CATASTROPHY Faulty Intelligence Misled Troops at War's Start

The second article in the 3-part series
This is the second article in the three-part series:

October 20, 2004
'CATASTROPHIC SUCCESS'
Faulty Intelligence Misled Troops at War's Start
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
New York Times

In early 2003, as the clock ticked down toward the war with Iraq, C.I.A. officials met with senior military commanders at Camp Doha, Kuwait, to discuss their latest ideas for upending Saddam Hussein's government.

Intelligence officials were convinced that American soldiers would be greeted warmly when they pushed into southern Iraq, so a C.I.A. operative suggested sneaking hundreds of small American flags into the country for grateful Iraqis to wave at their liberators. The agency would capture the spectacle on film and beam it throughout the Arab world. It would be the ultimate information operation.

Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, the commander of allied ground forces, quickly objected. To avoid being perceived as an occupying army, American forces had been instructed not to brandish the flag.

The idea was dropped, but the C.I.A.'s optimism remained.

The agency believed that many of the towns were "ours," said one former staff officer who attended the session. "At first, it was going to be U.S. flags," he said, "and then it was going to be Iraqi flags. The flags are probably still sitting in a bag somewhere. One of the towns where they said we would be welcomed was Nasiriya, where Marines faced some of the toughest fighting in the war."

Just as the intelligence about Iraq's presumed stockpiles of unconventional weapons proved wrong, so did much of the information provided to those prosecuting the war and planning the occupation.

In a major misreading of Iraq's strategy, the C.I.A. failed to predict the role played by Saddam Hussein's paramilitary forces, which mounted the main attacks on American troops in southern Iraq and surprised them in bloody battles.

The agency was aware that Iraq was awash in arms but failed to identify the huge caches of weapons that were hidden in mosques and schools to supply enemy fighters.

On postwar Iraq, American intelligence agencies underestimated the decrepit state of Iraq's infrastructure, which became a major challenge in reconstructing the nation, and concluded erroneously that Iraq's police had had extensive professional training.

And while intelligence experts noted an insurgency in its catalog of possible dangers, it did not highlight that threat.

The National Intelligence Council, senior experts from the intelligence community, prepared an analysis in January 2003 on postwar Iraq that discussed the risk of an insurgency in the last paragraph of its 38-page assessment. "There was never a buildup of intelligence that says: 'It's coming. It's coming. It's coming. This is the end you should prepare for,' " said Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the former head of the United States Central Command and now retired, referring to the insurgency. "It did not happen. Never saw it. It was never offered."

The Central Intelligence Agency has come under harsh criticism for its failings on Iraq's weapons and the Sept. 11 terror attacks, and critics have urged that it be overhauled as part of a broad reform of the nation's intelligence community.

The agency declined requests for interviews for this article and declined to respond to written questions submitted to its chief spokesman.

Richard J. Kerr, a former deputy director who was asked by the agency to review its intelligence analysis on the Iraq war, said in an interview that much American intelligence on postwar Iraq was on the mark, particularly the assessment predicting the resentment of Iraqis if the United States did not transfer power quickly to a new Iraqi government. Still, he acknowledged some deficiencies.

"Intelligence assessments on the likely Iraqi impatience with an extended U.S. presence and the role of the army in Iraqi society were particularly prescient," Mr. Kerr said.

"The intelligence accurately forecast the reactions of the ethnic and tribal factions in Iraq," he said. "These positive comments, however, cannot gloss over the fact that Iraq revealed some serious systemic problems in the intelligence community. Collection was poor. Too much emphasis was placed on current intelligence and there was too little research on important social, political and cultural issues."

Trying to Catch Up

Despite more than a decade of antagonism between Saddam Hussein's government and the United States, the Bush administration was operating with limited information when it began to consider the invasion of Iraq. After the 1991 Persian Gulf war, collecting intelligence on Iraq was not always the top priority for American spy agencies, which were burdened by a multitude of potential crises and threats.

Iraq was considered a Tier 2 country. North Korea, in contrast, was Tier 1. As the agencies saw it, North Korea possessed an active nuclear weapons program and a large conventional army in striking range of South Korea and the American forces there. Iraq was seen more as a gathering threat.

The months before the war were a scramble for more intelligence. The American military did its best to fill the gaps, using Predator drones, U-2 spy planes and other surveillance systems. The land forces command printed 100,000 maps of the southern Iraq oilfields, which the Marines were to secure. Detailed block by block analyses were prepared for downtown Baghdad.

Iraq, in intelligence parlance, was a "glass ball environment," meaning the weather was often conducive to collecting images from above.

