Mistakes in Iraq

The list of mistakes in Iraq is long winded, so this will be a long post. Contrary to what seems to be popular belief, I'm not going to say that the first mistake was going in there to begin with. I believe very strongly that America should be there. It was a mistake to go in there for the reasons we did, but we should be there nonetheless. Below is a incomplete list of mistakes in handling Iraq dating from 1990 forward.

• The first mistake was not taking Saddam out of power the first time we were there. There's no telling how much easier it would have been to rebuild that area before 9/11. Before 9/11 there wouldn't have been so much of an incentive for foreign fighters to head into Iraq for the express purpose of fighting Americans.
• Our second mistake, failing that was for us to not have helped the Shiite rebellion shortly after we left Iraq, while we still had a strong troop base in the country. We promised our help then, and then watched from Kuwait's borders as they got slaughtered. Had we helped them then, before Ahmedinejad had control of Iran, and again before 9/11, by the time 9/11 rolled around the country would more than likely have already been stabilized and would have been a great ally in the "War on Terror". Not to mention the money we are spending there now could have been spent elsewhere focusing on other state sponsors of Terrorism.
• Instead of pushing for WMD's and Terrorism reasons for going to war with Iraq, Bush should have gone with the things that we had no doubt about in his reasoning for war. Saddam's balking at all of the UN Sanctions and his obvious and known human rights abuses. These would have garnered enough public support to win his case, without the terrible public fallout of finding out that WMD's didn't exist (or were removed before we got there).

These next three are probably the most aggravating factors on the fighting we are seeing in Iraq today. Any one of them would have greatly reduced what our troops, and the Iraqi populace is going through, and all three of them could have very likely stopped most of this from occurring in the first place. These all deal with the recent invasion and aftermath.

• Troop levels. In 1990 when we initially were helping to liberate Kuwait (Read: Trying to stop Saddam from invading Saudi Arabia) we had a total of over 600,000 troops on the ground. These troops were only there for the purpose of pushing Saddam's forces out of Kuwait and back to Iraqi borders. Kuwait is approximately 18,000 square kilometers. That's 33 troops/square kilometer. Now, with a much larger span of goals we have 150,000 troops in Iraq, which is 437,000 square kilometers. That is 0.34 troops/square kilometer. Granted much of that is desert, so the concentration is different, but still we are trying to control an entire country that has broken down to the foundation with a third of the troops we used just to push that country back to it's own borders.
• Disbanding Saddam's Army. This fatal error just put 400,000 trained soldiers, many of them with families to feed (and note an Iraqi family on average is more than twice the size of the average American family) on the streets, jobless. Why this was done is beyond me. Sure they were all Baathists, you couldn't get a job in Iraq unless you were. Much like everyone in Germany was a Nazi on paper, but not all of them really were. Sure there were some loyalists there, but a good number of them were patriots, who had seen and been through enough war to give them a national identity. So you shake up the leadership circles and officers, put them all through vigorous ethical retraining, arrest the known human rights abusers, and start with a solid base. Had we not committed this error, the previous error would not have been such a large issue. Where does a trained soldier go to make money when he loses his job? My guess would be the people who are paying you to blow yourself up and kill American soldiers and Iraqi civilians.
• Giving all of the rebuilding contracts to American companies. Roughly 30% of Iraq is now unemployed. Before America came did Iraq not have any companies that built their refineries, schools, and other facilities? Did they not have engineers and construction firms? How upset would you be to see a Russian come to America and rebuild us when we have perfectly capable craftsmen of our own who need work? Upset enough to turn to violence against them to keep your family fed? Giving these jobs to them would give them reason not to become an insurgent. Who wants to go to work all day just to go back at night and blow up their project? Who needs to turn to illegal activities when their legal activities let them make ends meet?

How do we correct those mistakes? Not easily. Many of them are uncorrectable. I believe that an increase in troop presence would help. It would give them more targets yes, but I think it would greatly improve daily life for the Iraqis. They might see an M1A1 on every street corner, but at least they wouldn't have to wait around for the Military to respond, they would be ready at any moment. And yes, slowly we could start reworking all of those contracts to companies in Iraq, give people jobs, and get more of our civilians out of the way.

I read a story recently about a Baghdad company that built bridges after we attacked Iraq in '91. They quoted the US an estimate of $300,000 to rebuild a bridge that an American company then estimated for multiple millions of dollars. Which one got the contract? Guess.