Iraq: what went wrong?

 Western polls in the year after the invasion of Iraq showed that 82 percent of Iraqis opposed the occupation and 57 percent wanted foreign troops to leave immediately. US troops were widely seen as "lacking in respect for the country's people, religion and traditions" and "indiscriminate in their use of force when civilians are nearby." Five percent or less of Iraqis believed the U.S. invaded "to assist the Iraqi people," destroy WMDs, or establish democracy, while 43% said the aim was "to rob Iraq's oil." More than 50 percent said attacks on US troops were "justified" or "sometimes justified."  Two years later the results are virtually the same. A secret poll, undertaken for the UK Ministry of Defence and obtained by The Sunday Telegraph, shows that 45 per cent of Iraqi citizens support attacks on the US/UK occupation forces, fewer than one per cent think these forces are helping to improve security, 82 per cent are "strongly opposed" to their presence and 67 per cent of Iraqis feel less secure because of the occupation.  

 What has gone wrong? The US neo-cons argued that military force against Saddam Hussein would be welcomed by Iraqis and a pro-US "democracy" readily imposed. According to the book by Washington Post reporter, Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War, this was never likely since Iraqis combined national pride with a profound mistrust of the US and UK rooted in the colonial experience, America’s near-total support for Israel and the near-genocidal sanctions they had imposed on the country after the 1991 Gulf war. According to a report by Anthony Cordesman, the most prominent expert on Gulf security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (Iraq's Evolving Insurgency),  and other critics of the conduct of the occupation, the post-invasion breakdown of security, infrastructure, and public health, the mass unemployment inflicted by the dissolution of the army, purge of the bureaucracy and public sector layoffs, the death of perhaps 100,000 people, mostly civilians, in the first year of war and occupation, the halving of GNP/capita compared to 2001, the imposition of a puppet government of mostly exiles without popular support in Iraq, the flooding of the country with foreign mercenaries and contractors, the open avowal of the intention to occupy it for at least three years and to acquire permanent basing rights, and the attempt, in violation of the Geneva convention, to privatize and sell off Iraq's oil assets to Western buyers --all ensured that Iraqis would view the foreign armies as occupiers, not liberators.

 For these experts, the self-defeating conduct of the US in Iraq, far from being a mere "mistake," owes everything to the influence of Rumsfeld’s Pentagon and the neo-cons. Cordesman argues that US decisions were so flawed because the politicians by-passed the interagency decision-making process and ignored the experts in favor of the neo-con ideologues and exile groups and because of Rumsfeld's pressure on the military to under-man the invasion and the Pentagon's failure to plan for nation-building. George Packer, writing in Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, (NY: Farrar Straus Girous, 2005), reveals that the Pentagon and neo-cons eschewed post-war planning because, in exposing the difficulties the US would face, such planning might have obstructed their drive to war. He writes that "The arrogance phase [of the US war] was going in undermanned, under-resourced, [expecting to] skim off the top layer of leadership, take control of a functioning state, and be out by six weeks and get the oil funds to pay for it.” Falah Aljibury contends that it was the plan to sell off Iraq's oil, which ultimately led to the insurgency and attacks on US occupying forces. "We saw an increase in the bombing of oil facilities, pipelines, built on the premise that privatization is coming," he reported.

 The US responded to the growing resistance it encountered with tactics pioneered by Israel in occupied Palestine: bombing and firing on densely populated urban areas; demolishing homes, collective punishment of villages, herding of thousands into detention camps, food blockades of suspected insurgent areas, not to mention the "daily humiliations and occasional brutalities that come with the presence of an occupying army."   A US commander infamously declared: "With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them.”   However, this has only inflamed the insurgency and apparently lost the battle to win Iraqi “hearts and minds.”