Much of the intelligence was derived from reconnaissance systems, not from operatives on the ground. With few spies inside Iraq, the agency relied on defectors, detainees, opposition groups and foreign government services, according to a Senate report.

"Some critics have claimed during the prewar period, we did not have many Iraqi sources, " James L. Pavitt, former deputy director for operations for the agency, said in June in a speech to the Foreign Policy Association.

"We certainly did not have enough," he said. "Until we put people on the ground in northern Iraq, we had less than a handful. As I mentioned before, the operating environment was tremendously prohibitive, and developing the necessary trust with those Iraqis who had access was extraordinarily difficult in light of the risks they faced. Once on the ground, however, our officers recruited literally dozens of agents - some of whom paid the ultimate price for their allegiance to us."

The C.I.A. inserted agents in the southern oil fields shortly before the war. American intelligence officers obtained the telephone numbers of Iraqi generals and called to encourage them not to fight. Fearful that the calls were a loyalty test by Saddam Hussein, some changed their numbers, which hindered their efforts to talk to each other when the war was under way.

The United States gained a detailed understanding of Iraq's oil infrastructure and obtained a secret map of Iraq's Baghdad defense plan. The C.I.A. also helped debunk one threat that the military had worried about: the possibility that Mr. Hussein's government would flood the country to thwart an allied advance.

The agency, though, turned out to have a less clear understanding of what the United States would face once it invaded Iraq, or of Mr. Hussein's military strategy. In January 2003, the National Intelligence Council issued its assessment of what might happen after the dictator was ousted. The report cautioned that building democracy in Iraq would be difficult because of its authoritarian history. And it warned of the risk that the American forces would be seen as occupiers.

"Attitudes toward a foreign military force would depend largely on the progress made in transferring power, as well as on the degree to which that force were perceived as providing necessary security and fostering reconstruction and a return to prosperity," it said. The report also noted that quick restoration of services would be important to maintain the support of the Iraqi public.

Broader Picture Was Missing

But the analysis was less prescient on other points.

The study underestimated the fragile state of Iraq's infrastructure, suggesting it could be fixed quickly if it were not extensively damaged in the fighting. "Iraqis have restored their physical infrastructure quickly in previous wars," it stated. The United States chose not to attack the electrical grid, knowing that it would soon need to administer and reconstruct Iraq. But the electrical system collapsed from long neglect, and difficulties in restoring the service left much of the capital in darkness and aggravated residents' fears about crime.

In assessing potential threats, the intelligence report also gave far more weight to the possibility of score-settling among Iraqi ethnic groups than to an insurgency. The discussion of that prospect was remarkably brief.

"The ability of Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups to maintain a presence in northern Iraq (or more clandestinely elsewhere) would depend largely on whether a new regime were able to exert effective security and control over the entire country," it noted. "In addition, rogue ex-regime elements could forge an alliance with existing terrorist organizations or act independently to wage guerrilla warfare against a new government or coalition forces."

Mr. Kerr, the former C.I.A. official, said the agency's regional experts were more concerned than the assessment by the National Intelligence Council about the potential threat of guerrilla attacks by paramilitary forces after Mr. Hussein's government was toppled, particularly if American troops stayed in Iraq for a significant period of time. But he acknowledged that the assessments did not anticipate the sort of virulent insurgency that Americans forces now face in Iraq.

"They did believe there would be a fairly significant stay-behind group of Saddam loyalists and fedayeen that would attract outside support," he said. "But it would be stretching it to reach too far down this line. I could not justify saying that they predicted the war as it has developed."

Gaps Become Apparent

From the start of the war, it was clear that some of the intelligence was off.

On March 19, 2003, for example, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, told the White House that he had firm evidence that Mr. Hussein and his family were in a suburb near Baghdad known as Dora Farms. The Iraqi leader and his two sons were thought to be hiding in a concrete bunker; the C.I.A. provided exact coordinates.

Lt. Gen. Michael (Buzz) Moseley, the air war commander, who was at an air base in Saudi Arabia, quickly developed a plan for stealth fighters to drop satellite-guided bombs, followed by cruise missiles. The planes hit their targets. But when American forces got to Dora Farms after the fall of Baghdad, they discovered there was no underground bunker at that site, General Moseley said in an interview last year.

The Iraqis responded to the attack by firing missiles at American forces in Kuwait. American intelligence learned that a small number of oil wells had been set on fire, so the land war was accelerated.

Senior military officers and intelligence analysts had expected that the Iraqi leader would center his defense in Baghdad, and planned for a decisive battle against his Republican Guard divisions and special military and paramilitary units in the capital. The American forces discovered in the first days of the war that the Iraqis had a different strategy. The Marines learned this the hard way.

