From "Mindless in Iraq," by Peter W. Galbraith in The New York Review of Books, a set of reviews of Iraq-related current affairs titles.
As we now know, Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon had no plan to secure any part of Baghdad. It allowed looters to destroy Iraq’s governmental infrastructure and to steal thousands of tons of high explosives, weapons, and radioactive materials. And it had no coherent plan for Iraq’s postwar governance.
In reference to Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, by Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor:
Greg Newbold, who later joined the revolt of the generals, told Gordon and Trainor of his reaction to Rumsfeld’s 125,000-troop figure: "My only regret is that at the time I did not say ,Mr. Secretary, if you try to put a number on a mission like this you may cause enormous mistakes…. Give the military what you would like to see them do, and then let them come up with it. I was the junior guy in the room, but I regret not saying it.’"
Regarding Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco, by David L. Phillips:
Men who had put their lives on the line in combat were mostly unwilling to put their careers on the line to speak out against a plan based on numbers pulled out of the air by a cranky sixty-nine-year-old.
Referring to Ahmad’s War, Ahmad’s Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq, by Michael Goldfarb:
Shawkat, [an Iraqi,] founded a newspaper that used Iraq’s new press freedoms to protest against this new form of the old order. He was murdered after ignoring a succession of death threats.
Goldfarb contrasts the casualness with which the Americans approached the occupation with the deadly consequences for his friend. His prose reflects his understandable outrage when he writes about how the Coalition Provisional Authority had been turned into an extension of the Bush-Cheney ’04 reelection campaign. Other nations’ professional foreign-service officers found it shocking that senior CPA figures [in Iraq] attended meetings with their Bush-Cheney lapel pins on…. Didn’t they know they were representing all Americans, not just the president’s supporters?
Goldfarb describes a young Republican, sent by the Bush administration to instruct the Iraqis on democracy, who explained to a gathering of tribal and community leaders assembled at the Baghdad Hunt Club that "a political party exists to channel power…. Once you have political power, then you can create, you can do what you want with government, right?"
Goldfarb comments:
To people who had survived the Ba’ath, a political party that really knew how to channel power, the lecture must have seemed ridiculous…. By now I was full of slow-burning anger. My friend Ahmad had died for this? So some kid could stand inside a privately guarded compound, explaining that "a political party exists to channel power" on a street guarded by American soldiers in a city where, one year after the overthrow of Saddam, the original meeting site [at a Baghdad Hotel] was so insecure that local police could not defend it? This was bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq? The most powerful nation in history had rendered itself utterly powerless here.
Galbraith’s review also covers The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq, by Fouad Ajami.
