesman is because he strikes me as genuinely non-ideological and as such I highly recommend him for a lot of the same reasons I recommend Gunaratna (who is one of his associates, incidentally) and as a result this summary is in the same format as my earlier summaries of the ICG reports with some very sparse commentary and inferences on the subject.
Saddam's powder keg
- One of the key legacies of British colonial policy was to enlist a friendly minority to assist them in administering the colony and in the case of Iraq that minority was the Sunnis. The difficulties faced by the Iraqi Sunnis in retaining their status as the nation's ruling elite was further compounded by the rise of Saddam Hussein when he assumed full power in 1979.
- As a result, Iraq was perpetually ruled by a small, rural clique of Sunni Arabs that used Baathism and the violent mechanisms of the state to retain power. Its economy was undeveloped, agriculture remained primitive and unproductive, state-run industries undercut development, and the state-run financial sector set up barriers to both trade and foreign investment. These problems were exacerbated under Saddam, who turned the Iraqi economy into a command kleptocracy in which Saddam and his cronies exploited their positions solely to secure power and personal
wealth.
- Already impoverished from the huge debt created during the Iraq-Iran War and the subsequent Gulf War, Iraqi infrastructure, education, and oil development were all crippled in the aftermath of the latter conflict and the imposition of international sanctions. Political dissent became even more dangerous, Kurdish efforts towards autonomy were met with violence, the use of poison gas, and ethnic cleansing. Secular and religious Iraqi Shi'ite leaders were placed under constant surveillance and subject to imprisonment and assassination campaigns. The marshlands along the Iranian border became a sanctuary for deserters and Shi'ite opposition groups.
- Following the Gulf War, Shi'ite uprisings were brutally suppressed, leading to series of low-level clashes between Shi'ites and the regime that lasted until Saddam was overthrown. While these clashes received little international attention, post-war discoveries of mass graves of both Shi'ite rebels and Iraqi civilians demonstrate how serious these clashes became and led to further Shi'ite alienation against Sunnis and leaving a lasting anger at the US and UK for failing to defend the Shi'ites (in contrast to the Kurds) that President Bush had initially encouraged to rise up to begin with.
- Parallel Kurdish uprisings in northern Iraq led to a flood of refugees into Turkey following the uprising's suppression and the use of US airpower and international aid efforts to create a safe zone for the Kurds. As a result, the Kurdish factions were able to operate with a level of security unavailable to the Shi'ites but also left them in a legal limbo with more than a third of Saddam's troops massed along the periphery of their "security zone." Divisions between the two largest Kurdish groups led to open fighting between them during the early 1990s, even to the point of the KDP accepting support from Saddam against the PUK. The end-result of this process, however, was to increase the Kurdish desire for an independent state as well as that many dispossessed Kurds were unable to return to their homes in "Arabized" areas of Kirkuk and
Mosul.
- From 1991-2003, Saddam sought to increase support for his regime by exploiting tribal divisions that he had previously tried to abolish and giving positions of power to those tribal and clan leaders who were willing to endorse his will. He made a cynical attempt to exploit religion by publicly embracing Islam and supporting Sunni Wahhabis while penalizing those Shi'ite clerics he regarded as a threat. Money was poured into the Sunni majority regions of western Iraq, government and security positions were given exclusively to Sunnis, and those resources that existed were poured into military industries that favored Sunni employment. As a result, the Iraqi economy and urban environment was restructured to favor the Sunni cities of Tikrit, Samarra, Fallujah, Ramadi, and other towns regarded as being loyal to Saddam.
- Saddam manipulated rationing, import control, state funds, and the UN oil-for-food program for his own ends, undercutting economic development while the weakening of Iraqi education, medical services, and infrastructure were used as a propaganda tool in the hopes of persuading the UN to lift its sanctions. He also favored key cities like Baghdad in order to prevent urban unrest, leaving most of the countryside with little in the way of water, power, and sewage systems. Rather than restoring and developing the oil industry, existing fields were overused, funds were redirected to the regime, and exports were manipulated in order to obtain kickbacks and get support from sympathetic nations like Syria. In order to conceal these efforts, Saddam launched a massive propaganda campaign aimed at blaming the US and the UN for all of Iraq's domestic ills.
- As a result of these events, Iraq circa 2003 was divided by far greater pressures and had far less capability for political leadership thanks to more than 2 years of neglect, misrule, and oppression by Saddam Hussein.
