[Mb-civic] Getting ready for the next fiasco

[Lyle K'ang]

Personal Message: 
 Getting ready for the next fiasco while admitting the present one
 
 U.S. Lowers Sights On What Can Be Achieved in Iraq
 
 By Robin Wright  and Ellen Knickmeyer, Washington Post
 
  The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be 
achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for far 
less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end in 
four months, according to U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad.
 
 The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a 
self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are 
free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.
 
 "What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or 
what unfolded on the ground," said a senior official involved in policy 
since the 2003 invasion. "We are in a process of absorbing the factors of 
the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the 
beginning."
 
 Administration officials still emphasize how much they have achieved despite 
the chaos that followed the invasion and the escalating insurgency. "Iraqis 
are taking control of their country, building a free nation that can govern 
itself, sustain itself and defend itself. And we're helping Iraqis 
succeed," President Bush said yesterday in his radio address.
 
 Iraqi officials yesterday struggled to agree on a draft constitution by a 
deadline of tomorrow so the document can be submitted to a vote in October. The 
political transition would be completed in December by elections for a permanent 
government.
 
 But the realities of daily life are a constant reminder of how the initial U.S. 
ambitions have not been fulfilled in ways that Americans and Iraqis once 
anticipated. Many of Baghdad's 6 million people go without electricity for days 
in 120-degree heat. Parents fearful of kidnapping are keeping children indoors.
 
 Barbers post signs saying they do not shave men, after months of barbers being 
killed by religious extremists. Ethnic or religious-based militias police the 
northern and southern portions of Iraq. Analysts estimate that in the whole of 
Iraq, unemployment is 50 percent to 65 percent.
 
 U.S. officials say no turning point forced a reassessment. "It happened 
rather gradually," said the senior official, triggered by everything from 
the insurgency to shifting budgets to U.S. personnel changes in Baghdad.
 
 The ferocious debate over a new constitution has particularly driven home the 
gap between the original U.S. goals and the realities after almost 28 months. 
The U.S. decision to invade Iraq was justified in part by the goal of 
establishing a secular and modern Iraq that honors human rights and unites 
disparate ethnic and religious communities.
 
 But whatever the outcome on specific disputes, the document on which Iraq's 
future is to be built will require laws to be compliant with Islam. Kurds and 
Shiites are expecting de facto long-term political privileges. And women's 
rights will not be as firmly entrenched as Washington has tried to insist, U.S. 
officials and Iraq analysts say.
 
 "We set out to establish a democracy, but we're slowly realizing we will 
have some form of Islamic republic," said another U.S. official familiar 
with policymaking from the beginning, who like some others interviewed would 
speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity. "That process is being 
repeated all over."
 
 U.S. officials now acknowledge that they misread the strength of the sentiment 
among Kurds and Shiites to create a special status. The Shiites' request this 
month for autonomy to be guaranteed in the constitution stunned the Bush 
administration, even after more than two years of intense intervention in Iraq's 
political process, they said.
 
 "We didn't calculate the depths of feeling in both the Kurdish and Shiite 
communities for a winner-take-all attitude," said Judith S. Yaphe, a former 
CIA Iraq analyst at the National Defense University.
 
 In the race to meet a sequence of fall deadlines, the process of forging 
national unity behind the constitution is largely being scrapped, current and 
former officials involved in the transition said.
 
 "We are definitely cutting corners and lowering our ambitions in democracy 
building," said Larry Diamond, a Stanford University democracy expert who 
worked with the U.S. occupation government and wrote the book "Squandered 
Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to 
Iraq."
 
 "Under pressure to get a constitution done, they've lowered their own 
ambitions in terms of getting a document that is going to be very far-reaching 
and democratic. We also don't have the time to go through the process we 
envisioned when we wrote the interim constitution -- to build a democratic 
culture and consensus through debate over a permanent constitution," he 
said.
 
 The goal now is to ensure a constitution that can be easily amended later so 
Iraq can grow into a democracy, U.S. officials say.
 
