Artículo de THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN en “The New York Times” del 25.06.2003
President Bush is sure lucky no weapons of mass destruction have been found yet in Iraq.
Because had we found these weapons our entire focus today would be on the real issue: why the Bush team — which wanted this war so badly and had telegraphed it for so long — was so poorly prepared for postwar Iraq.
I still believe that with the right effort Iraq can be made a decent place. But that task has been made much harder because of the Pentagon's poor planning for postwar Iraq. If the Pentagon's lapses can be overcome — and I hope they will be — then we should learn from them for future wars. If they can't be overcome, then they will be grist for next year's who-lost-Iraq debate.
Let's start with the biggest analytical failure. The Bush Pentagon went into this war assuming that it could decapitate the Iraqi army, bureaucracy and police force, remove the Saddam loyalists and then basically run Iraq through the rump army, bureaucracy and police.
Wrong. What happened instead was that they all collapsed, leaving a security and administrative vacuum, which the U.S. military was utterly unprepared to fill. The U.S. forces arrived in Iraq with far too few military police and civilian affairs officers to run the country. As a result, the only way U.S. troops could stop the massive looting was by doing the only thing they knew how: shooting people. Since they didn't want to do that, and since Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld seemed to believe that a little looting was O.K., so that Iraqis could let off steam ("stuff happens"), Iraqi government infrastructure, oil equipment and even nuclear research sites were just stripped bare. As a result, we are not just starting at zero in Iraq. We are starting below zero. (How the Pentagon could have failed to secure the known nuclear sites is unbelievable.)
Anyone familiar with NATO operations in Bosnia and Kosovo should have understood that we needed two armies for this invasion. The first was the fighting force that would kill Saddam's regime, and the second, following right behind it, a force of military police, civilian affairs officers, aid groups and public affairs teams to get our message across. The Pentagon brilliantly prepared the first force, but not the second.
So, you get incidents like the one last week, where hungry Iraqi soldiers, protesting for back pay, get shot at by U.S. troops — a great way to win friends — because our troops are unprepared for crowd control, a job for M.P.'s. Most of the police and M.P.'s we send into nation-building are reserves, and there was already a shortage — something the Pentagon should have seen and rectified by reconfiguring our force structure.
Because we did not have enough soldiers, police or M.P.'s in Iraq, we could not seal the Syrian or Iranian borders or protect oil pipelines from sabotage. As a result, Arab fighters have slipped in via Syria to join the battle against us and Iranian activists have crossed from their side. Oil pipelines are being blown up daily.
As for the missing W.M.D., Bush officials keep saying that Iraq is the size of California and hard to search. True, but Saddam's inner circle is the size of an N.F.L. team — and we've captured more than half of them. I find it incomprehensible that none of them have had anything revealing to say, one way or another, about the missing W.M.D. A tarot card reader could have discovered more from these people than the Pentagon has so far. A Western diplomat tells me Centcom has not managed the interrogations well and they are now in the hands of the C.I.A.
Because the Pentagon had no coherent postwar plan for reconstituting Iraq politically, it made it up as it went along. Instead of a firm U.S. hand guiding things from the top, the Pentagon initially appointed the hapless Gen. Jay Garner to run Iraq. He's been replaced by the more deft L. Paul Bremer, but important time has been lost in which Muslim clerics have filled the vacuum in many areas. We must establish an Iraqi secular authority — soon.
A successful U.S. rebuilding of Iraq is the key to America's standing in the world right now. But Mssrs. Bush and Rumsfeld seem to be treating it like some lab test in which they can see how much nation-building they can buy with as little investment as possible.
As one Marine officer said to me: There is something to be said for doing war on the cheap, but if you want to do war on the cheap, "pick a country that doesn't matter."