Task Force Tarawa, a Marine unit assigned to secure the bridges in eastern Nasiriya, was told that a C.I.A. source had reported that Iraq's 11th Infantry Division, which was to guard the bridges, would probably surrender. Convinced that Nasiriya would be a relatively easy fight, senior Marine commanders did not make any reconnaissance drones available.

The fight in Nasiriya turned out to be one of the toughest of the war. Thousands of paramilitary fighters, the Saddam Fedayeen, had taken up positions there and in the other southern cities, including Samawa and Najaf, determined to put down any Shiite rebellion and to draw the Americans into bloody bouts of urban warfare. In Nasiriya, the Marines' mission was complicated when the Army 507th Maintenance Battalion - made famous when Pfc. Jessica Lynch was taken prisoner - stumbled into the city. The Marines suffered 18 dead the first day, some by American fire, after it ran into hordes of Iraqi fighters.

"All indications were that it would not be much of a fight, that the Iraqis were probably going to capitulate," recalled Joseph Apodaca, a retired lieutenant colonel who served as the intelligence officer for the task force that fought in Nasiriya. "After that contact in Nasiriya, I lost quite a bit of faith in national-level reporting."

Flawed intelligence led to other units' being caught by surprise, too. In Samawa, the Army's Third Squadron, Seventh Cavalry Regiment had been told, based on intelligence reports, to be prepared to conduct a parade to show solidarity with the inhabitants.

Sgt. First Class Anthony Broadhead, who led a group of Bradley fighting vehicles and M-1 tanks into the city, was standing in the hatch of his tank and waving when the Iraqis responded by shooting. A fierce firefight between the soldiers and the paramilitary forces broke out.

"The fighting that occurred in Samawa was not with conventional Iraqi forces but with Saddam Fedayeen and Baath Party members," noted Lt. Col. Terry Ferrell, the unit's commander. "In the intelligence summaries, we had heard about this type of enemy, but they had not been given any credit for being as tenacious and capable of fighting as they demonstrated not only in this battle, but in every other fight the squadron encountered."

The flawed information provided to the units in Nasiriya and Samawa were not the only lapses. American intelligence knew Iraq had huge quantities of conventional weapons, but did not realize that arms caches has been established in schools, hospitals and mosques as part of the strategy to turn the southern cities into bastions for the Saddam Fedayeen.

"What intelligence did not reveal was the magnitude of the regime's weapons holdings," the First Marine Division noted in its after-action report. "Huge caches were hidden in every area of the country, but it was only after the division closed on those facilities that the full magnitude of the distribution of tons of weapons and ammunition throughout the country came to light."

The failure of the American intelligence agencies to detect the paramilitary forces in the south made it harder to anticipate the potential for an insurgency, Colonel Apodaca said. "They are good at reaching into the higher levels of organizations, but those guys don't see clearly what is going on at the bottom," he said.

An American general who asked not be identified because of the sensitivity of his position said: "I think it is safe to say we had an accurate picture of their forces in terms of their general capability and size. But we did not have a good sense of how they were intended to be used. We started out with a deficit of human intelligence, of sources inside."

Misreading the Consequences

Even in the last days of Mr. Hussein's government, some preliminary reports suggested that a guerrilla campaign could emerge once he was toppled.

On April 5, 2003, a Defense Intelligence Agency task force said the Baathists had made plans to wage a protracted guerrilla war and would form a tactical alliance with Islamic jihadists. Their goal, the task force said, was to produce casualties so that the American public would push for United States forces to quit Iraq.

On April 9, American intelligence agencies issued a "sense of the community" memo - their collective judgment - which concluded that Baath Party cadres, Iraqi security forces and paramilitary fighters were operating independently under longstanding orders. They could be expected to fight on until they were neutralized, Saddam Hussein was killed or senior Iraqi leaders whom they respected ordered them to stop fighting. Even then, the memo said, some would fight on.

Later, after the fall of Baghdad, American intelligence would learn more about preparations that had been made for a guerrilla campaign. The Iraq Survey Group, which was sent to Iraq primarily to search for evidence of unconventional weapons, uncovered some documents. The papers concerning Falluja, Iraq's most volatile city, identified storage areas for weapons caches and provided the names of 75 Saddam Fedayeen and 12 suicide volunteers who were expected to join in the fight.

