[R-G] Wolfowitz Admits 'Clueless' on Counterinsurgency

[Anthony Fenton]

By ELI LAKE
Staff Reporter of the Sun
April 29, 2008
Wolfowitz Admits 'Clueless' on Counterinsurgency
http://www2.nysun.com/article/75428

WASHINGTON — Paul Wolfowitz, in his first public remarks on the Iraq  
war in years, said the American government was "pretty much clueless  
on counterinsurgency" in the first year of the war.

The former deputy secretary of defense said yesterday that the force  
sent to Iraq was adequate for fighting Saddam Hussein's military,  
citing the speed with which American troops toppled the regime. But  
Mr. Wolfowitz said no one in the Bush administration anticipated that  
Saddam would order his security services to wage an insurgency after  
their formal defeat on the battlefield.

Mr. Wolfowitz's remarks came at a forum for a new book, "War and  
Decision," by the former no. 3 official at the Pentagon, Douglas  
Feith. In the book, Mr. Feith argues that America's greatest mistake  
in the war was establishing a coalition provisional authority instead  
of installing a group of Iraqi exiles in an interim government until  
elections could be held.

Mr. Wolfowitz said he agreed with his old colleague. But his remarks  
yesterday have special relevance, because in the run-up to the war,  
the deputy secretary of defense downplayed testimony from a retired  
Army chief of staff, General Eric Shinseki, who told Congress that  
postwar stabilization operations would require several hundred  
thousand troops.

On February 27, 2003, Mr. Wolfowitz told the Senate Armed Services  
Committee that the estimate was "wildly off the mark." Until 2007,  
Democrats often cited General Shinseki's testimony in their critique  
of the war.

"There were two issues about enough troops," Mr. Wolfowitz, who served  
as deputy defense secretary between 2001 and 2005, said yesterday.  
"One was enough troops for the major combat. A lot of people said we  
didn't have it, and obviously we did. There was a very difficult  
balance that had to be struck between surprise, which meant a smaller  
force, and enough troops or a lot of troops, which meant a much slower  
force and potential of many disastrous consequences."

But on the question of postwar troop levels, Mr. Wolfowitz said he  
would have preferred to augment the American presence with trained  
Iraqis. "The other 'enough troops' issue was enough troops for  
afterwards. And I think on that point, yeah, we were clueless on  
counterinsurgency," he said.

A spokesman for the National Security Council, Gordon Johndroe,  
declined to comment, saying he had not yet seen the comments.

"I think I said in my comments quoting Doug's book, no one anticipated  
this insurgency, a lot of people were slow to recognize it once it  
started," Mr. Wolfowitz said. "And I do think a real failure — I  
assign responsibility all over the place — was not having enough  
reliable Iraqi troops early enough and fast enough, because I think a  
sensible counterinsurgency strategy would not be to flood the country  
with 300,000 Americans, but rather to build up Iraqi forces among the  
population."

In the year before the war, the Pentagon, under Messrs. Wolfowitz and  
Feith, clashed with the State Department over the future role of Iraqi  
exile groups. The State Department favored cultivating Iraqis living  
in the country, while the Pentagon put its trust in a constellation of  
exile organizations and sought to make the group a government in exile.

By December 2002, the Bush administration had settled on the contours  
of an exile government that included Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National  
Congress, Iyad Allawi's Iraqi National Accord, the two major Kurdish  
parties, and two Shiite Islamist parties hosted and trained by Iran,  
known as Dawa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in  
Iraq. The latter Shiite group last year changed its name to the  
Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and, in a political alliance with  
Dawa, is the majority bloc that now controls the most votes in the  
Iraqi parliament. Prime Minister al-Maliki is a member of the Dawa  
Party.

It is unclear whether these organizations could have significantly  
augmented the American brigades in Iraq after the fall of Saddam in  
spring 2003. At the beginning of the war, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld  
publicly warned the militia associated with the Islamic Supreme  
Council of Iraq, known as the Badr Corps, to stay out of the fighting,  
as American intelligence suspected it had close ties to Iran. Mr.  
Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress had some fighters at the ready,  
though far fewer than likely would have been necessary for the kinds  
of operations the American military to this day is reluctant to turn  
over to an Iraqi army it has been training for five years. The  
militias affiliated with the two major Kurdish parties had fought a  
civil war that ended in 1996 and were likely to be distrusted by Arab  
Iraqis.

While the commanders of the American military in 2003 appeared loath  
to learn new ways of fighting an insurgency, two years later, the  
current commander of Multi-National Forces in Iraq, General David  
Petraeus, rewrote the Vietnam War-era Army counterinsurgency manual.  
His new strategy, which emphasizes the protection of the population  
and seeks to reduce the power of Al Qaeda and other insurgent groups  
by winning the population's loyalty and cutting membership in the  
groups, is credited with reducing violence against American soldiers  
and Iraqi civilians.