The
New York Times has an extensive article up on their website, for print publication on Sunday, about a new version of a sadly repetitive theme: Bush administration has to perform a difficult task. Rather than listen to the experts who have a clue about said task, they turn to political people and sweetheart deals with shady corporations.
This time round, it's the Iraqi police force, and the attempts to rebuild it after the invasion.
The headline says it all, though in a rather understated way:
Law and Disorder
Misjudgments Marred U.S. Plans for Iraqi Police
"Misjudgements" is a nice way to say "mind-blowing screw-up".
As chaos swept Iraq after the American invasion in 2003, the Pentagon began its effort to rebuild the Iraqi police with a mere dozen advisers. Overmatched from the start, one was sent to train a 4,000-officer unit to guard power plants and other utilities. A second to advise 500 commanders in Baghdad. Another to organize a border patrol for the entire country.
That's
one adviser to organize an entire border patrol (really inspires confidence in Administration efforts on
our southern border...)
Before the war, the Bush administration dismissed as unnecessary a plan backed by the Justice Department to rebuild the police force by deploying thousands of American civilian trainers. Current and former administration officials said they were relying on a Central Intelligence Agency assessment that said the Iraqi police were well trained. The C.I.A. said its assessment conveyed nothing of the sort.
It's like there's some highly-classified Administration document, the Fuck-Up Checklist. Ignore the experts and contigency plans? Check. Blame it on the CIA? Check. Outsource the job to a corporation? Check (see below).
After Baghdad fell, when a majority of Iraqi police officers abandoned their posts, a second proposal by a Justice Department team calling for 6,600 police trainers was reduced to 1,500, and then never carried out. During the first eight months of the occupation -- as crime soared and the insurgency took hold -- the United States deployed 50 police advisers in Iraq.
Against the objections of Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, the long-range plan was eventually reduced to 500 trainers. One result was a police captain from North Carolina having 40 Americans to train 20,000 Iraqi police across four provinces in southern Iraq.
So, let's review. First, Justice said "you'll need 6600 people". Then, that number was magically reduced to 1500. Then, we actually sent 50. By way of comparison, I grew up in a fairly quiet town of 50,000 people (Brookline, MA), which has a police force
three times larger than that. And yes, there's a difference between a training cadre and an actual force, but still.
Obvious statement of the day:
While even a viable police force alone could not have stopped the insurgency and lawlessness that eventually engulfed Iraq, officials involved acknowledge that the early, halting effort to rebuild the force was a missed opportunity.
I'm torn between two theories. Either the administration truly thought that we'd be greeted by candy and flowers, or they
just didn't care if Iraq descended into chaos. Or, if you prefer, stupidity vs. evil.
Now, we come to the key question, which always has to be asked when talking about the Administration. Who's making money?
Field training of the Iraqi police, the most critical element of the effort, was left to DynCorp International, a company based in Irving, Tex., that received $750 million in contracts. The advisers, many of them retired officers from small towns, said they arrived in Iraq and quickly found themselves caught between poorly staffed American government agencies, company officials focused on the bottom line and thousands of Iraqi officers clamoring for help.
So, who is DynCorp? Well, Google can
help answer that question. In particular, note the
third hit on that search, which states that:
Already armed DynCorp employees make up the core of the police force in Bosnia. DynCorp troops protect Afghan president Hamid Karzai, while DynCorp planes and pilots fly the defoliation missions over the coca crops in Colombia. Back home in the United States Dyncorp is in charge of the border posts between the US and Mexico, many of the Pentagon's weapons-testing ranges and the entire Air Force One fleet of presidential planes and helicopters. The company also reviews security clearance applications of military and civilian personnel for the Navy.
[...]
Earlier that year Ben Johnston, a DynCorp aircraft mechanic for Apache and Blackhawk helicopters in Kosovo, filed a lawsuit against his employer. The suit alleged that that in the latter part of 1999 Johnson "learned that employees and supervisors from DynCorp were engaging in perverse, illegal and inhumane behavior [and] were purchasing illegal weapons, women, forged passports and [participating in] other immoral acts."
And notice that the US-Mexico border is one of the areas of their operation.
Back to the NY Times. DynCorp, despite the large amount of money that was paid, didn't do a very good job. So, the military took over and promptly made things worse:
When it became clear that the civilian effort by DynCorp was faltering, American military officials took over police training in 2004, relying on heavily armed commando units that had been established by the Iraqis. Within a year, members of the Sunni Muslim population said some units had been infiltrated by Shiite Muslim militias and were kidnapping, torturing and executing scores of Sunni Muslims.