The battle for the future of Iraq has only intensified as the insurgency has become entrenched. It has now taken thousands of lives, crippled reconstruction, threatened election of a new Iraqi government and forced American troops to engage in a grueling guerrilla conflict. The C.I.A. and other intelligence services are deeply involved in gathering information to help subdue the rebels controlling some of Iraq's cities, trying to fill in the gaps that existed when the Americans invaded Iraq.

"We understood their conventional force, their missiles programs, their air force," recalled Maj. Gen. James M. (Spider) Marks, now retired, who served as the chief intelligence officer for the land war command. "The elements of power which we could assess from a distance we assessed quite well. What we missed was the fine granularity that you get from a physical presence on the ground, by interacting with the Iraqi people over the years. Since 1991, we lost our finger on the pulse of the Iraqi people and built intelligence assessments from a distance. We did not appreciate the 'fear factor' and the grip that the regime had on the people."

"We did not appreciate the "fear factor" and the grip that the regime had on the people".

Sure ya didn't...
But ya gave US Color-coded Terror Alert Levels...



So... WHERE are the WMDs?

What I am wondering is why it is assumed that it is a fear factor that is involved with the insurgency problem. Who are they fearing now? Surely not saddam who was holed up by himself like frightened rabbit.

Debate Lingering on Decision to Dissolve the Iraqi Military
Third article in the series:

October 21, 2004
'CATASTROPHIC SUCCESS'
Debate Lingering on Decision to Dissolve the Iraqi Military
By MICHAEL R. GORDON

When Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus flew to Baghdad on June 14, 2003, he had a blunt message for the American-led occupation authority. As the commander of the 101st Airborne Division, General Petraeus had been working tirelessly to win the support of Iraqis in Mosul and the neighboring provinces in northern Iraq.

But the authority's decree to abolish the Iraqi Army and to forgo paying 350,000 soldiers had jolted much of Iraq. Riots had broken out in cities. Just the day before, 16 of General Petraeus's soldiers had been wounded trying to put down a violent demonstration.

Arriving at the huge Abu Ghraib North Palace for a ceremony, General Petraeus spied Walter B. Slocombe, an adviser to L. Paul Bremer III, who headed the authority. Sidling up to him, General Petraeus said that the decision to leave the soldiers without a livelihood had put American lives at risk.

More than a year later, Mr. Bremer's disbanding of the Iraqi Army still casts a shadow over the occupation of Iraq. The American military had been counting on using Iraqi soldiers to help rebuild the country and impose order along its borders. Instead, as a violent insurgency convulsed the nation, United States forces found themselves deprived of a way to put an Iraqi face on the occupation.

While Mr. Bremer soon reversed himself on paying salaries to the ex-soldiers, his decision to formally dissolve the Iraqi military and methodically build a new one, battalion by battalion, still ranks as one of the most contentious issues of the post-war.

Mr. Slocombe argues that the move was necessary to establish an Iraqi military that was not tainted by corruption and was acceptable to ethnic groups that had long been repressed by Saddam Hussein's military. He also says that it was the only possible course because so many Iraqi soldiers had fled their posts and drifted back into the population and military bases had been picked clean by looters.

But senior American generals were privately urging a much different approach, according to interviews with military and civilian officials. Top commanders were meeting secretly with former Iraqi officers to discuss the best way to rebuild the force and recall Iraqi soldiers back to duty when Mr. Bremer arrived in Baghdad with his plan.

"It was absolutely the wrong decision," said Col. Paul Hughes of the Army, who served as an aide to Jay Garner, a retired three-star general and the first civilian administrator of Iraq. "We changed from being a liberator to an occupier with that single decision,'' he said. "By abolishing the army, we destroyed in the Iraqi mind the last symbol of sovereignty they could recognize and as a result created a significant part of the resistance."

Drafting the Plan

When the Bush administration first began to plan for post-war Iraq in early 2003, disbanding the Iraqi military was not part of the strategy. Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense, outlined a policy for retaining and retraining the existing Iraqi military in a March 2003 meeting of the National Security Council that President Bush attended.

The idea, which was developed with General Garner, was to take existing units, remove high-level Baathists and supporters of Saddam Hussein, and put the soldiers to work. The Iraqi military, Pentagon officials reasoned, would have its own transport and could help with the reconstruction, functioning as a kind of modern day Civilian Conservation Corps. Units that proved themselves capable and politically reliable could help the American military maintain order.

At the White House meeting, Mr. Feith made another argument for using the existing army. Iraq was racked by unemployment and taking 350,000 armed men, cutting off their income and, in effect, throwing them out on the street could be disastrous.

