Customer Reviews

Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

To all those who have written reviews here before me: I'm criticizing this book and I'm neither a Republican nor a Democrat. I'm a native Iraqi. David Phillips is no doubt an insider and his book unveils a lot of the confusion within the administration on how to handle Iraq. This book is good as an assessment of the performance of the administration at large. I don't believe it is good to explain the American failure in Iraq.
From an Iraqi perspective, America's endeavor in Iraq came to a bitter end not because of State and DoD rivalry. America failed because both State and DoD didn't understand Iraq's language, culture, sociology and anthropology. Failure happened because experts like Phillips analyzed and assessed the situation there from the comfort of their offices inside the beltway in Washington DC.
Before writing on Losing Iraq, try first Understanding it. Phillips's book should be put in this context. Still, the book has good information on the need to get the administration's house in order if the United States is to regain its leading role in the world, yet Losing Iraq falls shorts on debating the Iraq issue from outside American partisanship.

I'm inclined to be generous with the stars because of the number of clearly orchestrated negative reviews, all using identical language. Nevertheless, Losing Iraq demonstrates what happens when the object of foriegn policy is considered irrelevant, and the only consideration is ideology. It becomes clear that history, national identity and circumstances were really of no interest to the neo-cons, who were anxious to use Iraq as a proving ground for their interventionist philosophy. It also shows how alienated the policy professionals have become from those who drink the administration's kool-aid.

Sad but true. Entering a war with dishonorable motives (i.e., lying about WMD and then changing war goals to nation building and establishment of democracy) only gets the imperialist into more trouble. Fortunately for the US, it had enough money to get through this little bush war, but imagine what one trillion dollars could do to alleviate poverty and ignorance in America over the past eight years. The American political class has the farsightedness of a common mole. Frank Wallis explored similar themes in his _Iraq 2003: Causes and Consequences of an Imperial Expedition_ (Editions Tour Blanche, 2007). ISBN: 978-0963833211.

This book is an insider's look at the building of the American occupation regime in conquered Iraq. As such it is full of detailed criticism of this process from the inside - the shortsightedness of the occupation viceroy, of the President, the difficulty in finding worthy native collaborators who would perform as expected. As a nuts-and-bolts account of the US invasion of Iraq, and installation of its satellite regime, it's an interesting and useful addition. This is why I have given it four stars.

It loses a star, however, because it is after all a rationalization of conquest. The author's final sentence - "Winning the peace requires cooperation from freedom's beneficiaries" - shows the moral obtuseness of the entire American colonization project. At no time does Phillips show awareness of the most basic truth: that the United States has no right to be in Iraq. The statement also betrays the author's complete lack of contact with Iraqi reality. During the same period covered by Phillips' negotiations, journalist Nir Rosen was gathering ground-level material for his book, "In the Belly of the Green Bird." Rosen encountered and described an entirely different universe from Phillips' smoke-filled drawing-rooms and idealist banter - militias run rampant, the doors of peaceful citizens kicked in by gun-wielding US occupation forces, insubordinate natives shot for insufficient submission, the whiff of civil war arising from these corpses and sweeping over the land. While Phillips quotes Kurdish leaders on the freedom and opportunity the American regime has brought, Rosen took a deep look into Kurdistan during the 2005 elections to see few Arabs voting and Kurdish leaders plotting ethnic cleansing. Both books should be read side-by-side for a truly eye-opening experience: not just as a corrective to David L. Phillips, but to the entire Wilsonian naivite he embodies.

Iraq was never America's to lose, and the true fiasco was assuming the moral right to believe otherwise.

A nagging question hovers in the air over this volume, regarding Bush and the Pentagon - "How On Earth Did They Get Away With It?". Phillips gives us a seasoned expert's analysis of the complexities and hard work of nation-building, and documents the blunders and missed opportunities of an American Administration long on faith and need for control but short on fact-based analysis and thinking-in-depth. Phillips was one of the talented nation-doctors shunted to the sidelines while the barbershop crowd busied themselves with leeches and bleeding. This book will figure prominently when We The People finally do a "lessons learned" study of the Iraq adventure and what went wrong.

Did you know that there was a plan for occupying Iraq? This plan was hatched in 1998. But President Bush ignored it because the neocon cabal told him to. Mistake after mistake was made and our soldiers have paid the price, as well as our taxpayers. Eight billion dollars is unaccounted for in the reconstruction efforts. But, our media cannot be critical of the president. We're in a time of war, right?

