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No End In Sight

I watched an absolutely horrifying documentary on-demand on Netflix called No End In Sight. I highly recommend it. It covers the Iraq war, primarily the aftermath of the war - in particular focusing on the lack of planning, poor decision making, and arrogance of the Bush administration. The beginning parts of the movie make clear the lack of post-war planning that was in place when the war started and even when the war ended. There were literally no plans. That part of the movie is obviously disturbing. But the majority of the movie is actually focused in on three policies put into place by Paul Bremer under the Coalition Provisional Authority. Those were:
  1. Not declaring martial law and not providing enough troops to maintain order
  2. De-Ba'athification
  3. Disbanding the Iraqi Army

The repurcussions of the first one are pretty obvious. There's no police, there's no army, and Saddam Hussein released thousands of criminals before the war started. What do you expect to happen? Looting, violonce, vandalism, etc. And then with the second and third, I suppose if you're a political hardliner, some of these decisions may have made sense. For instance, the Ba'athist were the political party in power under Saddam Hussein. How could you possibly trust any of them in the new administration? Aren't they all totally corrupt? I suppose you could say the same thing about the Iraqi Army. How could you trust them? Why not just completely disenfrancise them? Maybe that will work. Well, that's what they did. The problem with the "De-Ba'athification" was that the only people in the country that were trained to run a government were immediately told that they could never work for the government ever again. These are all the intellectuals and even the school teachers. How do you run a government without these people - most of which were apolitical and had only joined the Ba'ath party to continue their careers? The problem with disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers (like 500,000) was two-fold. The first is that there was suddenly no military - i.e. no one to protect Iraq's border, to protect it's infrastructure, to maintain peace and order. The second is that suddenly you have half a million out of work men who have no way of feeding their families. What do they do? The only job in town is to join the insurgency, so why not do that?

Overall, just a frightening frightening summary of post-war Iraq. But what's most disturbing is the amazing arrogance of the Bush administration and how they didn't listen to any of the advice provided to them by the military or intelligence communities. Equally sad as it is infuriating.

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