American commanders also backed that approach. In a March 2003 meeting with a team of visiting Pentagon officials, General John P. Abizaid, then Gen. Tommy Franks's deputy, expressed concerns that the Americans would arouse resentment if they enforced security in Iraq largely by themselves. He favored a quick turnover of power to an interim Iraqi authority and the use of Iraqi forces to complement and eventually replace the Americans.

"We must in all things be modest," General Abizaid said, according to notes taken by a Pentagon official. "We are an antibody in their culture."

There was a military imperative as well. The American commanders knew they might have sufficient forces to oust Mr. Hussein, but it would be difficult to control a large nation with 25 million people and porous borders with Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Kuwait. The V Corps, which oversaw United States Army forces in Iraq, wanted Iraqi Army units to patrol the borders to block terrorists, jihadists and Iranian- sponsored groups from sneaking into the country and to prevent loyalists and possible caches of unconventional weapons from getting out, a former V Corps officer said.

The Bush administration did not just discuss keeping the old army. General Garner's team found contractors to retrain it. MPRI, a consulting company based in Alexandria, Va., and run by Carl Vuono, a retired general and former Army chief of staff, received an initial contract for $625,000. The company sent a nine-member team to Kuwait to begin creating a program to involve former Iraqi soldiers in reconstruction.

RONCO, a Washington consulting company, developed a proposal to screen Iraqi soldiers so they could join a new fighting force or be retrained for other duties. The company drew up a detailed plan for three screening centers in northern, central and southern Iraq.

Civilian and military planners had been actively encouraging Iraqi Army units to surrender en masse or to flee and not fight for Mr. Hussein. There were indications the Iraqis would do just that. Faced with advancing American and British troops and a furious barrage from the air, most of the enemy soldiers fled in the first days of the war instead of surrendering. Still, the American generals decided it was vital to use the Iraqi forces, who many officers figured had done what they had been asked.

The New Iraqi Military

On April 17, little more than a week after American troops first entered Baghdad, General Abizaid joined in a satellite video conference with senior officials, including Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary. General Abizaid noted that no Iraqi units were still in place but urged that the United States form a three-division interim Iraqi military using units that had "self-demobilized" as well as members of opposition groups, who would be invited to appear at processing centers.

In Iraq, the American generals were trying to field a new Iraqi military. On May 9, Lt. Gen. David McKiernan and other senior officers met with Faris Naima, a former Iraqi officer, in a meeting coordinated by a C.I.A. official in Baghdad.

Mr. Naima had the professional bearing of a soldier and spoke fluent English. He had been the commander of Al Bakr Military College, a training ground for Iraq's top officers. Suspect politically, but still valued by Mr. Hussein's government, he was appointed as the Iraqi ambassador to the Philippines and then Austria. According to a report by Kuna, the Kuwaiti news agency, Mr. Hussein's son Qusay ordered him and his wife to return to Baghdad after their tour in Vienna, but Mr. Naima refused.

Wearing a frayed business suit at the meeting with the American generals, Mr. Naima pulled out a folded piece of paper from his jacket that outlined his plan for how to proceed.

Because looting had broken out in Baghdad and crime was rampant, he said a show of power was needed. The most important thing, he said, was security. He also said the Americans had to act fast to get the Iraqi noncommissioned officers and the police back to work, according to an officer who was present.

Mr. Naima urged the Americans to establish three- Iraqi military divisions, which would be deployed in northern, central and southern Iraq. An army company would be stationed in each major town to back up the police. Mr. Naima said there were plenty of potential military leaders who were not committed Baathists. The idea, he said, would be to start at the top, create a new Iraqi Ministry of Defense, and then work down. All the officers would be required to denounce the Baath Party.

When the Americans wondered where they would find the officers, Mr. Naima had an answer. I can bring them to you, he told the generals.

He also offered some political advice. The Americans should announce a departure plan so Iraqis did not view them as occupiers. And they had to pay the military, the police and the bureaucrats. Iraq was a nation of civil servants, he said, and they needed their salaries to survive.

The Americans were impressed. They thought they could work from the top down as well from the bottom up to summon Iraqi soldiers to duty, screen them and quickly install a new force.

While the American generals and the C.I.A. were working on reviving the army, General Garner's occupation authority was making parallel efforts. Soon after arriving in Baghdad, one of his top planners, Colonel Hughes of the Army, heard from an officer in the 101st Airborne Division, whose troops were patrolling Baghdad. Some former Iraqi officers had told the Americans they wanted to receive their salaries.

