From a local guy--and the Kansas City Star

An important article from the Kansas City Star today, by a General at Fort Leavenworth, who served in Iraq in the last few years:

Missed Signals from Iraq Resulted in Wrong Responses, Retired General Recalls

By Scott Canon
The Kansas City Star

FORT LEAVENWORTH | Premature declarations of victory ultimately doomed the Iraqi occupation to lost opportunities, a former commander of U.S. troops there said Friday.

Ricardo Sanchez, a retired Army lieutenant general whose Iraq command stretched through the first year after the invasion, told more than 1,000 mid-career officers that Washington’s expectations of good news blotted out drearier reports coming from Baghdad in 2003 and 2004.

“We honestly believed what we had been told — that we’d be greeted as liberators,” Sanchez said in a 90-minute talk to students at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth.

So when Sanchez and others began reporting that a deadly and powerful insurgency was brewing in the country, and that Iraqis saw Americans as occupiers, not saviors, he said, the Bush administration was slow to accept the reality. That, in turn, meant troops ill-equipped and poorly trained for the burgeoning insurgency.

So at the very time when the military needed more armor and counterinsurgency expertise, he said, the White House wanted symbols of success.

Sanchez, on a tour to promote his memoir, cited as a chief example the turning over of sovereignty to a disorganized Iraqi government before it was ready to assume power.

He said unreal expectations also prompted a retrospectively foolhardy overreaction to the killing of four Blackwater security employees in Fallujah in 2004.

Seared in the public consciousness, the burning and hanging of two of the bodies off a bridge was “tactically insignificant,” Sanchez said. Yet it created political pressure to show that U.S. troops were not just sitting ducks.

When the subsequent offensive in Fallujah turned out to be bloodier than expected and threatened to tilt the 2004 U.S. elections, Sanchez said, the White House ordered a retreat.

In his book, Wiser in Battle, published last week, he said he refused because it would have given the enemy a resounding victory while putting his troops in unreasonable peril as they withdrew from the city under fire. He threatened to quit.

That won him a compromise, he said: The U.S. offensive would halt, but there would be no retreat.

Resigning, he said in an interview after Friday’s speech, would have been a perilous turning point, putting “our mission at much greater risk.”

Such a public rebuke of the President Bush and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld by a field commander would have been “a tumultuous situation at the highest levels of command (putting) a question in the mind of the soldier on the battlefield.”

Sanchez’s book has drawn varying reviews — lauded as a frank look at the tension between military commanders and the White House, and criticized as being self-serving.

In The Washington Post, reviewer Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote that Sanchez “is so busy castigating erstwhile colleagues that he never stops to wonder if he might have erred.”

In the book, Sanchez took some responsibility for the abuses of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. Yet, he said Friday that the scandal’s seeds were planted in 2002 when the administration decided some terror suspects were not necessarily protected by the Geneva Conventions. Consequently, Sanchez said, abusive interrogation techniques became commonplace and accountability for abuses fell apart.

Bush was focused on the war, attuned to its difficulties and supportive of the military, Sanchez said in his interview. But he said the president “does not impose his will.” For instance, he said Bush was slow to demand action in Fallujah.


And then this quote, from a sign on a poster a lady held in a picture in that same newspaper today:

"Blind faith in bad leadership is not patriotism."

Obvious but important to say.

Have a great weekend, folks. American soldiers are still out there, fighting and dying in your name, for your oil.