America's Strategic Mistakes
- The US planned to fight a regional war with speed, efficiency, and low cost but the US post-war strategy was unrealistic and all but impossible to achieve. As a result, the US planned only for the destruction of the Iraqi military during the actual conflict rather than dealing with a major insurgency in its aftermath. The most obvious mistake can be seen in that the US estimates with respect to Iraqi WMD stockpiles that were so key to pre-war planning were later found not to exist, but the administration and senior military leadership made a far more serious mistake by essentially wishing away all the problems involved in stability operations and nation-building, leading them to make massive policy and military errors that led to the creation of much of the climate for insurgency in Iraq.
- A full understanding of what happened is still unclear and it is far easier to accuse specific US leaders than it is to understand what really happened or assign responsibility with any credibility. All the same, it seems clear that many key decisions were made in ways that bypassed the US interagency process, ignored the warnings of US regional and intelligence experts, ignored the earlier military war and stability planning conducted at CENTCOM, and ignored the warnings of policy-makers
and experts in allied states such as the UK. Too much credibility was given to ideologues and true believers both as to the ease with which the war could be fought as well as to Iraqi exile groups that exaggerated the level of Iraqi popular support for the invasion, the ease with which Saddam could be replaced, and the scale of Iraqi ethnic and sectarian divisions as well as the sheer scale of Saddam's economic mismanagement.
- These issues were compounded by leadership within the Office of the Secretary of Defense that put intense pressure on the US military to plan for the lowest possible level of deployment and then to delay that deployment in order for the political need to appear precipitous at the UN. The US military leadership actively resisted planning for and involvement in large-scale enduring stability and nation-building activity and failed to plan and deploy for the risk of a major insurgency.
- Regardless of the cause, the US failure to plan for meaningful stability operations and nation-building was by far the most serious strategic mistake going into the war that led to the insurgency and crime that are the focus of Cordesman's analysis. In addition to these major mistakes, there were a host of lesser problems including: the failure to accurately assess Iraqi nationalism, cultural differences, and the difficulties of a modernizing an infrastructure designed to accomodate ~16,000,000 for a population of ~25,000,000, unrealistic estimates of the nation's oil wealth, support for the former regime in the Sunni areas, secular vs. theocratic tensions, and the impact of tribalism, demographics, and unemployment that became US problems the moment the coalition overthrew Saddam.
Other problems included but are no means limited to:
- The failure to plan or execute an effective information operations campaign prior to the invasion to "win hearts and minds" in order to persuade them that the US had not come to conquer Iraq, leading to a failure to anticipate the flood of conspiracy theories that followed the beginning of US military operations.
- The failure to create or provide anything resembling the kind and number of civilian elements from the US government necessary for nation-building and stability operations. These problems were particularly serious in the State Department and other civilian agencies and many of the civilians who were available were neither willing nor recruited to take the kinds of risks necessary in the field.
- The failure to plan or execute for the continuity of local, provincial, and national government, to anticipate the risk that the Iraqi government would simply dissolve or to plan for the military, police, and security forces necessary for maintaining such continuity as well as to win the support of those Iraqi officials and officers needed to preserve the core of governance in order to create an environment both local legitimacy and security.
- Broad failures by military and intelligence officials who distorted or selectively interpreted the data, leading them to erroneous conclusions and poor post-war planning.
- An over-reliance on exile groups with limited credibility and influence inside Iraq as well as the failure to anticipate Iraqi expectations post-Saddam and miscalculations about the level of UN support and US ability to secure transit through Turkey.
- Failing to provide the personnel and skills necessary to secure the Iraqi rear and urban areas as the Coalition advanced and prevent the massive looting of government buildings, military bases, and arms depots during and after the fighting. As a result, the existing machinery of government collapsed and it was not until May 2003 (2 months after the fall of Baghdad) that 4,000 MPs were deployed to patrol Baghdad and even then it took time for them to arrive. No serious effort was made to rebuild the Iraqi military until June 2004 despite the mass desertions during the war and the social unrest prompted by disbanding the Baath Party and its attendant security forces.
- The creation of the Office of Reconstruction and Assistance (ORHA) initially recruited military and civilian officials for only 3 month tours. ORHA planned to retain the old ministries and government functions but was given only limited human and financial resources, not allowed meaningful liaison powers with neighboring states, was never integrated into the military command, and was not even present in Baghdad until 12 days after the city fell.
