Paul Bremer: We Never Had Enough Troops

Critics of the Bush administration's war in Iraq and, in particular, the Bush administration's plans for Iraq have long complained that the plans never called for enough troops to do the job right. Wishful thinking took over from hard reality, they said. It turns out that Paul Bremer who governed Iraq after the invasion seems to agree.

According to The Washington Post:

Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, administrator for the U.S.-led occupation government until the handover of political power on June 28, said he still supports the decision to intervene in Iraq but said a lack of adequate forces hampered the occupation and efforts to end the looting early on. "We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness," he said yesterday in a speech at an insurance conference in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. "We never had enough troops on the ground."

In a Sept. 17 speech at DePauw University, Bremer said he frequently raised the issue within the administration and "should have been even more insistent" when his advice was spurned because the situation in Iraq might be different today. "The single most important change -- the one thing that would have improved the situation -- would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout" the occupation, Bremer said, according to the Banner-Graphic in Greencastle, Ind.

A Bremer aide said that his speeches were intended for private audiences and were supposed to have been off the record.

Yes, I'll bet they weren't intended for public distribution! In an attempt to achieve some damage control, Bremer is saying that he believes that there are currently enough troops in Iraq, but it's hard to see how exactly he can empirically or logically support such a claim. After all, the problems that resulted from not having enough troops early on haven't really been solved now. Thus, the reasons why we can be sure that we didn't have enough troops early on currently exist in sufficient quantities now to reach a similar conclusion about the present situation.

Bremer is not the first person of experience and responsibility to say these things, but everyone else has been criticized by the Bush administration for it:

Prior to the war, the Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, said publicly that he thought the invasion plan lacked sufficient manpower, and he was slapped down by the Pentagon's civilian leadership for saying so. During the war, concerns about troop strength expressed by retired generals also provoked angry denunciations by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In April 2003, for example, Rumsfeld commented, "People were saying that the plan was terrible and there weren't enough people and . . . there were going to be, you know, tens of thousands of casualties, and it was going to take forever." After Baghdad fell, Rumsfeld dismissed reports of widespread looting and chaos as "untidy" signs of newfound freedom that were exaggerated by the media. Rumsfeld and Bush resisted calls for more troops, saying that what was going on in Iraq was not a war but simply the desperate actions of Baathist loyalists.

President Bush has insisted that he doesn't have any regrets, doesn't believe that he made any mistakes, and even knowing what he knows now wouldn't do anything differently. We can only conclude that this means that he wouldn't have put more troops on the ground early on, despite the fact that so many people (all outside his inner circle, curiously enough) argue and have argued for the use of more troops.

Phillip Carter comments:

As Amb. James Dobbins writes in his RAND study "America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq", we have learned this lesson over and over again during the small and large wars of the 20th Century — in Nazi Germany, Japan, Korea, Lebanon, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. Winning the war is one thing; winning the peace is quite another. It quite often requires more troops and resources to effectively secure the peace than to win the war. Technology can only do so much to help win the peace. At some point, to borrow T.R. Fehrenbach's expression: "You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life. But if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud."

Another common critique of the Bush administration's handling of Iraq is the failure to properly plan for what should be done after the war. Bremer echoes this as well:

In yesterday's speech, Bremer told the insurance agents that U.S. plans for the postwar period erred in projecting what would happen after Hussein's demise, focusing on preparing for humanitarian relief and widespread refugee problems rather than a bloody insurgency now being waged by at least four well-armed factions. "There was planning, but planning for a situation that didn't arise," he said.

This fits in too closely with John Kerry's recent arguing that Bush is living in a fantasy world. It's unfortunate that so many of Bush's actions seem to validate this criticism. It's also, I think, a symptom of someone who is too beholden to the radical Christian Right: a preference for fantasies about what the world should be like over a rational calculation about how the world really is.

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