Four turning points: The Iraq war that might have been
For all that, however, the tribal leaders were offering to cooperate. At a time when suicide bombers were streaming to Iraq to wage war against the Americans, leaders of the Albu Nimr tribe wanted to help secure Iraq’s border with Syria and Jordan. Even in Fallujah, a hotbed of insurgent attacks, there were tribal leaders who were reaching out to the Americans.
“Sunnis in Al-Anbar have proposed plans to increase local security and facilitate economic growth by employing former soldiers to patrol the Iraqi border,” the memo noted. “While Sunni leaders aim to improve the quality of life for their constituencies, they also hope these initiatives will increase their influence in post-Saddam Iraq.”
Ignoring the Sunni’s offers carried considerable risks. “If they perceive failure in engaging the Coalition or the GC they may take order actions to include creating alternate governing and security institutions, working with anti-Coalition forces, or engaging in criminal activity to ensure the prosperity and security of their tribes.”
The memo was ignored. And when Col. Carol Stewart, the head of the intelligence plans section at Central Command, tried to advance a similar plan to have tribal leaders police their own areas — her plan to establish the Anbar Rangers would have cost less than $3 million for the first half 2004 — she got nowhere. Bremer’s team made clear that it did not plan to make the tribes a formal part of Iraq’s security structure.
Blowback
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At this point how the Bush Wars might not have been a disaster is about as useful to us as theories on how chumpthreads and HotAirLoon might be something besides willful retards in need of public flogging.
MelonCollie on March 13, 2013 at 9:52 PM
Well lets just consider this first instance, you recall the story of the frog and scorpion, this is what happened to the tribesmen of Anbar, when they invited the Salafists into their tent,
narciso on March 13, 2013 at 9:59 PM
Yep. A small nuke over Baghdad and one in Tora Bora….
Missed opportunities.
catmman on March 13, 2013 at 10:06 PM
You can go back to any war and point to a recommendation written somewhere by someone that if followed might have changed the war. Anyway, we still won, but we didn’t leave a residual force so we will see how that works out.
Wigglesworth on March 13, 2013 at 10:22 PM
Our only mistake, was not setting the population free while achieving our objectives, and then getting the heck out of Dodge and leaving freedom in the hands of those who live there to defend it.
If they wanted to be free, they would be so.
However, after several years of keeping them free, listening to them complain about us, we are now going back in to keep them free.
They don’t want to be free.
Let’s just be sure to tell their next dictator, “screw with us and we’ll do to you what we did to the dictator before you, your move”.
Nation building is a mistake. Not all of us want to be free and less of us are willing to fight for it.
Hog Wild on March 13, 2013 at 10:25 PM
Bomb from afar.
Period.
No boots on the ground where the people are poisoned by the Koran.
It’s a goddamned fools’ errand.
And got thousands of Americans killed to establish 2 SHARIA LAW ISLAMIC STATES.
SHEER FRIKKIN’ LUNACY.
profitsbeard on March 13, 2013 at 11:43 PM
Shoulda, woulda, coulda.
You got squat because you didn’t understand Islam. Now you get squat because you are not allowed to understand Islam. Soon you will get buggered for your ignorance.
BL@KBIRD on March 14, 2013 at 12:43 AM
Bremer’s policies were based on directives coming out of DC that were themselves based on a fantasy world view of Iraq. There is no way the Sunni tribes were going to be involved in *anything* as long as Saddam was still at large. Saddam was captured in December of 2003, if Col. Stewart made her suggestions while Saddam was still at large, that was absolutely not going to go anyway.
Also, even for some period of time after Saddam was captured, there was a certain inertia to a lot of these policies in that the basic framework and basic policy direction isn’t something that was going to be changed 180 degrees in one month or one quarter. The overall philosophy around which decisions were made was going to continue for a while. It takes time to change it at the top and it takes time for that change in philosophy to trickle out to the line units. You can put out paper, but it takes a while for human beings to change their mindset. Prior to Saddam’s capture, Sunnis were regarded as more likely enemies than friends. There was the potential of Saddam getting across the border into Syria and running a government in exile.
It wasn’t until Saddam was captured and enough people had rotated out of Baghdad and new people rotated in that someone could approach Rumsfeld and try to sell him on using the tribes. Rumsfeld wasn’t necessarily micromanaging day to day operations but he was micromanaging many of the higher level decisions that should have been left to the military and he was determined, in my opinion, to use the “small footprint” approach *without* the help of the Sunnis. When Bush decided to “go big” with the surge, that was the end of Rumsfeld’s approach and he left.
crosspatch on March 14, 2013 at 2:45 AM
meant: that was absolutely not going to go anywhere.
crosspatch on March 14, 2013 at 2:48 AM
I kept an unopened copy of the Chicago tribune from the issue that covered Saddam’s capture. I agree with BL@CKBIRD, without policy that coherently deals with a reprobate system like mohammedianism, any action is doomed to fail. Coulter said it best.
tom daschle concerned on March 14, 2013 at 7:48 AM
So basically “Boooooosh!” since Bremer was his guy.
roy_batty on March 14, 2013 at 9:16 AM