Support Our Troops, Dump Bush alibi . july 8 – 14, 2004
An Albuquerque Lieutenant Colonel returns from Iraq with a bitter message for the Bush administration
By Steven Robert Allen
From June 2003 through June 2004, he also served as part of the occupation force in Iraq.
For security purposes and due to the nature of his work, Garcia can’t use his real name in this article. Yet given the current mess in Iraq, this Albuquerque soldier’s thoughts on the Bush administration’s faulty justifications for the war and his own dramatic experiences in the country are of utmost interest. Garcia, of course, can’t claim to speak for the entire military. As a registered Republican, however, who voted for Bush in 2000, his take on the Iraq debacle is an eye-opener, to say the least.
“The bottom line is we didn’t need to do this,” Garcia says. “The war in Iraq diverted attention from al Qaeda, and it also handed Osama bin Laden a strategic victory. In other words, the Bush administration did exactly what al Qaeda wanted us to do. It’s created a huge recruiting opportunity for our enemies, and we’ve alienated the whole world in the process.”
I asked Garcia what he’d say to George W. Bush if he had the chance. “With respect, sir,” says Garcia, “you’ve lost my vote.” …
“There just wasn’t enough evidence that Iraq presented an imminent threat to our national interests,” he says.
To make matters worse, Garcia says, the war wasn’t conducted the way the military wanted it to be conducted. “The civilian leadership disregarded the advice of military planners. They have manuals about how to do this sort of occupation. The Department of Defense ignored them. Look what happened to Shinseki.”
Gen. Eric Shinseki, you might recall, was the Army Chief of Staff. Right before the invasion, he testified to a congressional committee that, due to Iraq’s size and cultural complexity, he believed the military required a force of several hundred thousand troops to adequately occupy the country. Shinseki was much more worried about the subsequent occupation of Iraq than the war itself.
A couple days later, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz publicly rebuked the general before another congressional committee, calling Shinseki’s estimate “wildly off the mark.” Wolfowitz also said, “It’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam’s security forces and his army. Hard to imagine.”
Hard to imagine for Wolfowitz, maybe, but not for the military experts who had spent years researching the intricacies inherent in attempting to overthrow Saddam’s regime. As it turns out, it was Wolfowitz’ statements that were wildly off the mark. Garcia believes that the occupation of Iraq has become a catastrophic disaster not because the military didn’t plan appropriately, but because the Bush administration ignored the military’s plans from the beginning. The result, he said, has been a much greater loss of life, both American and Iraqi, than would otherwise have been the case.
According to Garcia, the current administration has combined extreme arrogance with a capacity for deluding itself that makes such disasters almost inevitable. “I don’t think the big shots in the Bush administration are malicious or conspiratorial or conscious liars,” he says. “Actually, I think they really believe the things they say, which to me is even scarier. These people don’t listen to other viewpoints, and they don’t seem to have the ability to use basic critical thinking skills to reach logical solutions to the problems we face in the war on terrorism. The neo-conservatives really scare the crap out of me. Their messianic view of global democracy is pure fantasy.” …
Like many experts, Garcia believes the Bush administration made a terrible mistake when it opted to disband Saddam’s army. “They should’ve just lopped off all the top generals and done some spot removals of the hardcore Baathists, but kept the military together. Iraq under Saddam was a highly militant society. Being in the army brought with it a huge amount of prestige. These young guys lost that prestige, and on top of that they brought all their guns home with them. It created a very bad situation.”
That’s just one example of what Garcia views as the Bush administration’s gross incompetence in conducting this war. “I’d love to be at West Point in 10 years for the class ’How Not to Conduct a War,'” he says, “I’m sure they’re talking about it right now, how badly the civilian leadership screwed up.” …
”[T]here still wasn’t a close enough connection between Iraq and al Qaeda to justify the war.
“I mean, we could invade Venezuela tomorrow and do the same sort of net good for the Venezuelan people that we’ve done in Iraq, but it would be strategically detrimental to us. If we really wanted to help the Iraqi people, if that was our goal, then we should’ve used NATO or the U.N. from the beginning. Going it alone has hurt us in a big way.”
Garcia considers himself to be a moderate, old-style Rockefeller Republican, but these days he feels like a minority in his party. Although he won’t change his party affiliation, he’s finished with the Bush administration.