 On security, the administration originally expected the U.S.-led coalition to 
be welcomed with rice and rosewater, traditional Arab greetings, with only a 
limited reaction from loyalists of ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. The 
surprising scope of the insurgency and influx of foreign fighters has forced 
Washington to repeatedly lower expectations -- about the time-frame for quelling 
the insurgency and creating an effective and cohesive Iraqi force capable of 
stepping in, U.S. officials said.
 
 Killings of members of the Iraqi security force have tripled since January. 
Iraq's ministry of health estimates that bombings and other attacks have killed 
4,000 civilians in Baghdad since Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari's interim 
government took office April 28.
 
 Last week was the fourth-worst week of the whole war for U.S. military deaths 
in combat, and August already is the worst month for deaths of members of the 
National Guard and Reserve.
 
 Attacks on U.S. convoys by insurgents using roadside bombs have doubled over 
the past year, Army Brig. Gen. Yves Fontaine said Friday. Convoys ferrying food, 
fuel, water, arms and equipment from Kuwait, Jordan and Turkey are attacked 
about 30 times a week, Fontaine said.
 
 "There has been a realistic reassessment of what it is possible to achieve 
in the short term and fashion a partial exit strategy," Yaphe said. 
"This change is dictated not just by events on the ground but by 
unrealistic expectations at the start."
 
 Washington now does not expect to fully defeat the insurgency before departing, 
but instead to diminish it, officials and analysts said. There is also growing 
talk of turning over security responsibilities to the Iraqi forces even if they 
are not fully up to original U.S. expectations, in part because they have local 
legitimacy that U.S. troops often do not.
 
 "We've said we won't leave a day before it's necessary. But necessary is 
the key word -- necessary for them or for us? When we finally depart, it will 
probably be for us," a U.S. official said.
 
 Pressed by the cost of fighting an escalating insurgency, U.S. expectations for 
rebuilding Iraq -- and its $20 billion investment -- have fallen the farthest, 
current and former officials say.
 
 Pentagon officials originally envisioned Iraq's oil revenue paying many 
post-invasion expenses. But Iraq, ranked among world leaders behind Saudi Arabia 
in proven oil reserves, is incapable of producing enough refined fuel amid a 
car-buying boom that has put an estimated 1 million more vehicles on the road 
after the invasion. Lines for subsidized cheap gas stretch for miles every day 
in Baghdad.
 
 Oil production is estimated at 2.22 million barrels a day, short of the goal of 
2.5 million. Iraq's pre-war high was 2.67 million barrels a day.
 
 The United States had high hopes of quick, big-budget fixes for the electrical 
power system that would show Iraqis tangible benefits from the ouster of 
Hussein. But inadequate training for Iraqi staff, regional rivalries restricting 
the power flow to Baghdad, inadequate fuel for electrical generators and attacks 
on the infrastructure have contributed to the worst summer of electrical 
shortages in the capital.
 
 Water is also a "tough, tough" situation in a desert country, said a 
U.S. official in Baghdad familiar with reconstruction issues. Pumping stations 
depend on electricity, and engineers now say the system has hundreds of 
thousands of leaks.
 
 "The most thoroughly dashed expectation was the ability to build a robust 
self-sustaining economy. We're nowhere near that. State industries, electricity 
are all below what they were before we got there," said Wayne White, former 
head of the State Department's Iraq intelligence team who is now at the Middle 
East Institute. "The administration says Saddam ran down the country. But 
most damage was from looting [after the invasion], which took down state 
industries, large private manufacturing, the national electric" system.
 
 Ironically, White said, the initial ambitions may have complicated the U.S. 
mission: "In order to get out earlier, expectations are going to have to be 
lower, even much lower. The higher your expectation, the longer you have to 
stay. Getting out is going to be a more important consideration than the 
original goals were. They were unrealistic."
 
 Knickmeyer reported from Baghdad.



Lyle K'ang, MBA/IM 
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