Facts Not Politics

· State Department experts warned CENTCOM BEFORE THE IRAQ WAR WAS STARTED about lack of plans for post-war Iraq security. (So-called) planning for post-Saddam regime change began as early as October 2001. Ask your dear leader how many civil officials were sent to Iraq to aid in the following areas and why the job was not done: public health and humanitarian needs, transparency and anti-corruption, oil and energy, defense policy and institutions, transitional justice, democratic principles and procedures, local government, civil society capacity building, education, free media, water, agriculture and environment and economy and infrastructure.

· In a declassified State Dept. memo dated Feb. 7, 2003, officials warned of "a failure to address short-term public security and humanitarian assistance concerns (that) could result in serious human rights abuses which would undermine an otherwise successful military campaign, and our reputation internationally." And that there were "serious planning gaps for post-conflict public security and humanitarian assistance between the end of the war and the beginning of reconstruction.

· A fall 2002 report by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency indicated that the U.S. had no hard evidence that Iraq was stockpiling chemical and biological weapons.

· This administration led our troops into war without a plan for the
aftermath. However, Desert Crossing, the war game, was conducted by the United States Central Command in 1999 and was led by Marine General Anthony Zinni (ret. – the very same who said it would take several hundred thousand troops to occupy a country the size of Iraq) and tested "worst case" and "most likely" scenarios of a post-war, post-Saddam, Iraq. Highlights are:

o Assumed 400,000 troops may "still be a mess" - (Rumsfeld insisted that the number be sharply reduced).

o Forewarned that regime change may cause regional instability by opening the doors to "rival forces bidding for power" which, in turn, could cause societal…"fragmentation along religious and/or ethnic lines" and antagonize "aggressive neighbors."

o A transitional government…would likely encounter difficulty…from a "period of widespread bloodshed in which various factions seek to eliminate their enemies."

o Stressed that the creation of a democratic government in Iraq was not feasible, but a new pluralistic Iraqi government which included nationalist leaders might be possible.

· A high-level intelligence assessment by the Bush administration concluded in early 2002 that the sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq was unlikely. A host of economic, diplomatic and logistical obstacles made such a sale improbable. Among other problems, it would have required 25 hard-to-conceal 10-ton tractor-trailers filled with uranium across 1,000 miles and at least one international border.

· The Senate Intelligence Committee found that Hussein was distrustful of al-Qaida and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime.

· The former CIA official who coordinated Middle East intelligence said the administration “went to war without requesting - and evidently without being influenced by - any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq.”

· “President Bush’s aides did not forcefully present him dissenting views from CIA and State and Defense Department officials about possible stiff Iraqi resistance. Bush embraced the predictions of some top administration hawks, beginning with Vice President Dick Cheney.”

· Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith inappropriately manufactured “alternative” intelligence reports wrongly linking Hussein with al-Qaida.

· Rumsfeld set up his own little CIA inside the CIA to “get the information they wanted.” Cheney was constantly at the CIA breathing down their necks.

· Retired Army Maj. Gen. John Riggs said that Rumsfeld created an “atmosphere of arrogance” in which military advice on Afghanistan and Iraq was ignored or discounted. As a result, Rumsfeld and his deputies miscalculated badly in planning how Iraq would be secured after Hussein’s ouster. He was forced to retire minus one star after an interview in which he said the Army had been stretched thin and needed thousands more troops.

· As the Iraqi insurgency was escalating in spring 2004, top Pentagon authorities rejected an appeal for more troops from L. Paul Bremer.

· “President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld and others continued to describe the insurgency as a containable threat, posed mainly by former supporters of Saddam Hussein, criminals and non-Iraqi terrorists – even as the U.S. intelligence community was warning otherwise.”

· “…Rumsfeld and Franks stifled the free exchange of ideas and shut out the National Security Council. They dismissed concerns about the insurgents and threatened to fire the one general, William Wallace, who dared to state the obvious in public.”

· “Vice President Dick Cheney exerted ‘constant’ pressure on the Republican former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the panel’s Democratic chairman charged…The pressure was to stall an investigation into the Bush administration’s use of flawed intelligence on Iraq.”

· In 2006, NATO military chiefs asked for 2,500 more troops and air support to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan and they got nothing (our troops are part of the NATO contingent).

· “Five years later, reconstruction is offset by anarchy” in Afghanistan. “When the Taliban was pushed out (in 2001), they were neither replaced by effective government, nor were they replaces by alternative security forces. NATO is now dealing with the consequences of previous failures in policy.”

· The Marine Corps is again recalling members of the Individual Ready Reserve for an involuntary tour of duty. Soldiers’ tours have been extended and others have had to leave for Iraq or Afghanistan early. “Many of us routinely asked for more troops,” said a retired senior general who commanded an infantry division in Iraq.

· Fighting nearly four years in a two-front war has put unprecedented stress on the Army and the Marine Corps. “The idea that 300 million Americans send the same 140,000 people again and again and again into combat is absolutely immoral.” – Frank Schaeffer.

· Scores of Mississippi National Guard troops who lost their homes to Hurricane Katrina were refused even 15-day leaves to aid their displaced families.

· Four of Bush’s political appointees at the State Department sidelined key career weapons experts and replaced them with political operatives. The reorganization of the department’s arms control and international security bureaus produced an “exodus of experts with decades of experience in nuclear arms, chemical weapons and related matters, including the State Department’s top authority on the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

· “Pentagon civilians ascendant. Rumsfeld loyalists elbow military aside. The three military service chiefs have been dropped in the Bush administration’s doomsday line of Pentagon succession, pushed beneath three civilian undersecretaries in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s inner circle.”

· The Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee inserted a provision in a military authorization bill to fire the lawyer who was leading the office of the special investigator for Iraq reconstruction. Investigations had sent American occupation officials to jail and had exposed disastrously poor construction work by companies such as Haliburton and Parson and discovered that the military “did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.”

· Looted munitions are being used to make deadly roadside bombs and will probably continue to support terrorist attacks throughout the region. Some sites are not secure more than 3 ½ years after the war started. The entire country was considered one big “ammo dump” and commanders lack the manpower to secure the sites “without harming the war effort.” (As illogical as that sounds.)

· “We have been shortchanging these returning soldiers ever since the conflict began. Look at the inadequate funding in the Veterans Administration. That’s caused by the fact that there has been a deliberate underestimate of the number of troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan who will need care.” – a retired military officer.

· The National Guard is less prepared than it has ever been to respond to a terrorist attack, a natural disaster or other crisis.

· The new commander in Iraq also “wrote the book” on counterinsurgency. The army’s new manual calls for about as many troops to occupy Baghdad, alone, as are in the entire country.

· “Wars affect the training of officers…Fort Leavenworth forced to alter curriculum”

· Private donations built a new high-tech facility at Fort Sam Houston specializing in treating amputees, burn victims. The Intrepid Foundation has also built dozens of houses for families of wounded soldiers while they undergo treatment. There is also a charity that tries to provide plane tickets so troops can go home or families can go to Walter Reed because the government apparently cannot provide these services.

· Several government witnesses told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that almost every measure of the performance of Iraq’s oil, electricity, water and sewage sectors has fallen below pre-invasion values...

· “Billions of dollars earmarked for rebuilding Iraq have been diverted from reconstruction projects because of insurgent violence and poor planning by the U.S.”

· In June of ’05, “the NRA and its allies in the House defeated an effort to restrict gun manufacturers’ exports of high-powered .50-caliber rifles. The guns, which can bring down jet airliners, are dream weapons for terrorists.”