What Were They Thinking? - New York Times

What Were They Thinking? - New York TimesOctober 7, 2005
What Were They Thinking?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

When the definitive history of the Iraq war is written, future historians will surely want to ask Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush each one big question. To Saddam, the question would be: What were you thinking? If you had no weapons of mass destruction, why did you keep acting as though you did? For Mr. Bush, the question would be: What were you thinking? If you bet your whole presidency on succeeding in Iraq, why did you let Donald Rumsfeld run the war with just enough troops to lose? Why didn't you establish security inside Iraq and along its borders? How could you ever have thought this would be easy?

The answer to these questions can be found in what was America's greatest intelligence failure in Iraq - and that was not about W.M.D.

Let me explain. While visiting the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr last week, I spent a morning watching the commanders of the Iraqi Navy hold a staff meeting, while their British and U.S. advisers looked on. On the one hand, you felt as if they were doing a pretty good imitation of a British command briefing. On the other hand, the slightly ragged quality left you feeling that if you pulled the British and U.S. advisers out tomorrow, the whole Iraqi Navy would collapse. The human capital and institutional foundation are simply not there yet. "How these guys ever fought the Iranians for eight years, I will never know," a British trainer remarked to me.

After that staff meeting, a British Royal Navy officer who was escorting me suggested that we go to Basra to see the flea market there. He said I could find anything I wanted, because so many Iraqis have had to hock basic household goods - stereos, refrigerators, air-conditioners, cars - to survive the last decade under Saddam.

Message: Failing to find W.M.D. was a big intelligence failure. But the even bigger failure - the one that is the source of all our troubles today - was the failure to understand just how devastated Iraq's society, economy and institutions had become - after eight years of war with Iran, a crushing defeat in Gulf War I and then a decade of U.N. sanctions.

But I think Saddam knew how busted and bankrupt his country and army were. Therefore, he never wanted to completely erase the impression that he had W.M.D. Saddam lived in a den of wolves. The hint of W.M.D. was his only deterrent shield left against his neighbors, his enemies at home and the West. (This was alluded to in the Duelfer W.M.D. report.) So he tried to allow just enough U.N. inspections to clear him on W.M.D., while playing just enough cat and mouse with the U.N. to leave the impression that he still had something dangerous in the closet.

The Bush team, and the C.I.A., not only failed to learn that Saddam had no W.M.D., they failed to appreciate how devastated Iraqi society really was. The Bush team, listening largely to exiles who had not lived in Iraq for years, thought that there were much more of an Iraqi middle class and more institutions than actually existed. So Mr. Bush thought taking over Iraq would be easy. That is the only way I can explain his behavior.

This intelligence failure about Iraqi society is what is killing us today. Because what really happened after the U.S. invasion is that what little Iraqi state existed just fell apart in our hands, like a broken vase. And then Rummy let the shards get looted. So yes, when the Bush team says rebuilding Iraq is like rebuilding Germany, it's half right. It is like rebuilding Germany, but not post-World War II Germany. It is like rebuilding medieval, pre-modern Germany - the Germany of clans and feudal fiefs, before there was a state.

As this column has long insisted, we are not doing nation-building in Iraq. We are doing nation-creating. It is hugely important, but hugely difficult. I can only assume the C.I.A. didn't know how broken Iraq was, because if the president knew and still put in so few troops, it was criminal.

Sadly, what Iraq desperately needs most from the U.S. today are A.I.D. workers, State Department advisers and technical experts from every agency of the government who can help rebuild Iraq's human capital. But people are afraid to go. And who can blame them? We have never established basic public order there, because we never had enough troops.

The president's speech on terrorism yesterday was excellent. He made clear, better than ever, why winning in Iraq is so important to the wider struggle against Islamo-fascism. But it only makes me that much more angry that he fought this war as though it would be easy - never asking for any sacrifice, any military draft, any tax hikes or any gasoline tax - and that he tolerated so much incompetence along the way.