Iraq and Afghanistan

An Op-Ed in Friday’s Times discusses in detail the lack of medical services at the Abu Ghraib prison. This was not an occasional or early-on problem. It was a day in and day out problem over a period of months. It turns out that the medical people accepted the idea of putting a leash on some of the more psychotic prisoners because they had no psychologist to prescribe antipsychotic drugs and they lacked the usual restraining devices. More generally, the prison hospital lacked basic supplies. It often ran out of intravenous fluids and even had a dentist do a heart surgery. When they ran out of the standard blood sugar tests, they simply guessed the right dose of insulin from the appearance of the patients.

This is only the latest chapter in a long history of Pentagon incompetence attending the Iraq adventure. It started back when the SecDef told his people to ignore the State Department’s well thought out plan for what to do after the invasion. This led to confusion in planning at the start. After one poorly planned false start on the civilian side, Bremer was brought in to run the show. One of his first actions was to disband the Iraqi Army and dismiss all people from leading positions in the civil service that had Baath Party connections. Since in Saddam’s Iraq nearly everyone with any education worked for the government, this meant that the best and the brightest and well as hundreds of thousands of less well endowed were suddenly out of work. It also meant that a large part of the populace understood their pensions to be cancelled. This disenfranchised group became the heart of the insurgency and has remained so.

Lack of planning, of thinking through what might happen, led to a more general inability to imagine any problems after attaining a quick victory. The most critical mistake was to underestimate the force that was needed in the field (several generals had this right but no one was listening: Rumsfeld’s light and nimble modern army was the fashion of the day). This led to sending insufficient forces to Iraq. This meant in the first instance that the thin forces that had to hold Baghdad initially had neither the ability nor the orders to protect the country’s archaeological heritage from looting — even though looting on a smaller scale had accompanied the first Gulf War. Lack of adequate planning also included the failure to provide body armor for many soldiers in the field. This led to many people raising money in the States to purchase body armor for their soldiers. Poor planning and inadequate forces in the field led to a massive failure to secure ammunition storage sites throughout the country. It is true these were more numerous than anyone expected, but still when the military learned of the existence of unsecured major sites, many continued to be left unguarded. Even in recent months, we have been told again and again that the vehicles used to transport our military have not been armed adequately — this more than a year after we learned from experience the insurgency’s widespread use of roadside bombs. Even today, one notes in photographs from the front that vehicles often have jury-rigged armor plates bolted on to them.

These massive failures of planning and inability to respond to what was happening in the field should be investigated in full by the military forces, the Pentagon, and Congress. An honest evaluation and accounting may require waiting until a new Administration comes into office. It may not. There are several top Republicans very concerned about the record. As a result of the bungling, many Americans and Iraqis have unnecessarily lost their lives. The war has been unnecessarily drawn out. It has been unnecessarily costly. Before such incompetence is confronted and remedies are carried out, we should never again take off on such an adventure, no matter how appealing it might seem. Let’s put our dreams in quarantine until we are prepared to fully accept their costs and implications.