Was It Just Optimism?

The chief of the British Army, Gen. Richard Dannatt came out in favor of a British withdrawal today. According to Gen. Dannatt, the presence of British troops are "exascerbating" the security problems in Iraq rather than making them better. Gen. Dannatt added that the original Bush/Blair plan for Iraq might have relied more on "optimism" than anything else.

"Optimism" might be a mild term for the Bush administration's initial ideas for occupying Iraq.

Plan 1:
The first Bush "plan" was to:
1. install Ahmed Chalabi as the new Iraqi leader;
2. retain most of the Saddam Hussein administrative apparatus;
3. pay for Iraq's reconstruction through oil revenues.
4. Get out after six easy months.

Plan 2
The second Bush plan was to train an Iraqi military to take over the fight against the insurgency from the American military with an assumption that the U. S. would have drastically weakened the insurgency.

Under Plan 1, the new bosses would be pretty much the same as the old bosses except that the Chalabi at the top would be answerable to the Bush administration instead of the ghost of dictators past like Saddam.

However, Chalabi was a convicted felon in Jordan, had no popular base in Iraq, and could not be taken seriously because of his lack of connection with the Shiite religious establishment.

There also was no chance that the long-suffering Shiite majority was going to tolerate the continued operation of Saddam's bureaucratic apparatus.

The first Bush plan was ludicrous from the beginning.

Plan 2 was not as obviously hopeless as the original plan, but still has failed.

The primary problem has been the Iraqi military and police forces. At best, the Iraqi military is more loyal to their ethnic groups and militias than they are to the Iraqi government. At worst, they have been riddled with insurgent infiltrators.

The middle ground is also discouraging. The Iraqi military and police often been unwilling to fight the insurgents the American way, preferring to form death squads on the side. In a weirdly ironic development, the death squads have replaced the American military as the primary opposition to the insurgency in Baghdad. As a result, American generals are in the awkward position of trying to make the world's best army relevant to the Iraqi sectarian bloodbath. There's some implicitly "good"news there in the sense that the Shiite population can defend itself, but it now looks like the American legacy in Iraq is going to be years, perhaps decades, of slaughter.

Right now, it takes optimism to see any kind of stable situation emerging in Iraq. Anything else is just delusion.