|
Official Says U.S. Rushed to War in Iraq
A top diplomat accuses the administration of sending the country to
war too soon and poorly prepared because of 'clear political
pressure.'
By Paul Richter
10/22/05 "Los
Angeles Times" -- -- WASHINGTON — A top U.S. official
for aid to Iraq has accused the Bush administration of rushing
unprepared into the 2003 invasion because of pressures from
President Bush's approaching reelection campaign.
Robin Raphel, the State Department's coordinator for Iraq
assistance, said that the invasion's timing was driven by "clear
political pressure," as well as by the need to quickly deploy the
U.S. troops that had been amassed by the Iraq border.
Soon after the invasion, Raphel said, it became clear that U.S.
officials "could not run a country we did not understand…. It was
very much amateur hour."
Her views appeared as part of an oral history project on the website
of the congressionally funded U.S. Institute of Peace. Raphel's
account is one of a number that have appeared on the website this
year as former officials who were among the first sent into
post-invasion Iraq have begun to publicly assess the first two years
of the U.S. mission.
Although the officials' views vary widely — and some are positive
about the U.S. effort — the accounts make clear that many of the
veteran diplomats who were the first to be sent to Iraq had
misgivings about the effort from the beginning, with their views
foreshadowing criticisms that followed months and even years later.
Many analysts speculated in 2003 that the timing of the invasion
might be affected by Bush's desire to complete the war before the
beginning of the 2004 political campaign. But Raphel is apparently
the first government official closely involved in the effort to
publicly level such an accusation.
Raphel, a 28-year veteran of the State Department's foreign service
and a former assistant secretary of State, said in her account that
veteran diplomats who were sent to Iraq early in 2003 shared a view
that "we were not prepared."
"We went too soon. We should have waited until we built an
international coalition, which we could have done if we had waited
six months," she said.
But the combined pressures of politics and military requirements
"made us move before we were remotely ready for the post-conflict
situation," said Raphel.
In her tour in Iraq, Raphel was one of a small group of veteran
diplomats brought in to help retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, then
L. Paul Bremer III, establish a new government. She was the senior
U.S. advisor to the ministry of trade, which was one of the most
important Iraqi government agencies because it imported food and
other goods that the central government distributed to the
population.
Raphel didn't fully explain what led to her conclusion that
reelection politics compelled the decision to go to war in March
2003. The diplomat, who plans to retire soon from the foreign
service, declined through a spokeswoman to discuss the views she
expressed in the Institute of Peace project.
Her oral history account appeared on the website in the spring, but
was little noticed until recently. It was based on an interview in
July 2004, when the United States had just returned sovereignty to
the Iraqis and was portraying the mission as highly successful.
A White House official, asked about Raphel's comments, said: "The
president has made clear, in more venues and on more occasions than
I can count, his rationale for the war." The official spoke on
condition of anonymity in keeping with White House rules.
Raphel said she had joked to colleagues early in her tour that
"within weeks, we will be on our knees to the United Nations,"
asking them to take over leadership of the mission.
She said that key decisions from those days, including those to
disband the Iraqi army and remove from government members of Saddam
Hussein's Baath Party, were dictated by the neoconservative views
held by hawkish senior administration officials and their Iraqi
exile allies.
The decisions "were ideologically based," she said. "They were not
based on analytical, historical understanding."
She said she believed officials with an ideological bent kept close
watch on the others.
"There were political people round and about," she said. "One had to
be careful."
As months passed, she said, it became clearer that the United States
could not run Iraq, and officials began making preparations to
return sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government in June 2004.
Another former official who served in Iraq with Raphel agreed in an
interview that the veteran diplomats sent in at the time shared many
of the same misgivings.
"It was a huge task and we were going about it in a fairly hapless
fashion," said David J. Dunford, a State Department Middle East
specialist who was put in charge of the Iraq foreign ministry in
early 2003.
Among the veteran diplomats in the first group into Iraq, "we all
felt pretty much the same," Dunford said.
"I don't remember thinking we went to war because of the reelection
schedule, though that may have been the case," he said. Yet, "you
could feel there was a drive to go to war no matter what, no matter
what the facts."
Dunford said he opposed the war initially because he felt "the
enormity of the task was beyond our capability."
Nevertheless, when he was asked to take part, he decided the
question was: "Are you going to help, or sit on your hands?" He
added: "I decided I would try to help."
In his oral history, Dunford said he believed the administration
didn't adequately plan for a rebuilding because it didn't believe
that the job would be a U.S. responsibility.
At the time of the war, there was a "great struggle between the
State Department and the Pentagon about who would run post-war
Iraq," and the Pentagon eventually won, Dunford said, agreeing with
many assessments of administration divisions in the war's early
days.
"Basically, their strategy was we would be showered with flowers,
and the Iraqis would welcome us and we would turn over power within
weeks to a government headed by [Iraqi exile] Ahmad Chalabi," he
said. "And we would get out of Dodge."
But Dunford added that "that strategy sort of fell apart as reality
set in" and senior U.S. officials came to the view that handing the
country immediately to the exile leadership would not work.
Others have criticized the involvement of Defense Department
planners. In a speech in Washington on Wednesday, Lawrence
Wilkerson, who was former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's chief
of staff, charged there was a "cabal" led by Vice President Dick
Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to usurp foreign
policy decisions.
"Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in
secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the
consequences," said Wilkerson, a frequent critic of the Bush
administration's foreign policy and handling of intelligence.
Government veterans who were sent to Iraq as part of the U.S.
mission also were convinced that "we cannot remake other countries
in our image in terms of democracy or capitalism or things like
that," said Dunford in his oral history account. "That should come
naturally from the citizens of the country."
The oral histories show that, in the chaos of Iraq after the
invasion, American officials didn't always have to follow high-level
decisions they opposed.
David Nummy, a former assistant U.S. Treasury secretary who was
assigned to run the Iraqi Finance Ministry, told in his account
about how he simply ignored the "de-Baathification" order, which he
believed would lead to chaos.
"I came to the conclusion that if I had executed the
de-Baathification order, it would unravel everything that had been
accomplished," Nummy said. "So I essentially ignored the order."
Yet he added, "It was not clear to me that there was a really high
degree of importance being placed on implementing the order; it was
more important to announce" it.
In another of the oral history accounts, a Defense Intelligence
Agency official who served 13 months in postwar Iraq said that in
seeking transformation of the region, the American "strategic
assumptions … were very wrong."
Col. Philip J. Dermer, who helped organize local governments and the
Iraq defense ministry, said the United States needed far more
advance planning.
"We barely got into the planning for what would happen afterward,"
he said. "And by the time we did, it was too much, too fast, ad
hoc."
Other former officials who gave oral histories praised many of the
early U.S. decisions, as well as the efforts of U.S. and Iraqi
leaders, and predicted a more positive outcome for the mission.
Frederick C. Smith, a retired Pentagon official who then was senior
advisor to the Iraq Defense Ministry, defended the de-Baathification
program and said: "I don't think anybody could have done a better
job" than Bremer, the American official who headed the now-disbanded
Coalition Provisional Authority, a temporary governing agency.
Even so, Smith said, the United States needed more troops, better
security and advance planning.
"One lesson is clear, he said. "We should have been better prepared
with better planning."
Times staff writer T. Christian Miller in Washington contributed
to this report.
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
Translate
this page
(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.
Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the
originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.) |