- Failure to anticipate the threat of the insurgency and external infiltration despite significant intelligence warnings. US forces were also not deployed for counter-insurgency operations, civil-military operations, and nation-building in the immediate aftermath of the regime's collapse. Creation of regional commands was done on the basis of administrative convenience and most of the stabilization tasks was left up to improvization of local commanders with little if any civilian support.
- Lack of language and regional expertise on the part of US ground forces as well as the absence of human intelligence (HUMINT) for counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency operations.
- Premature planning for US withdrawl from Iraq before the situation was secure or clear, with major reductions initially planned for as soon as 3 months following the fall of Saddam's regime rather than plans for a sustained period of stabilization operations.
- The creation of an occupation authority (the CPA) that initially planned several years of occupation rather than speeding up the transfer of sovereignty back to the Iraqi people ASAP. The CPA's record is quite mixed, but it seems that it only began planning to transfer sovereignty back to the Iraqi people after October 2003 and the choice of June 2004 as the transfer date was largely arbitrary and hence not very convincing to the Iraqi people.
Important Addendum to the Above
- Foresight is always harder than 20-20 hindsight.
- No predicted the current status quo, but many of these problems that allowed for the current insurgency were raised during interagency planning sessions during the summer and fall of 2002. The problem is not that the system did not work but rather that the US military and political leadership did not heed what they regarded as negative advice for a variety of reasons, in so doing creating an environment in which the current insurgency was able to arise.
Dan's comments
As I said, a lot of this makes a great deal of sense to me, though I tend to attribute a lot more to the inter-agency infighting that occurred during the run-up to war than Cordesman does. This infighting seems to me to have delayed much of the post-war planning and led to a pattern of rather schizophrenic behavior on the part of the US government: anybody see a disconnect in planning a rapid draw-down of US forces following the war and planning to set up the CPA to run Iraq for 3 years?
As many already have noted, Cordesman comes down pretty harsh on the neocons in government in this study, though I'm not so certain whether or not many of specific policies he lists the US as having tripped up on (not turning sovereignty over to the Iraqis, etc.) aren't policies that most of the folks over at AEI support anyway and attribute the failure to implement said policies to the CIA or the State Department. There is also a great deal of irony that for all his criticism of the neocons, Cordesman's analysis pretty much accepts their "regional war" paradigm with respect to Syrian and Iranian involvement in the insurgency and the role of foreign terrorists like Zarqawi.
In any event, hope you enjoyed this first installment and are looking forward to future summaries. Part 2 continues here.
There is a factor that is missing from the analysis. Had the Bush administration planned for all the possible negative contingencies, it would never have been able to gain popular support for the war. The Administration hoped for the best and convinced themselves of the best and planned for it, and figured that it would pick up the pieces that needed to be picked up if the analysis were wrong. And I, for one, am glad that they did!
This is the type of war that dozens of nations will be fighting against the salafist bigots. These are the nazi-equivalents of modern day, the bin Laden saluting jacksandaled jihadi.
There's no getting around fighting this war, whether in Baghdad, Beslan, Madrid, NYC, or Jerusalem. Islam contains this seed of bigoted superiority, of demonizing and subhumanizing those of other faiths. But it's the fanatics who take that bigotry seriously and make it part of themselves who make this ongoing war so inevitable.
People who think that any amount of planning for Iraq could have headed off this jihadi war are seriously deluded. Suicide bombing by suicide bombing, roadside bomb by roadside bomb, assassination and beheading by atrocities without end, it's going to last a long long time and would have done with or without Bush's war in Iraq. At least now we can get a better grasp of what the jihadis had in mind all along.
Just one thing. Outside of your agreement with Bill about the constitution of the insurgency has he changed his mind about the substance of Cordesman's analysis or is it being dismissed as just more "niggardly details?"
I'm not sure that was ever his position on it to begin with, you'd have to ask him. The constitution of the insurgency is pretty much at the core of Cordesman's analysis, however. The post-war failures are mainly viewed within the climate through which they enabled the insurgency to take root.
So we made a mistake in listening to the intelligence community about WMD's and not listening to them about their "warnings" about the post war environment. How is one to know when to listen and when not to?
What about the job State did running up to the war that left the 4ID in boats?
And what would the world look like today had we not gone in?
I think that leading up to the war, the "experts" were predicting a different set of problems and the administration did do a lot of planning on many of the potential problems. Some of that planning was successfull, such as the excellant job the administration did in reaching out to the Shia community and building support for the democratic government process. I can recall a lot of speculation before the war that the shia would not be as cooperative as they have been. The administration has not gotten credit for that success.