After securing approval from senior officers, Colonel Hughes met with the group at the officers' club of the Iraqi Republican Guard. The men, calling themselves the Independent Military Gathering, said they wanted to cooperate with the Americans. Though many wanted to work outside the military, they were willing to supply names of potential recruits, including lower ranking noncommissioned officials. Before the war, they had had removed computers containing military personnel records from the Iraqi Defense Ministry. Eventually, they gave the Americans a list of some 50,000 to 70,000 names, including the military police.

In Washington, though, Mr. Bremer was developing a dramatically different approach. A boyish-looking former diplomat, Mr. Bremer was to replace General Garner in May. He would become known in Baghdad for his take-charge personality and his trademark desert boots worn with Brooks Brothers suits.

He believed that many of the problems with violence and crime that the United States faced in Iraq stemmed from Iraqi fears that Mr. Hussein and his Baathist supporters might outlast the American occupiers and claw their way back to power. He wanted to take bold action to demonstrate that the Baathists were through, once and for all.

In a memo to the Pentagon, Mr. Bremer , noted his desire that "my arrival in Iraq be marked by clear, public and decisive steps to reassure Iraqis that we are determined to eradicate Saddamism." While his main purpose was to promote the de-Baathification of Iraq, plans to abolish Mr. Hussein's army soon became part of the initiative. Mr. Slocombe, who was under secretary of defense in the Clinton administration, recommended that the Iraqi military and the Ministry of Defense be formally eliminated.

As he saw it, the Iraqi Army had gone AWOL. There were no longer intact divisions, and many military vehicles and bases had been looted. Moreover, Mr. Slocombe thought the force was corrupt and dominated by Sunni officers. He did not believe it was feasible to recall the existing army and felt there was no choice but to build a new one from scratch.

After he arrived in Iraq, Mr. Slocombe met with Mr. Naima, former Iraqi officers and General McKiernan. Mr. Slocombe thanked the Iraqi officers but made it clear that he did not view them as the nucleus of a new Iraqi command, a participant said. It was a blow not only to the Iraqis but to the American military officers who thought they were identifying senior officers to help remake the army.

Mr. Feith, the senior deputy to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, said in an interview that Mr. Bremer's thinking represented a necessary shift. Mr. Feith said that using the Iraqi Army had seemed sensible because the value of putting an intact army to use outweighed the disadvantages of using a potentially corrupt force.

"It made sense at first to say we are going to use them," Mr. Feith said. "When we saw that the Army did not remain in units, that the people disappeared, that looters had stripped all of the infrastructure, all of the various pros that weighed in favor of using the army had been negated by events. And we were left with the cons, a bad, corrupt, cruel and undemocratic army."

After arriving in Iraq, Mr. Bremer formally issued Order No. 2, The Dissolution of Entities, which abolished the army.

The order, dated May 23, noted that the occupation authority planned to create in the near future the New Iraqi Corps as the first step in forming a national self-defense capability for a free Iraq. But the schedule for building that force was methodical and no one who had served in the Iraqi military at the rank of colonel and above was to be recruited without thorough vetting. There were provisions for making a termination payment to officers who were mustered out, but salaries would no longer be paid. There was no mention of a program to retrain the troops for other tasks.

The Administration's Role

The role of top Bush administration officials in approving the plan is unclear. Mr. Slocombe said the decision was the subject of extensive consultations with senior Defense Department officials in Washington. A draft of Mr. Bremer's decree abolishing the army, he said, was sent to Mr. Rumsfeld before it was issued.

Lawrence Di Rita, Mr. Rumsfeld's spokesman, said in an e-mail message that the issue was not taken up by cabinet-level officials and was "definitely not one that the secretary of defense decided."

General Peter Pace of the Marines, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Joint Chiefs were not consulted about the decision.

Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, indicated that the idea did not originate in the National Security Council but acknowledged that the White House did not object.

"I don't think that anybody thought it was wildly out of context with what we were trying to achieve and the whole structure had been set up so that some of those decisions could be made in the field or through the Pentagon chain," she said in an interview.

In the field, however, the plan was more contentious than many in Washington realized. Much of the debate did not concern the abolition of the army but the subsequent plan overseen by Mr. Slocombe to establish a new army from the ground up.

Under his schedule, which Mr. Slocombe said was worked out with military planners, it would take a year to field the first division of infantry - about 12,000 Iraqi troops - and two years to train and equip a three-division force. To avoid the taint of Baathism, no one from the rank of colonel and above could join without vetting.

The military did not like that approach. The commanders did not care whether the army was formally disbanded as long as a new one was quickly assembled to take its place. But General Abizaid wanted Iraqi soldiers available in several months, not several years, planners at his command said.

When Col. John Agoglia, the liaison between the occupation authority and General Franks of the Central Command, learned of the plan, he quickly called the military headquarters in Qatar.