Republicans who support this president, you have no credibility. If it had been a Democrat who misled the public to start a war, a Democrat who did not know about the different Iraqi factions, a Democrat who was at the helm when 9-11 came down, a Democrat who OKed violating the Geneva Convention and a Democrat who sent our kids off to die as an "experiment," you would be calling for his impeachment.

To you, being Republican is a religion - a religion that is anti-intellect and entirely in the realm of faith over reason. And your hatred of the enemy (Democrats) has clouded your judgement and any shred of reasoning capability you once held.

No wonder you hate a book that basically says your worship of President Bush is contrary to facts. Someday, you will grow up and become less emotional and more rational. You might even become an ex-Republican like me!

It seems many reviews discuss this book through the prism of their politics, as opposed to reviewing it _as a book_.

As a book, I was quite disappointed. Firstly, a good half of the book is taken up with the PRE-war planning on invading Iraq, rehashing material presented (much better) in Woodward's or Clark's books.

When we finally get to the post-invasion planning, the book suffers from a fatal flaw - the author's own axe-grinding. The author was a principal on the multi-agency project, led as I remember out of the State Department, which compiled a long set of guides for how the reconstruction should go. In one of the more notable (but already known) failures, these guides were discarded by the Bush administration, as the authors were viewed as too "soft". OK, fine. However, the author harps on this over and over and over. Over and over, the book reads like this: "So then Bremer made this decision, which turned out wrong. We told you so.".

This is also weakened by the fact that the authors recommendation is virtually _always_ "form a multi-sided commission to study the issue" - not exactly gripping reading. Frankly, I can see why more action-minded minds might have started to ignore the author and his comission - sometimes multi-sided comissions are not the right answer!

The blurb for the book gives the impression that the author was a "True believer" (one of Rice's friends, etc.) who became disullusioned over time. This may be true, but the book is written instead with the advantage of 20/20 hindsight - the author's recommendations were always right, Bremer's/Cheney's always wrong, according to the book. Not only does this strain credulity, but it made this a rather unenlightening read for me - i would have been much more interested in something that discussed how the planning _evolved_, rather than the litany of "we told you so's" that this book presents.

This book has some insight on the early stages of pre-war planning, particularly as it pertained to the Kurds. The Kurds considered the years after the first gulf war to have been a "golden age". They enjoyed the implicit military guaranty of the U.S., and an economic boom from controlling border crossings used by smugglers evading the embargo. The Kurds were at first ambivalent about the invasion, but became supporters in the hope that Iraq would follow them in secular politics and economic development.

There is also some material on the Democratic Principles Working Group (AKA The Mother of All Working Groups). That was a committee of Iraqi opposition groups that sought to develop a plan of the postwar Iraqi government. The committee suffered from infighting and distrust, and was dominated by groups with limited constituencies in Iraq (i.e. Kurds and exiles). The group also suffered from an academic focus- developing a theory of an Iraqi government when they needed to BE the Iraqi government. As dysfunctional as it was, the administration discarded its work and transferred the responsibility for postwar government to an even more unqualified and incompetent group: the Defense Department's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance under Doug Feith. And things went downhill from there...

The rest of the book is a readable but generic account of the occupation and the failure to confront the insurgency.

Recommended primarily for the Kurdish material.

To foster partnership and enhance legitimacy, the Future of Iraq Project (FOIP) tried to engage Iraqis representing the country's diverse ethnic and religious groups. However, it was clear from the beginning that empowering Iraqis was antithetical to the Pentagon's goal of pushing Chalabi into power (faster?). Advocates of military action grew increasingly concerned that further planning would reveal difficulties and weaken the case for war. Defense believed that after a brief transition period, authority could be handed to an interim government dominated by Iraqi exiles (subsequently strongly resented by Iraqis). After dismantling the Ba'ath party, Iraq's technocrats would transfer their loyalties for a new administration and function like before. The cost of reconstruction would be paid almost entirely from oil revenues.

Iraqis could not believe that the formidable U.S. military was able to vanquish Saddam's Republican Guard yet lacked the capabilities to prevent looting and control civil strife. More than any other factor, the coalition's inability to curtail the escalating violence poisoned Iraqis against the U.S. and turned the "liberation" into an "occupation."