And now, after years of insurgency, they're trying what should have been done in the first place:
This spring, three years after administration officials rejected the large American-led field training effort, American military commanders are adopting that very approach. Declaring 2006 the year of the police, the Pentagon is dispatching a total of 3,000 American soldiers and DynCorp contractors to train and mentor police recruits and officers across Iraq.
Of course, it may be too late to be very effective now, with the insurgency solidly established and chaos spread across the land.
It's not that there wasn't a plan to do this pre-war. In March 2003,
General Garner raised an ambitious plan by Richard Mayer, a Justice Department police-training expert on his staff, to send 5,000 American and foreign advisers to Iraq. Mr. Mayer said his detailed, inch-and-a-half-thick plan included organizational tables, budgets and schedules.
See, that's the sort of
planning that competent organizations do. During WWII, planning for the post-war era started
years before the war actually ended. But, what happened to these nice plans? Take a guess:
ut at the meeting with N.S.C. officials, General Garner's proposal was met with skepticism by council staff members, who contended that such a large training effort was not needed. One vocal opponent was Mr. Miller.
"He didn't think it was necessary," General Garner said in an interview.
Mr. Miller, who left the government last year, confirmed his opposition. He said the assessment by the C.I.A. led administration officials to believe that Iraq's police were capable of maintaining order. Douglas J. Feith, then the Defense Department's under secretary for policy, said in an interview that the C.I.A.'s prewar assessment deemed Iraq's police professional, an appraisal that events proved "fundamentally wrong."
(Miller was a National Security Council bigwig in charge of Iraq security planning at the time). And, let me remind you, that's Douglas "stupidest man alive" Feith, trying to shift the blame on to the CIA. The CIA tells a
slightly different story:
But Paul Gimigliano, a spokesman for the C.I.A., said the agency's assessment warned otherwise. "We had no reliable information on individual officers or police units," he said. The "C.I.A.'s written assessment did not judge that the Iraqi police could keep order after the war. In fact, the assessment talked in terms of creating a new force."
I think that the history of the past few years has shown that, in general, when the Administration disagrees with the CIA, the CIA has usually proven to be correct. I'm guessing this will prove to be another such case.
Even before General Garner presented his case, Pentagon officials were criticizing reconstruction efforts known as nation building. In a speech on Feb. 14, 2003, Mr. Rumsfeld warned that international peacekeeping operations could create "a culture of dependence" and that a long-term foreign presence in a country "can be unnatural."
At the White House meeting, Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, said the administration would revisit the issue after Mr. Hussein was removed from power, General Garner said. The meeting then moved on to other issues.
They would "revisit the issue". In other words, don't worry about actually planning. We'll wing it when the time comes. The words of each verse are different, but every time, the chorus is the same.
Soon after, General Garner was out, and Paul Bremer took over.
Then, the invasion actually happened. There's a large chunk of the article which I'm going to skip over, detailing the problems of the poor souls on the ground actually trying to train a new Iraqi force. Go read it.
One minor problem, it seems, is that people forgot that you have to pay for things like training a new force.
Officials at the State and Defense Departments blame one another for the police plan unraveling.
"We and DynCorp were ready to go by June," said a senior State Department official involved in the police training effort who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to comment. "But no money was provided for this purpose."
Mr. Miller, the former National Security Council official, said Mr. Bremer never made the need for field trainers a major issue in Washington.
"We had such a golden opportunity in the first few months," he said. "These people were so willing. Even the Sunni policemen wanted change."
Says it all, really. I wish we hadn't invaded the place in the first place, but once that decision was made, we as a country had a moral imperative to do our best to not muck things up. For this, if nothing else, George Bush and the rest of his administration are damned.
The joys of outsourcing:
Government investigators are examining reports of criminal fraud by DynCorp employees, including the sale of ammunition earmarked for the Iraqi police, said a senior government official who requested anonymity because the investigation is continuing. After one of its subcontractors working at the police training academy in Jordan stole fuel worth $600,000 in 2003, the company failed to install proposed fraud controls, federal auditors said.
And, finally, the article closes with
By then there was a growing sense among American officials that the civilian training program was not working, and the United States military came up with its own plan. It was the Americans' third strategy for training the Iraqi police, and it would run into the worst problems of all. Basra was just the beginning.
Why do I get the sinking feeling that there's going to be worse to come from the NY Times in a day or so?
Anyway, go read the whole (long) thing. Depressing as hell, but it needs to be read.
-dms