"There was a debate, which was not whether to formally disband the old army and not primarily about whether to recall old units," Mr. Slocombe said in an interview. "It was whether to put the process to train, equip and mold an Iraqi army under the command of select former Iraqi generals."

Mr. Slocombe said that his approach was no slower than that advocated by American commanders, because the extensive looting of the bases would have hindered retraining. He argued that his plan would produce a more reliable ally, not a Sunni-led force that would not be accepted by the Shiites and other ethnic group.

A former planner from General Franks's command strongly disagreed. "We wanted to rapidly call the soldiers back, get them on our side and then sort out who could and could not be trusted," said the planner, who did not want to be identified because he did want to be publicly caught up in the controversy. "It would have been a lot faster than building one battalion at a time. And we wanted to send a psychological message that they were going to be part of the new Iraq, to prevent them from turning against us."

General Garner, who was winding up his service in Iraq at that time, was also opposed. He said he had not been given advance notice of the plan. "What was happening was that hundreds of Iraqi soldiers were just beginning to come back," Mr. Garner said. "We could have brought back and paired them up in former units. Instead, we just shut the door on them."

General Franks and his commanders were in an awkward position, trying to influence a decision that already had been made. In late May, Rear Admiral James A. Robb, the Central Command's chief planning officer, told Mr. Slocombe that General Abizaid believed that former senior Iraqi officers should not be disqualified and that the training should be accelerated. General Franks followed up in a video conference on June 2 with Mr. Bremer.

"I think the velocity of doing it can be characterized as a miscalculation," General Franks said about the plan in an interview.

He also urged Mr. Bremer to pay the demobilized soldiers, who had few job prospects in a nation with soaring unemployment rates. General Petraeus reinforced that message when he ran into Mr. Slocombe at the military ceremony in Baghdhad two weeks later.

In a compromise, Mr. Slocombe agreed that senior Iraqi officers could serve on an advisory board, but without the prospect of command, the idea soon withered.

Soon after Mr. Bremer issued his order abolishing the army, the occupation authority made a discovery. He had initially decided to bar officers from the rank of colonel and above unless they could prove they were not high-ranking Baathists. But an examination of personnel records showed that important Baathists did not appear in large numbers until the rank of major general. Even then, only 50 per cent of those officers were affected. That was the point Mr. Naima had made with General McKiernan.

There was another problem with the plans for the Iraqi Army. The acronym for the New Iraqi Corps turned out to be a profanity in Arabic, so the name had to be changed. [/u]

Stretching the Military

As the insurgency took root in the volatile Sunni Triangle and in other Iraqi cities, the United States military was finding itself increasingly stretched thin. At the same time General Abizaid was pressing Mr. Bremer and Mr. Slocombe to speed up the training of the military, he also urged that a militia be established to help fill the security gap. But members of the new Iraqi Civil Defense Corps lived at home and were not a national force.

Mr. Slocombe and Maj. General Paul D. Eaton, who was brought in to oversee the training of the army, drafted a new plan to accelerate it, taking advantage of an agreement to train Iraqi officers in Jordan.

When fighting erupted in Falluja earlier this year, however, the newly trained Iraqi security forces did not acquit themselves well. An Iraqi Army unit showed little stomach for battle. When ordered to join American marines in combat, the soldiers refused to board a helicopter to take them to the town, saying they would not bear arms against fellow Iraqis.

In June, almost a year after he voiced his concerns about the initial decision not to pay the army, General Petraeus was appointed to a new post: training the new Iraqi Army.

In recognition of Iraq's new sovereignty, a veteran Iraqi general is serving as the army chief of staff, and some senior officers have been recruited. General Petraeus has trained one brigade of a new intervention force to fight insurgents and another brigade of regular army troops. He intends to have a division of each by January

But he - and his military and civilian bosses - have a larger goal in mind. By having an Iraqi army that can defeat the insurgency and secure the peace, they know, the Americans eventually can go home. "I know where this ends," General Petraeus said when he took on his new post. "It ends with the Iraqis in charge of their country."

For Training Iraq's Police, the Main Problem Was Time
October 21, 2004
For Training Iraq's Police, the Main Problem Was Time
By MICHAEL R. GORDON

Critics have complained that the Bush administration did not have a plan to deal with postwar Iraq. But when it came to rebuilding the Iraqi police, the issue was not the absence of a plan but the time it took to put it into effect.

As the Iraq war approached, Richard Mayer, a Justice Department official, drew up options and plans to rebuild the Iraqi police. As the deputy director of an international training program at the department, he had considerable experience in training police forces from Haiti to the Balkans.

