The lead paragraph from a New York Times article on Iraqi's "dysfunctional" police says it all. It lays out the initial state of affairs right after the invasion including the critical project of rebuilding the police forces,

the Pentagon began its effort to rebuild the Iraqi police with a mere dozen advisers. Overmatched from the start, one was sent to train a 4,000-officer unit to guard power plants and other utilities. A second to advise 500 commanders in Baghdad. Another to organize a border patrol for the entire country.

Yep, you read that correctly, "a dozen advisers" for a country that Rumsfeld et al kept reminding us when they couldn't find WMDs is the size of California. A dozen advisers for a country the size of California. Is it any surprise that chaos rules in Iraq? Keep in mind that in Kosovo, the UN sent 4,800 police and trainers. Keep in mind that the UN trained the new police recruits for six months, not ten weeks as in Iraq.

The NYT goes on to detail how,

Before the war, the Bush administration dismissed as unnecessary a plan backed by the Justice Department to rebuild the police force by deploying thousands of American civilian trainers.

And then when the chaos, that Rumsfeld dismissed as just the messy bits of democracy taking hold, broke out and

when the majority of Iraqi police officers abandoned their posts, a second proposal by a Justice Department team calling for 6,600 police trainers was reduced to 1,500, and then never carried out. During the first eight months of the occupation — as crime soared and the insurgency took hold — the United States deployed 50 police advisers in Iraq.

Against the objections of Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, the long-range plan was eventually reduced to 500 trainers. The result was a police captain from North Carolina having 40 Americans to train 20,000 Iraqi police across four provinces in southern Iraq.

Sure the Iraqi police were untrained, corrupt, and underpaid, but that doesn't excuse our lack of planning, our lack of judgment, the lack of oversight, and our own incompetence when it came to retraining them.

During the first two years of the war, three different government groups developed three different plans to train Iraq's police, all without knowing of the existence of the other.

A lack of planning; a lack of judgment prevailed on everything related to Iraq. The Bush White House failed to plan for the consequences of invading Iraq and then failed to respond to events on the ground. This is nothing short of a failure of leadership. Surprisingly Rumsfeld still has a job. Surprisingly George Bush still has a job.

Revelations of the sort found in this NYT article as well as others shows why the Republicans are banging the drum that if the Democrats win control of Congress in the November mid-term elections there will be investigations and perhaps even an impeachment of President Bush. The Bush folks so mishandled everything related to 9/11 that they fear a Congress willing to ask questions. The Republicans in Congress that enabled Bush's crimes fear that people will start asking "how did this happen?" and hold those very same Republican enablers responsible. They have much to fear.
posted by Idle Crank at 5/20/2006 01:14:00 PM