Archive for November 5th, 2006

Rattling the bones

“… If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it.”
GWB, 1999

Eric’s spotlighting the recent documents on secret war games held in ‘99, retrieved through the Freedom of Information Act, on the home page. Only a single-celled amoeba still thinks that Dubby didn’t come to the table with the intention of crushing Saddam and grabbing oil rights in Iraq … and there may even be some dissent in the petrie dish. Today we learn his personal vendetta was carried out in spite of war game simulations that told … plainly … what would happen if he did. And the report was a no-brainer, repeating the common wisdom that history had made clear and that the British had learned the hard way. Even his flower-throwing NeoCons have backed away from his inability to handle the mess he’s made … as if they weren’t the cheerleaders that pepped up Dubby’s delusion from the git-go.

So — rush to war? Yep — no bones about it, now.

War games and NeoCon’s, below.

Jude

War simulation in 1999 pointed out Iraq invasion problems
CNN, AP
November 4, 2006

WASHINGTON (AP) — A series of secret U.S. war games in 1999 showed that an invasion and post-war administration of Iraq would require 400,000 troops, nearly three times the number there now.

And even then, the games showed, the country still had a chance of dissolving into chaos.
In the simulation, called Desert Crossing, 70 military, diplomatic and intelligence participants concluded the high troop levels would be needed to keep order, seal borders and take care of other security needs.

The documents came to light Saturday through a Freedom of Information Act request by George Washington University’s National Security Archive, an independent research institute and library.

“The conventional wisdom is the U.S. mistake in Iraq was not enough troops,” said Thomas Blanton, the archive’s director. “But the Desert Crossing war game in 1999 suggests we would have ended up with a failed state even with 400,000 troops on the ground.”

There are about 144,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, down from a peak in January of about 160,000.

A week after the invasion, in March 2003, the Pentagon said there were 250,000 U.S. ground force troops inside Iraq, along with 40,000 coalition force troops.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Central Command, which sponsored the seminar and declassified the secret report in 2004, declined to comment Saturday because she was not familiar with the documents.

News of the war games results comes a day before judges are expected to deliver a verdict in Saddam Hussein war crimes trial. (Watch people prepare as curfew sets across Baghdad in anticipation of the verdicts — 3:20 )

The war games looked at “worst case” and “most likely” scenarios after a war that removed then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power. Some of the conclusions are similar to what actually occurred after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003:

“A change in regimes does not guarantee stability,” the 1999 seminar briefings said. “A number of factors including aggressive neighbors, fragmentation along religious and/or ethnic lines, and chaos created by rival forces bidding for power could adversely affect regional stability.”

“Even when civil order is restored and borders are secured, the replacement regime could be problematic — especially if perceived as weak, a puppet, or out-of-step with prevailing regional governments.”

“Iran’s anti-Americanism could be enflamed by a U.S.-led intervention in Iraq,” the briefings read. “The influx of U.S. and other western forces into Iraq would exacerbate worries in Tehran, as would the installation of a pro-western government in Baghdad.”

“The debate on post-Saddam Iraq also reveals the paucity of information about the potential and capabilities of the external Iraqi opposition groups. The lack of intelligence concerning their roles hampers U.S . policy development.”

“Also, some participants believe that no Arab government will welcome the kind of lengthy U.S. presence that would be required to install and sustain a democratic government.”

“A long-term, large-scale military intervention may be at odds with many coalition partners.”

They knew Iraq was not a cakewalk, knew we would not be liberators
Margie Burns
Nov 5 2006

The National Security Archive now reveals that the Pentagon knew from 1999 on that invasion and occupation of Iraq would entail disaster.

Through a FOIA request, the National Security Archive has obtained documents of “Desert Crossing” war games conducted by CENTCOM ( U.S. Central Command) in April 1999 to assess outcomes of invading Iraq. Outcomes were not rosy.

As the NSArchive introduction observes, “Some of these conclusions are interestingly similar to the events which actually occurred after Saddam was overthrown. (Note 1) The report forewarned that regime change may cause regional instability by opening the doors to “rival forces bidding for power” which, in turn, could cause societal “fragmentation along religious and/or ethnic lines” and antagonize “aggressive neighbors.” Further, the report illuminated worries that secure borders and a restoration of civil order may not be enough to stabilize Iraq if the replacement government were perceived as weak, subservient to outside powers, or out of touch with other regional governments. An exit strategy, the report said, would also be complicated by differing visions for a post-Saddam Iraq among those involved in the conflict.”