Working with experts at the State Department, Mr. Mayer drew up a list of options, including an ambitious one to field 5,000 international law enforcement officials who would help train the Iraqi police and, if need be, help carry out police duties themselves, as international police officers do in Kosovo. Jay Garner, the retired lieutenant general who headed the first occupation authority in Iraq, said in an interview that he supported the big option.

The plan, however, was not well received at senior levels of the Bush administration. The White House was reassured by an assessment from the C.I.A. that the Iraqi police had extensive professional training. Nor did they want to see Americans carrying out law enforcement duties in Iraq.

Soon a new plan emerged. A small team of multinational assessors would go to Iraq after Saddam Hussein was forced out to see what assistance was required for the Iraqi police, courts and prison system. If it turned out help was needed, some 1,500 law enforcement experts - "civpol" or civilian police in the argot of the bureaucracy - would be sent.

About 1,000 of them would be Americans supplied by private contractors; 500 would be from other countries. The civilian police would act as advisers and trainers but would not wear uniforms or have the responsibility to carry out arrests.

The idea of carrying out an assessment before sending international police experts raised the risk that if the Iraqi police did not go back to work immediately after the war ended, there could be a breakdown in law and order before the United States was in a position to help. Robert Perito, an expert on peacekeeping operations at the United States Institute for Peace, a government-financed research center, warned about this possibility in a Feb. 28 presentation to the Defense Policy Board, a panel that advises Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

"Prior experience indicates that the regular Iraq police will be unavailable, intimidated or unprepared to act in the chaotic postwar environment," Mr. Perito said, according to copy of his presentation. "Reliance on coalition military forces is not the answer. Experience in the Balkans demonstrated that regular soldiers are neither trained nor equipped to deal with mob violence or engage in law enforcement."

It did not take long, however, before the Americans discovered that they were behind the curve.

Most of the Iraqi police had fled their posts, nearly all of the police stations in Baghdad were destroyed by looters, and many of the officers who had been lured back were poorly trained.

Robert Gifford, an official from the State Department's Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, served as the senior advisor to the Iraq Interior Ministry right after the invasion. When a 34-member assessment team showed up in May, Mr. Gifford sent all but five of them into the field immediately to try to shore up returning police station commanders, establish traffic control, help police leadership and start training at the police academy.

The team's May 30 report, titled "Iraqi Police: An Assessment of Their Present and Recommendations for the Future," noted the daunting problems. The Iraqi police were corrupt, unprofessional and untrustworthy, it said. The assessment recommended that 6,663 police advisers be sent, even more than Mr. Mayer of the Justice Department proposed before the war.

In Washington, however, that proposal was regarded as unrealistic. The United States simply did not have enough alliance partners to field such a large force.

Another problem was financing. An early State Department estimate was more than $1 billion a year to field 1,500 international civilian police officers, since the United States would have to provide security, logistics and provisions for the entire force.

Yet by May, all that was available to spend was $25 million in seed money provided by the State Department. That was enough to pay for only the assessment team and identify 150 American law enforcement experts, who were to be provided by a private contractor. They were identified and told to get ready to go to Iraq but were not initially sent.

In mid-May, Mr. Gifford turned over his responsibilities to Bernard E. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner who runs a consulting firm with Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor. In an Aug. 17 memorandum to L. Paul Bremer III, the new head of the occupation authority, Mr. Kerik described a difficult situation.

"Although some 32,000 police are back on duty country-wide, a combination of retirements and continued C. P.A. vetting of Baath Party loyalists will produce a personnel shortfall of 33,000-35,000 police,'' he wrote, referring to the Coalition Provisional Authority and Mr. Hussein's party. "Recruitment, screening, training and deployment of this many new police will take at least two years."

Mr. Kerik submitted a plan calling for the deployment of up to 1,500 international law enforcement advisers and exerts, the number that Bush administration officials had decided months before might be needed but which had not yet been sent. In his memo, he asked Mr. Bremer to talk to officials in Washington to win support for the plan.

Mr. Kerik said in an interview that securing money from the Congress was the big problem. But Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who initially had responsibility for training the Iraqi army and later was given the responsibility for training the Iraq police, suggested that management was an issue. He said the police training program he eventually inherited was a "disjointed fiasco."

Looking back on the summer of 2003, Mr. Perito said, the Bush administration, "did not have a training mission set to go."

"Instead, they decided to do an assessment, offer recommendations, have them adopted and then go for the money," he said. "What that does, it loses you the first six months of the operation. The doctrine on peace operations is that the initial month or so is critical."