Dexter Filkins reviews Paul Bremer’s new book:
The most startling moment in “My Year in Iraq,” L. Paul Bremer III’s memoir from his days as the head of the American occupation, comes near the end, when violent uprisings were sweeping most of the central and southern parts of the country in May 2004. With the whole American enterprise verging on collapse, Bremer decided to secretly ask the Pentagon for tens of thousands of additional American troops — a request that, as the rest of his book makes clear, was taboo in the White House and Pentagon.
Bremer turned to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top American commander in Iraq, and asked him what he would do with two more divisions, as many as 40,000 more troops. General Sanchez did not hesitate to answer. “I’d control Baghdad,” he said. Bremer then mentioned some other uses for the soldiers, like securing Iraq’s borders and protecting its infrastructure, to which General Sanchez replied: “Got those spare troops handy, sir?”
It bears repeating that the Pentagon brushed aside concerns about troops levels in late February 2003, right before the start of the war:
“The idea that it would take several hundred thousand U.S. forces I think is far off the mark,” Mr. Rumsfeld said.
Mr. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, opened a two-front war of words on Capitol Hill, calling the recent estimate by Gen. Eric K. Shinseki of the Army that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq, “wildly off the mark.”
News that Bremer asked for more troops in 2004 leaked out last month and was reported in the Washington Post:
Bremer’s memo, dated May 18, 2004, urged Rumsfeld to dispatch as many as two additional divisions — or about 30,000 troops — to Iraq, to meet myriad demands, including fighting insurgents, border control and securing convoy routes. The request, disclosed in Bremer’s new book on his year-long tenure in Iraq, reflected what he said was his fear that the United States was becoming “the worst of all things — an ineffective occupier.”
Rumsfeld, speaking yesterday at a Pentagon news briefing, recalled that he showed the Bremer memo to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff then, Gen. Richard B. Myers, saying: “This is a reasonable proposal from a reasonable person; let’s look at it.”
But after evaluating the proposal, the Joint Chiefs of Staff concurred with U.S. commanders responsible for Iraq that troop levels were adequate, said Gen. Peter Pace, who succeeded Myers as chairman of the Joint Chiefs and appeared with Rumsfeld at yesterday’s briefing.
“We did a very thorough analysis of that recommendation, and when we got done, all the chiefs agreed with the commanders in the field that the numbers of troops in the field then, as now, was appropriate to what we were fighting,” Pace said.
Rumsfeld said he then showed the response from the Joint Chiefs to President Bush. “The president, as he has consistently, said that he preferred to go with the judgments of the military commanders on the ground,” Rumsfeld said.
I’d like to see the thorough analysis that was done by the Pentagon. It must have taken up reams of paper.
The commander in the field was the torture-loving Ricardo Sanchez, and he felt that he needed two divisions just to control Baghdad. The President said he deferred troop level decisions to commanders in the field, and yet he refused to listen to Sanchez and grant his request.
Bremer’s book not only provides more evidence of the administration lying to the American people, but it exposes the criminal mismanagement of the war by Rumsfeld and Bush. It really is long past time for them to go.