General Zinni, who retired after the war games, tried unsuccessfully to remind the current administration about Desert Crossing. In an act of political heroism, he went public with some of his concerns. Aside from other problems, “the former CENTCOM commander noted that his plan had called for a force of 400,000 for the invasion — 240,000 more than what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved. “We were concerned about the ability to get in there right away, to flood the towns and villages,” USA Today quoted Zinni as saying in July 2003. “We knew the initial problem would be security.” (Note 7)”

Portions of the conclusions are being reported on CNN.com today.

Selected emails disclose that one of the entities involved in planning Desert Crossing, along with CENTCOM, was the giant security contractor “Booz Allen.” The emails refer to Booz Allen Hamilton, a huge northern Virginia firm numbering members and signatories of PNAC among its principals and the government among its chief clients. Booz Allen is a privately held mega-funded global contractor.

The company name hit the news earlier this fall with revelations that the Bush administration was secretly monitoring bank transactions (SWIFT). The White House said that the electronic surveillance was being supervised by Booz Allen, a claim that itself arouses problems. As this article by Liana Forest reminds, Booz Allen also developed Carnivore, the discredited data mining process, for use by the FBI. Thus we have a purported check and audit on government electronic surveillance being handled by a company that has demonstrably not seen fit to warn the public about what government is doing, either in regard to Iraq or in regard to financial spying.

Back to Desert Crossing: no argument can be made that key government agencies were left out of the loop. As the report afterward makes clear, “Over 70 participants, including the Department of State, Department of Defense, National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency took part in the seminar.” Donald Rumsfeld, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby and David Addington had access to the information processed by their predecessors in the Defense department. Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley had access to material available to the National Security Council.

Even couched in the value-neutral language of bureaucracy, the conclusions of the report are horrifying: “The dimensions of preparing a post-Saddam policy for Iraq and the region are vast and complex. Early preparation of a political-military plan as called for in Presidential Decision Directive 56 should be a priority. The accompanying policy debate will expose a variety of contentious positions that must be reconciled and managed. Key discussion points include: benefits and risks associated with various strategic options; information requirements; and the likelihood that intervention will be costly in terms of casualties and resources.”

Setting aside if one could that calling the invasion of another country “intervention” is quintessentially Orwellian; setting aside if one could that one nation has no right to remake another nation in the first place; setting aside if one could the injuries and deaths of thousands – one is still faced with the obscene presumptuousness with which underqualified individuals set themselves on a course to do something they never had a chance of doing. We keep asking how – how could they do it? – how could personnel as negligible as George Walker Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Wolfowitz and Libby, Hadley and Addington even think they could accomplish the remaking of Iraq? What made them think they had the right to do so?

In a sense the question answers itself. Invading and trashing a country that has not attacked us is self-evidently invalid. Only unqualified, ignorant, selfish people – ignorant in spite of all their resources, their wealth and their access to information and expertise — could imagine either that they could, or that they should give it a try.

Stale Cakewalk
by digby

Everybody’s talking about the the neocon rats deserting the sinking ship article that’s coming up in the December Vanity Fair. It’s a doozy. There are two excerpts however that I think are just priceless.

First, there’s Michael Ledeen, who sent his totally inexperienced 29 year old daughter to Bagdad to work as a financial advisor for the Coalition Provisional Authority in the early days of the invasion, blaming it on the bitches:

“Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes.”

The other is Ken “Cakewalk” Adelman:

And if he, too, had his time over, Adelman says, “I would write an article that would be skeptical over whether there would be a performance that would be good enough to implement our policy. The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can’t execute it, it’s useless, just useless. I guess that’s what I would have said: that Bush’s arguments are absolutely right, but you know what, you just have to put them in the drawer marked can’t do. And that’s very different from let’s go.”

The same guy who Bob Woodward spoke to in 2004 for his book “Plan of Attack;”

Cheney read the article and congratulated Adelman on his “clever column,” which, he said, “really demolished them.” Cheney and his wife, Lynne, invited the Adelmans to join the Cheneys on April 13 for a “small private dinner” with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby.

Adelman was so happy that he burst into tears at the door of the vice president’s residence that Sunday. He hugged Cheney for the first time in the 30 years he had known him. “We’re all together,” Cheney said. “There should be no protocol; ‘let’s just talk.’”

Wolfowitz proceeded to embark on a long review of the 1991 Persian Gulf war. “Hold it, hold it,” Adelman interjected. “Let’s talk about this Gulf war. I have been blown away by how determined the president is. The war has been awesome.”

Adelman said he had been “worried to death that there would be no war as time went on and support seemed to wane.”