General Garner was sent into Iraq prior to Bremer and just after the invasion for humanitarian assistance. Garner did not even learn about the FOIP until just before he left the U.S. He also desperately needed qualified staff. Though wanting to incorporate parts of the FOIP into his planning, he was prohibited from using many of those involved in its construction and leadership.

Then, in came Ambassador Bremer, with his own inexperienced team. Of the 1,147 Americans employed by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), only 34 were Foreign Service Officers. Bremer then made a series of catastrophic decisions that compounded problems. While the Future of Iraq Project anticipated that war criminals in the Iraqi armed forces and intelligence services would be prosecuted, it envisioned untainted elements working in partnership with coalition. When Bremer disbanded the army and then failed to pay the salaries and pensions of army personnel, he transformed 400,000 Iraqis and their families from potential partners into antagonists. Then, instead of targeting individuals (many/most had simply joined because it was a requirement for a job), Bremer's de-Ba'athification simply made the civilian government unmannable. Still another major error was Bremer's ignoring Ayatollah Sistani (this was going to be a secular government) - and subsequently being backed down regarding forming the Constitution without representatives elected by the Iraqis.

So writes David Phillips in his Introduction to "Losing Iraq." Phillips involvement had been in the Future of Iraq Project - upon realizing that it was to be ignored, he resigned. At the end of his book he declares that "Iraq's future is uncertain." It still is.

Written by a former Bush administration official who has actually been in Iraq, this book is a scathing indictment of American foreign policy. What we see on the nightly news is only a fraction of how bad things have become inside Iraq--ironically through the actions of our own government.

A lack of planning coupled with simplistic notions about how 'we would be welcomed' by flag-waving Iraqis prevented and continues to prevent the Bush administration from making sound decision in this area. Instead of combating terrorism, we may actually even be creating it through our presence inside Iraq. Our insistence upon invading Iraq and forcing a regime change (as opposed to letting the Iraqis do it themselves) reinforces the extremist's views of America as a 21st century colonial force.

Essentially we came in (and are remaining in Iraq) interested in what benefits America rather than seeing Iraqis as people. While reading this book, I thought how self-determination from the outset makes an all-critical difference between a democracy and a colony. For instance, America had received aid from France during the revolutionary war, but I suspect that Washington...etc would have become suspicious of and/or angry if the French had decided that they needed to set up a new government and infrastructure for us. If we would not accept such an arrangement here, we should not be acting shocked when Iraqis are demanding that it not exist in their own country.

Chief among the offenders was provisional government head L. Paul Bremer. Against the better judgment of other officials (such as General Garner) Bremer virtually nurtured suspicion against 'democracy' inside that country with his policy decisions.

First, he disbanded Iraq's existing military forces and followed this act with banning most Baath party members (the party which Saddam Hussein had belonged to) from holding a position in the new government, despite the fact that these members had both the cultural credibility and technical expertise which would be needed to make the 'democracy' legitimate. Supposedly these policies were undertaken to provide security measures inside Iraq, but that official explaination then undercut their own 'flag waving' fantasy.

Bremer's policies essentially grew terrorists inside the country because the actions helped legitimize an idea that Americans were only interested in Iraq for what it could give them---oil, but did not particularly care for the Iraqi people themselves. People who lost their jobs---and hence ability to feed themselves/their family then were actually given incentive to join terrorists who were fighting against American troops. The author is not surprised that Bremer's actions ultimately created instability inside the country to a level which ironically had not existed when Hussein (for all his flaws) was in power.

The author's background makes this work more accessible to the general public than similar works which are written by 'radicals'. However, I find it difficult to believe he was right as often as he said that he was as featured inside this book, if this really is the case--I am curious why he did not jump the sinking ship which is the Bush administration's Iraq policy much sooner. Even if policy is supposed to be made incrementally, somebody with his purported perspective in an administration brimming with 'hardliners' would not have been able to make substantial input inside this area. He would have been better off working elsewhere.

Also, I am able to understand the acronyms and other government language which was used in this book, but somebody without any public administration training honestly might become lost during some parts. If the jargon really is necessary, an index of terms/agency names placed inside subsequent editions might help other readers keep track of the information which is being presented.