Some of the planning was done, but events simply overtook the plans. For example, one of the criticisms of the administration is that they supposedly shouldn't have disbanded the Iraqi army. Frankly, I think the administration didn't, the Iraqi army disbanded itself spontaneously.
Also the exile groups failed to create support within Iraq as the administration had obviously hoped for.
Another popular theme is that the Defense department's planning was bad and the State Department's planning "good" and that once the evil Rumsfeld had his comeuppance, then the sun came out again. But I think this is a propaganda line that State has run through the media that doesn't really pan out that well.
This isn't State vs. DoD, guys. Re-read the errors that Cordesman says were made and I think you can see that they cut rather widely across the agency spectrum. It is also worth pointing out that during the April to May 2003 period that appears to have been rather crucial very few people were pointing out these criticisms. So you definitely have a combination of factors coming into play here that produced the appropriate climate for the insurgency to take root.
None of Part 1 deals with the main reason why all of this became a major problem - the insurgents themselves - and I think that's mighty important when considering the situation.
In some cases, I suspect that all the agencies had different ideas, and some agencies were right about some things but wrong about others. Dissolving the Ba'ath and the army caused problems-- but keeping them around would have caused others. Dissolving and starting over is probably a better long term thing, but at a bigger short term cost.
Thankfully, at least the decision to transfer over sovereignty happened. Many agencies (including, apparently, the British experts according to those memos) argued against doing that. Some groups (again, including many British experts) even favored setting up a "friendly" strongman. We rejected that, at least.
BTW, William Kaminsky of the blog Too Many Worlds has transcribed/summarized large portions of a speech Cordesman gave recently at CSIS. Kaminsky also has links to archived videos of the speech
The pillaging of ministries and infrastructure appears planned, doesn't it? Almost as if they knew what our post-war assumptions were in detail. And given we didn't move quickly (i.e. months, or even weeks, after Afghanistan), they had plenty of time to acquire this information from a Washington bureaucracy at war with itself (which had forgotten the little it knew about how to keep secrets), and plan their own response.
My guess is that in 30-40 years when a dispassionate and complete history is written, we'll be humbled by how poorly we understood the players and their capabilities, and consider ourselves blessed to have escaped much greater harm.
What would be the result if all we did was clear the noxious weeds (and not tend a garden)? i.e. (1) kill the tyrants, (2) cripple the forces loyal that would stand and fight, (3) destroy their heavy arms and ammunition dumps, (4) rubble whatever infrastructure that the tyrants relied upon, and (5) provide small arms to the populace? And as we left, make a set of demands that if not met would bring us back to do it again to the next set of tyrants?
Granted, it would be a disaster for a complacent populace (i.e. one that put up with tyrants), but would they remain that way?
Ari Tai:
Cordesman's study is done primarily for academic and military research purposes, not political purposes. Clearly, a lot of things did not go wrong that could have but that doesn't mean we still can't learn from those mistakes that did occur. As to the looting, from what I've seen it was the looting of banks and weapons sites that were pre-planned (and even involved huge teams with cranes and trucks), not the looting of government ministry buildings. Keep in mind that the only reason we have proof about the 1999 visit of an al-Qaeda emissary to Baghdad as well as Saddam's ties to the Ugandan Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) is because the good folks at the Daily Telegraph walked right in to the old Mukhabarat building after the fall of Baghdad.
As to these mistakes discrediting the venture, color me extremely skeptical. There were a lot of mistakes made in past wars too, but that doesn't mean that they weren't worth fighting. The whole idea that you have to be a completely morally pure and perfect agent in order to accomplish anything is a false concept.
I usually prefer incompetence as explanation over subtle strategy or conspiracies, but . . .
If the "flypaper" objective was driving planning, wouldn't the US want to create conditions for an insurgency? That's a necessary precondition for luring in lots of foreign jihadis. That would also tie in with why the Syrian border hasn't been closed off after two years.
"If the "flypaper" objective was driving planning, wouldn't the US want to create conditions for an insurgency? That's a necessary precondition for luring in lots of foreign jihadis. That would also tie in with why the Syrian border hasn't been closed off after two years."