“Yes,” agreed the vice president. “And it all began the first minutes of the presidency, when Bush said they were going to go full steam ahead…This guy was just totally different,” Cheney said. “He just decided here’s what I want to do and I’m going to do it.”

Writes Woodward, “It was a pretty amazing accomplishment, they all agreed, particularly given the opposition to the war. Here was Brent Scowcroft, the pillar of the establishment foreign policy, widely seen as a surrogate for the president’s father. There had been James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state, insisting on a larger coalition of nations.”

Talk turned to the current secretary of state, Colin L. Powell, and there were chuckles around the table. Cheney and Wolfowitz agreed that, as Cheney put it, Powell “was someone who just followed his poll ratings and bragged about his popularity. He sure likes to be popular. Colin always had major reservations about what we were trying to do.” (Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 30, 2004)

Adelman claims that he’s just shocked about Don Rumsfeld’s performance:

“The problem here is not a selling job. The problem is a performance job.… Rumsfeld has said that the war could never be lost in Iraq, it could only be lost in Washington. I don’t think that’s true at all. We’re losing in Iraq.… I’ve worked with [Rumsfeld] three times in my life. I’ve been to each of his houses, in Chicago, Taos, Santa Fe, Santo Domingo, and Las Vegas. I’m very, very fond of him, but I’m crushed by his performance. Did he change, or were we wrong in the past? Or is it that he was never really challenged before? I don’t know. He certainly fooled me.”

Uhm no. He was always full of shit and so was Ken Adelman:

March 23, 2003

“I have no doubt we’re going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction,” Adelman said, though he acknowledged some surprise that they have not been used yet. “One thing we may find is Saddam Hussein ordered them to be used and soldiers didn’t follow the orders. The threat of use goes down every day because adherence to orders goes down.”

March 30, 2003

SEC. RUMSFELD: Not at all. If you think — let me take that, both pieces — the area in the south and the west and the north that coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.
Adelman throwing Rumsfeld under the bus is rich. There is no difference between them. They are both incompetent, ideological zealots who have never been right about anything.

Update: Kevin Drum correctly says this pathetic attempt by the neocons to separate themselves from the architects of the war should be drowned in the bathtub. Iraq was their baby:

The neocons have always been idealists, and their ideals saw full flower in the Iraq war. A show of force in one country, plenty of threats against its neighbors, a disdain for multilateral action, and an occupation designed to be a showpiece of conservative ideology rather than a serious attempt at reconstructing a society. That’s what the neocons wanted, and that’s what they got. The rest is details.

The failure of Iraq is inherent in the naive idealism and fixated ideology of neoconservatism, and shame on us if we let them get away with suggesting otherwise. This is one rehabilitation project that needs to be stopped dead in its tracks.

The starry-eyed neocons are more than idealists. They are full-on magical thinkers who actually believed that if we deposed Saddam, the mere sight of our mighty army on the field would be enough to make everyone behave exactly as we wanted them to. That what puts the neo in neoconservatism. They are idealistic in the sense that they believe we won’t have to actually kill hundreds of thousands of people but merely rattle our giant codpieces and the enemy would capitulate out of pure shock and awe.

They know even less about human nature than the paleos who, at least, are clued into to the real human id. These guys are dreamier than dreamiest liberal idealist but they love to play with big, loud toys that go boom.

Adelman does say one thing I hope is true in the VF piece:

“the idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of morality, the idea of using our power for moral good in the world”—is dead, at least for a generation.

Good riddance. Consciously letting loose the most powerful military in the world for the pupose of “sending messages” and creating democracy and freedom at the point of a gun is a ridiculous idea. We have many other powerful tools in our toolbox that work a helluva lot better and don’t include “liberating” 600,000 people from their lives.

Update: I just realized that Adelman quoted Cheney saying “it all began the first minutes of the presidency, when Bush said they were going to go full steam ahead…this guy was just totally different, he just decided here’s what I want to do and I’m going to do it.”

Six years later, hundreds of thousands of deaths later, he said almost exactly the same thing to George Stephanopoulos this week-end:

“The president has made clear what his objective is and that’s victory in Iraq. We’re full speed ahead on that…It may not be popular with the public — it doesn’t matter in the sense that we have to continue the mission and do what we think is right. And that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re not running for office. We’re doing what we think is right.”

They have not grown or changed one iota from the first moments of their presidency.

Update II: Weldon has found an amazing example of a fresh faced neocon hanging in there in Foreign Policy magazine. He thought it might be a satire. It isn’t.

What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

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