Trudy Rubin: The Mistakes that Led to the Iraq Mess

Trudy Rubin, in the Baltimore Sun (5-20-05):

If you want to understand why things are going so badly in Iraq, read the profile of Douglas Feith, the No. 3 man at the Pentagon, in the May 9 issue of The New Yorker.
Mr. Feith, who will soon step down as undersecretary of defense for policy, was the Pentagon's man in charge of planning for postwar Iraq. He disagrees that the bitter Iraqi insurgency might have been preventable and denies the administration thought the postwar would be easy. He insists that the Pentagon foresaw the "chilling contingencies" that could follow the war.

OK. Never mind that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told me in November 2002 that he would be "astonished" if there were instability in postwar Iraq and said the operable historical analogy would be post-World War II France.

Never mind that the State Department's useful Future of Iraq project was shunted aside and the Pentagon's plan for administrating the postwar started only weeks before the invasion.

Never mind that Maj. Isaiah Wilson III, the official Army historian of the Iraq campaign, has written that the U.S. military invaded Iraq without a plan for occupying and stabilizing the country.

Never mind that a brutal insurgency is still killing Iraqis and tying down 140,000 U.S. troops, even as it undermines the reconstruction of the country and the newly elected Iraqi government.

If - despite all this - the Pentagon's chief planner for the postwar thinks he was so farsighted, why is Iraq in such a mess?

The answer is crucial to understanding what can be done to improve the situation. U.S. officials must analyze past mistakes to move forward.

Mr. Feith notes that "the Marshall Plan didn't get going until 1948" and it's only two years since Baghdad fell, implying there is a parallel to the U.S. occupation of Germany, where troops remain after six decades.

The parallel is false: Nazi Germany was wholly defeated by the allies; its prostrate people had to accept U.S. occupation. Iraq's Baathists were not wholly defeated, and U.S. policies have fueled an insurgency made up mostly of Baathists and other disaffected Sunnis, along with radical Arab Islamists....