Ive given that a lot of thought, and I believe it is some combination of the two. The conditions were non-negotiable. US troops in Iraq were going to attract jihadis. Whether they could get over the border or not is the interesting question. Its really tough to decide if they have been intentionally allowed in, or this is just a case of malignant neglect politically. The military as is cant close the border, but if Bush made it his #1 priority and turned the entire focus of the United States into sealing it, it could be done. In two years a giant wall could be built if nothing else. At the end of the day, i think its a sort of benign neglect, the political will isnt there because the thought is letting the jihadis in lets us kill them in Iraq. Rationaliztion, in other words.
Its a mistake, like i said in another thread this isnt about killing the most jihadis, its about defeating their minds. A stable and democratic Iraq is a greater victory than any arbitrary number of dead jihadis. But the fly-paper is still necessary, they had to come and fight in order for that strategy to work, and enough jihadis would have gotten in at somehow to make that point. But that phase is past and the border needs to be sealed.
You are not skeptical because you have kept your eye on the prize by educating people about the nature of the Jihadist enemy as a singular enemy and most importantly where/why/who/how this Jihadist enemy has enlisted/allied with nation states and when dealing with such an alliance what the problems are/were and evolving. Many of those whom are skeptical or have become skeptical after being supporters have either long realized or have come to realize that a comprehensive plan regarding how to control Iraq was made on too many bad assumptions, some good ones and the really good one what will happen if al-queda achieves its goal of acquiring military grade weapons of mass destruction. Many of these bad assumptions were evident from the beginning starting with retribution on the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen Shalikashvili's for his public comment on how many soldiers were necessary to invade and control Iraq. This overt politicization of this endeavor by publicly pooh poohing of the negative ramifications(ethnic strife, re/nation-building, securing the infrastructure) and not explaining what the aftermath would require is why there is skepticism now.
A more comprehensive explanation to the American people prior to the invasion was what was necessary. The Cordesmann papers makes this clear. Regardless of why Cordesmann is doing this the political ramifications are what is going to come to the fore and much of it is going to be skepticism. For people whom are against the GWOT it will be proof the current admistration is both incompent and totally political by embarking on the GWOT simply to acheive domestic political agenda's. To those whom are for it, it raises the issues of why the current administration has waited so long to push a more agenda about the GWOT and its difficulties.
Tonight the President will give his speech. If in it he fails to address the forward issues raised in the Cordesmann papers the skepticism will become louder on both sides of the political spectrum. And that could be realistically seen as OUR countries undoing.
From Cordesman's analysis:
"Iraq's defeat in the Gulf War in 1991, following its invasion of Kuwait, in 1990 did more than further impoverish the country. Uprisings in the Shia area of the south were suppressed with all of the regime's customary violence and then followed by a mix of repression and low-level civil war that lasted until Saddam was driven out of power.
Quite a different contrast than the oasis of peace some have attempted to portray Iraq as. When you factor in the frequent firing on coalition aircraft, Saddam labelling the sanctions as "genocide" and the containment policy as "aggressive acts of war", internal aggression (ie. Irbil 1996), his declarations that "the mother of all battles was not in the past", and the inability to disuade him from seeking WMD, I still maintain regime change was the best of a limited set of bad choices. The policy GWB inhereted was fatally flawed and no longer tenable.
Alot of the criticism over post-war planning and management has been cited in the past to varying degrees, and most of it appears legitimate. My main focus rests in identifying the mistakes and taking action to correct them. In some cases initial mistakes have been overcome (ie. vehicle armor, Iraqi security forces) to varying degrees. Every war has mismanagement and mistakes, and provides a bevy of material suitable to be criticized to no end. Some of the other warnings and predictions did not materialize. There was no scorched earth campaign against Iraq's oil infastructure, and thanks to quick reaction in the early days of combat, U.S. forces grabbed western Iraqi airfields and sealed off any chance that might have existed to fire off Scuds on Israel, a likely possibility that at the time was viewed as a threat in the chem/bio sense as well. There was not the millions of refugees that many predicted the war would cause and while maintaining autonomy, the Kurds never pushed for independence nor did they draw the Turkish military into the conflict. There were not tens of thousands of casualties in the battle for Baghdad as some had predicted on the way to over glamorizing shock and awe into the second coming of Dresden.
One could make a case that the administration didn't heed some of the warnings and by the same token some of the warnings were off base. If you make enough pre-war predictions, you'll likely get some of them right.
