Wolfie’s Hindsight
By Via Phil Carter and Eli Lake, Paul Wolfowitz on the mistakes of the occupation:
“One was enough troops for the major combat. A lot of people said we didn’t have it, and obviously we did. There was a very difficult balance that had to be struck between surprise, which meant a smaller force, and enough troops or a lot of troops, which meant a much slower force and potential of many disastrous consequences. I think I said in my comments quoting Doug’s book, no one anticipated this insurgency, a lot of people were slow to recognize it once it started,” Mr. Wolfowitz said. “And I do think a real failure — I assign responsibility all over the place — was not having enough reliable Iraqi troops early enough and fast enough, because I think a sensible counterinsurgency strategy would not be to flood the country with 300,000 Americans, but rather to build up Iraqi forces among the population.”
Phil concentrates on the “no one anticipated the insurgency”, but the bookends of that claim struck me as even less defensible. First, we needed a small force so that we could surprise the Iraqis? Uh…. seriously? Paul, we assembled an army in a neighboring state, then told them pretty much exactly when we were going to invade. There wasn’t any “surprise”; they knew where and when we were going to attack. This was the least surprising attack in modern military memory. And no, a large force doesn’t have to move slowly; elements can move very quickly, while other elements perform necessary mopping up, support, and occupation duties.
Possibly even more egregious is the claim about Iraqi forces. What exactly is Wolfowitz talking about? Was he planning to borrow a hundred thousand followers of Ahmed Chalabi, trained in counter-insurgency and ready to fight the good fight, from Imaginationland? Is this a slap at Bremer for disbanding the Iraqi Army? I think this latter can correctly be called a blunder, but getting the Army back into the barracks wouldn’t have solved the problems of looting and general chaos that immediately followed the invasion, and in any case the Iraqi Army was not well known for its counter-insurgency capability. Or is he proposing that we could have done in a few months what we’ve failed to do thus far in five years, which is to create a large, capable, loyal Iraqi Army from scratch?
It’s five years down the road, and I still find that I can be surprised by how inept our best and brightest turned out to be.