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The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End
Books: CookBooks: Craig Claiborne: Item 8
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The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without Endby Peter W. Galbraith
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21 of 23 people found the following review helpful: Insightful - Documents our Arrogance and Ignorance!, July 8, 2006 Reviewer:Pragmatist (Phoenix, AZ.) - The U.S. invaded Iraq with grand ambitions to bring it democracy, achieve good relations with Israel, and thereby transform the Middle East (eg. Syria and Iran would be the next market-oriented democracies). Instead the country is plagued by insurgency and is in the opening phases of a civil war. The difficulty in getting the factions to work together is underlined by the facts that fewer than one in ten voted for parties that crossed ethnic or religious lines, and after the election it took more than four months to choose the government's top officials. Meanwhile, North Korea expelled the U.N. nuclear inspectors, withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and reprocessed previously monitored plutonium into material for 6-8 nuclear weapons. This occurred after Bush II accused North Korea in '02 of violating the '94 agreement to freeze all nuclear activity (no uranium enrichment facility was operational at that time) and cut off fuel oil shipments. As for Iran, it had been coooperating with the U.S. in Afghanistan by sharing intelligence on al-Qaeda, preventing their entry into Iran, and allowing search-rescue efforts to use their territory - all that ended after Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech. Two months prior to invading Iraq, Bush II met with three Iraqi-Americans. They reported he didn't even know about the Sunni and Shiite sects, or their strong hostility. Ignorance was further encouraged by prohibiting General Franks from contacting General Zinni for his ideas on post-war planning, and General Garner's staff was carefully vetted to ensure that only "right thinkers" were utilized. Problems began immediately after Baghdad fell - despite administration officials being warned, the National Museum (its collections went back to the beginning of human civilization) was looted while U.S. forces watched; later Wolfowitz claimed all but 38 artifacts were recovered, ignoring thousands smashed and taken from storerooms. Similarly, the National Library - a repository of Iraq's recent history was burned. Elsewhere almost two tons of Iraqi yellowcake was looted post invasion, again while U.S. troops were nearby; Saddam's supposed recent yellowcake acquisitions were part of the justification for the invasion. Looters also took high explosives used to initiate nuclear explosions. Personnel files with names/addresses of Saddam Fedayeen (those attacking U.S. forces) were found and reported to Wolfowitz - again no action. The U.S. had simply assumed that Iraq's police and bureaucrats would report for work the day after Baghdad fell - despite the warnings of experts. General Garner's arrival was delayed about two weeks by General Franks - regardless, upon arrival Garner quickly began efforts to turn over Iraq to Iraqis and hold elections. However, he was quickly replaced by Paul Bremer - one of his first actions was to cancel meetings on Iraqi elections, and most knowledgeable Iraq leaders cite that point as when Iraqis began to see the U.S. as occupiers instead of liberators. Galbraith ultimately asks "What would an Iraqi government govern?" Answering his own question, he contends that it would not include the Kurdish area (Baghdad ministries are not even allowed to open offices there), the Shiite south (now run by clerics, militias, and religious parties as an Islamic state), nor Baghdad or the Sunni Arab heartland (will continue to be battlegrounds). Galbraith's Recommendations: Help the Kurds rule on their own, pull out of southern Iraq (would also give us more military strength vs. Iran), and put Sunni army/police in charge of Sunni areas while maintaining U.S. emergency reaction forces in the Kurdish areas.
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Galbraith, a leading commentator on Iraq thanks to his recent articles in the New York Review of Books, presents a clear-eyed and persuasive case against the Bush administration's nation-building project there. As a former U.S. diplomat with long experience in Iraq, he offers an insider's view of the American occupation's failures—the poor preparation for post-invasion chaos, the cluelessness about Iraqi politics, the incompetence and corruption of the occupation authority—while advancing a deeper critique. With Saddam's dictatorship and the Baathist party and army that supported it gone, he contends that Iraq is irrevocably splitting into a pro-American Kurdistan in the north, a pro-Iranian Shiite south and an ungovernable Sunni center. America "cannot put the country back together again and it cannot stop the civil war," he insists. Deeply skeptical of attempts to reunify the Iraqi state, he proposes that the U.S. withdraw from Arab Iraq and "facilitate an amicable divorce" between the fractious sections. Galbraith advised the Iraqi Kurds during recent constitutional negotiations and is palpably sympathetic to their national aspirations; his argument sometimes feels like a brief for Kurdish separatism. Still, Galbraith's authoritative grasp of the issues and his cogent, forthright call for disengagement ensure that the book will move into the center of the debate over American policy in Iraq. (July 17)
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Book Description
The End of Iraq, definitive, tough-minded, clear-eyed, describes America's failed strategy toward that country and what must be done now.
The United States invaded Iraq with grand ambitions to bring it democracy and thereby transform the Middle East. Instead, Iraq has disintegrated into three constituent components: a pro-western Kurdistan in the north, an Iran-dominated Shiite entity in the south, and a chaotic Sunni Arab region in the center. The country is plagued by insurgency and is in the opening phases of a potentially catastrophic civil war.
George W. Bush broke up Iraq when he ordered its invasion in 2003. The United States not only removed Saddam Hussein, it also smashed and later dissolved the institutions by which Iraq's Sunni Arab minority ruled the country: its army, its security services, and the Baath Party. With these institutions gone and irreplaceable, the basis of an Iraqi state has disappeared.
The End of Iraq describes the administration's strategic miscalculations behind the war as well as the blunders of the American occupation. There was the failure to understand the intensity of the ethnic and religious divisions in Iraq. This was followed by incoherent and inconsistent strategies for governing, the failure to spend money for reconstruction, the misguided effort to create a national army and police, and then the turning over of the country's management to Republican political loyalists rather than qualified professionals.
As a matter of morality, Galbraith writes, the Kurds of Iraq are no less entitled to independence than are Lithuanians, Croatians, or Palestinians. And if the country's majority Shiites want to run their own affairs, or even have their own state, on what democratic principle should they be denied? If the price of a unified Iraq is another dictatorship, Galbraith writes in The End of Iraq, it is too high a price to pay.
The United States must focus now, not on preserving or forging a unified Iraq, but on avoiding a spreading and increasingly dangerous and deadly civil war. It must accept the reality of Iraq's breakup and work with Iraq's Shiites, Kurds, and Sunni Arabs to strengthen the already semi-independent regions. If they are properly constituted, these regions can provide security, though not all will be democratic.
There is no easy exit from Iraq for America. We have to relinquish our present strategy -- trying to build national institutions when there is in fact no nation. That effort is doomed, Galbraith argues, and it will only leave the United States with an open-ended commitment in circumstances of uncontrollable turmoil.
Peter Galbraith has been in Iraq many times over the last twenty-one years during historic turning points for the country: the Iran-Iraq War, the Kurdish genocide, the 1991 uprising, the immediate aftermath of the 2003 war, and the writing of Iraq's constitutions. In The End of Iraq, he offers many firsthand observations of the men who are now Iraq's leaders. He draws on his nearly two decades of involvement in Iraq policy working for the U.S. government to appraise what has occurred and what will happen. The End of Iraq is the definitive account of this war and its ramifications.
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