Another idea for tonight's speech:
Mr Bush should take a leaf out of his predecessor Franklin D Roosevelt’s book. On February 23, 1942, FDR told his countrymen: “Your government has unmistakable confidence in your ability to hear the worst, without flinching or losing heart. You must, in turn, have complete confidence that your government is keeping nothing from you except information that will help the enemy in his attempt to destroy us.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-1669483,00.html
(hat tip Andrew Sullivan)
IMHO The various analysis of "mistakes" and "bad planning" ignore the fact that Saddam must also have had a plan, and Saddam also had a secret police force embedded deep within Iraqi society.
Saddam must surely have known that his Army would not survive a full on assault. So how would Saddam "win".
1) Provide enough resistance to the invasion so that US politicians would be able to proclaim a "victory". Words like "We have won", "We are winning", "Peace is at hand". (I'm sure Saddam was smiling when that Mission Accomplished sign showed up on that aircraft carrier)
2) Provide very helpful Iraqi's to the Western Media, slowly sow the seeds of the "Vietnam" meme while the "last pockets of resistance" were being stamped out. Knowledgable sources have always been taxi drivers, bar tenders and "fixers". Saddam would have surely had intelligience assets at Hotels frequented by foreigners pre-invasion and taxi drivers that services those hotels. Keep them in place.
3) Wait until the Spring of a US Presidential Election year, and toss almost everything you have at US Forces. Tet was costly militarily, but clearly the decisive battle. Then keep up steady pressure until the American electorate demands "Peace with Honor","Bring the Troops home now".
It is a simple formula, one that has a historical basis of working. Unfortunately, of the 3 possible candidates for US president, Howard Dean, John Kerry and George Bush, George Bush was the worst possible outcome for Saddam.
The only real question now is whether "Iraqi-ization" be sufficiently progressed by Spring 2008. I personnaly think it has already progressed substantially.
Enough soldiers myth:
WE never had enough to control Iraq. More than plenty to defeat Saddam.
Why didn't we have enough? Well you go to war with the army you have. To have enough boots on the ground would have meant an Army 2X its current size. Not going to happen. New divisions take 2 - 3 years to build. Where were the Dems in Congress who shoud have been begging for more divisions and CBGs in 2001? Going wobbly on us.
Plan B?
Built the required divisions with Iraqis. Police and military. Takes just as long as plan A but requires no great influx into the American Army.
To get where we are today with the Iraqi police and Army we had to start the process about 2 years ago.
Well surprise. That is just what happened and we are beginning to see results.
Patience. Sitzfleish. Courage.
Do we have enough?
Another thing for the President to condemn in his speech tonight
and the accompanying pictures if no one believes
Back to the Cordesman papers. Dan what do you make of Cordesman"s work against Larry Diamond's "Squandered Victory"
JK I mentioned the difficulty in getting work of the system and getting help. I can only pull out the Cordesman work one page at a time and that is from the option side of the program it is on. Any idea's on how to download the whole thing?
Robert M:
Isn't that Fred Phelp's kook brigade?
As for Cordesman vs. Diamond, I don't know because I haven't had time to buy and read the latter. I believe there are some differences, however ...
Good representation of the article - thanks for giving it a full and faithful rendering - kudos to you.
I would take small issue with #7 - re:
"April to May 2003 period that appears to have been rather crucial very few people were pointing out these criticisms."
It's interesting to restrict your time period to these two months. Why only these two, re: issues in Iraq stabilization?
For example the Army War College report of Feb 2003, pointed a LOT of the issues, pretty much across the board - fairly prescient.
There were other sources pointing out the likely issues in a post-war situation.
Also check out Too Many Worlds for more of Cordesman
JC:
Well, I hope you'll stick around for when I get around to summarizing the remainder of the analysis - there's quite a lot there. As for my point on the 2 month gap, judging from how I read Cordesman it looks like that period was pretty crucial as far as addressing the climate that contributed to the formation of the insurgency. By the time we started reacting to the situation, it was already too late.
The creation of an occupation authority (the CPA) that initially planned several years of occupation rather than speeding up the transfer of sovereignty back to the Iraqi people ASAP. The CPA's record is quite mixed, but it seems that it only began planning to transfer sovereignty back to the Iraqi people after October 2003 and the choice of June 2004 as the transfer date was largely arbitrary and hence not very convincing to the Iraqi people.
Why this change in October 2003. Which is also the reason that Iraq was, predictable, a defeat for the USA
ps. Most Iraqi's didn't want to become an American colony and we couldn't shoot at the Shia like we could ar the Sunni