Counter Jihad by Williams Brian Glyn;

Author:Williams, Brian Glyn;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2017-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Rise of the Iraqi Insurgency

In the aftermath of the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s army, the Iraqi government collapsed, and everyone from forty thousand policemen to the ministers of oil melted away. As civil society collapsed, gangs of Iraqis came out to loot government buildings in Baghdad and across the country. Across Iraq, everything from electrical wiring, to telephones and chairs in government buildings, to police cars, to fire engines, to school desks, hospital equipment, and oil piping was looted. Fires raged, and all government buildings and most ministries were looted or gutted.

Among the looters’ first targets in the postinvasion power vacuum was the National Museum in Baghdad, which housed one of the most valuable collections of ancient Mesopotamian artifacts in the world. Without police to maintain order, cars were carjacked, women were raped, people were kidnapped, billions of dollars was looted from banks, stores were burnt, ancient relics were stolen or destroyed, and anarchy prevailed in exactly the sort of scenario General Eric Shinseki had feared, and Rumsfeld had discounted.

At this time, many Iraqis who had disliked Hussein and were sitting on the fence came to associate the anarchy and loss of electricity, water, and security in the aftermath of the invasion with the now distrusted American invaders. When asked by a reporter about the chaos and looting, an unapologetic Rumsfeld dismissed the question by stating flatly that “democracy is messy” and “stuff happens.”38 He also said, “Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.”39

But it need not have been that way had the Americans come with a much larger occupation force to step in and help police and maintain order in the country of the sort called for by Powell and Shinseki. Todd Purdum, author of a history of the Iraq war, described the unfolding Phase IV problems as follows:

The problems for the Americans was that, after the fall of the statue, there was no order in Baghdad, and they didn’t have enough troops on the ground to enforce order. They didn’t have enough civil affairs officers. They didn’t have enough military policemen. The 4th Infantry was still making its way up from Kuwait. So if Rumsfeld’s vision of the war plan was a tactical success, some generals in the Pentagon began to worry if it mightn’t have been a strategic failure, because the American forces did not have the capacity to enforce order in the all-important aftermath of the war.40

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