Crosses of Lafayette: The Real Outrage

I have mentioned before that we have a bumper sticker on our car that says "HONOR THE WARRIOR NOT THE WAR." In Lafayette, the impetus behind the project to build the crosses on the hillside that are visable to riders on BART and drivers on Highway 24 is do exactly that. It is possible to honor the soldiers who have died in the war without honoring war itself or the perpetrators of the "war of choice" in Iraq.

In the current issue of The New York Review of Books, Mark Danner has written a chilling critique of the deeply irresponsible behavior of George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Condi Rice.

In a nutshell, after 9/11, Bush was able to appear to be so decisive precisely because he did not concern himself with details, complexities, dissenting opinions or the possibility of Plan A not working. Rumsfeld believed in Plan A: victory (toppling Sadaam) would be swift, U.S. troops would be welcome, Ahmad Chalabi would become the head of the new government, and "by the end of August we're going to have 25,000 to 30,000 troops left in Iraq." He had no plan B.

But Bush himself vetoed Chalabi:

So there would be no President Chalabi. Unfortunately, the President, who thought of himself, Woodward says, "as the calcium in the backbone" of the US government, having banned Chalabi's ascension, neither offered an alternative plan nor forced the government he led to agree on one. Nor did Secretary Rumsfeld, who knew only that he wanted a quick victory and a quick departure. To underline the point, soon after the US invasion the secretary sent his special assistant, Larry DiRita, to the Kuwait City Hilton to brief the tiny, miserable, understaffed, and underfunded team led by the retired General Garner which was preparing to fly to a chaotic Baghdad to "take control of the transition." Here is DiRita's "Hilton Speech" as quoted to Woodward by an army colonel, Paul Hughes:

"We went into the Balkans and Bosnia and Kosovo and we're still in them.... We're probably going to wind up in Afghanistan for a long time because the Department of State can't do its job right. Because they keep screwing things up, the Department of Defense winds up being stuck at these places. We're not going to let this happen in Iraq."

The reaction was generally, Whoa! Does this guy even realize that half the people in the room are from the State Department?

DiRita went on, as Hughes recalled: "By the end of August we're going to have 25,000 to 30,000 troops left in Iraq."

DiRita spoke these words as, a few hundred miles away, Baghdad and the other major cities of Iraq were taken up in a thoroughgoing riot of looting and pillage—of government ministries, universities and hospitals, power stations and factories—that would virtually destroy the country's infrastructure, and with it much of the respect Iraqis might have had for American competence. The uncontrolled violence engulfed Iraq's capital and major cities for weeks as American troops—140,000 or more—mainly sat on their tanks, looking on. If attaining true political authority depends on securing a monopoly on legitimate violence, then the Americans would never achieve it in Iraq. There were precious few troops to impose order, and hardly any military police. No one gave the order to arrest or shoot looters or otherwise take control of the streets. Official Pentagon intentions at this time seem to have been precisely what the secretary of defense's special assistant said they were: to have all but 25,000 or so of those troops out of Iraq in five months or less.

How then to secure the country, which was already in a state of escalating chaos? Most of the ministries had been looted and burned and what government there was consisted of the handful of Iraqi officials who Garner's small team had managed to coax into returning to work. In keeping with the general approach of quick victory, quick departure, Garner had briefed the President and his advisers before leaving Washington, emphasizing his plan to dismiss only the most senior and personally culpable Baathists from the government and also to make use of the Iraqi army to rebuild and, eventually, keep order.

But then Rumsfeld replaced Garner with Jerry Bremer. Bremer's first move was to dismiss all Baathists from government and his second move was to dismiss the Iraqi army. Bremer got his marching orders from Neocon Dougie Feith. Immediately the US "had at least 350,000 more enemies than it had the day before—the 50,000 Baathists [and] the 300,000 officially unemployed soldiers."

Iraq quickly spiraled out of control.

And who paid the price? The soldiers killed in Iraq. The Crosses in Lafayette honor these warriors but not the war and certainly not the pitiful architects of the failed war.