Mistakes, I’ve made a few…

And while Bush may feel there’s “too few to mention,” Fareed Zakari respectfully disagrees. From his excellent article in Newsweek, “Our Last Real Chance: The way forward: The administration has to admit its mistakes and try to repair the damage. Here’s how”:

The Bush administration went into Iraq with a series of prejudices about Iraq, rogue states, nation-building, the Clinton administration, multilateralism and the U.N. It believed Iraq was going to vindicate these ideological positions. As events unfolded the administration proved stubbornly unwilling to look at facts on the ground, new evidence and the need for shifts in its basic approach. It was more important to prove that it was right than to get Iraq right.

What exactly were those mistakes? There are two categories of them: “The history of external involvement in countries suggests that, to succeed, the outsider needs two things: power and legitimacy.”

Power

1. The United States went into Iraq with too few troops
   

   This is not a conclusion arrived at with 20-20 hindsight. Over the course of the 1990s, a bipartisan consensus, shared by policymakers, diplomats and the uniformed military, concluded that troop strength was the key to postwar military operations. It is best summarized by a 2003 RAND Corp. report noting that you need about 20 security personnel (troops and police) per thousand inhabitants “not to destroy an enemy but to provide security for residents so that they have enough confidence to manage their daily affairs and to support a government authority of its own.” When asked by Congress how many troops an Iraqi operation would require, Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki replied, “Several hundred thousand” for several years. The number per the RAND study would be about 500,000.

2. Our troops were not asked to make security for the Iraqi people their core mission
   

   After spending a week in Iraq last November, the Brookings Institution’s Kenneth Pollack noted that “the single greatest impediment” to the success of the reconstruction efforts was that Iraqis “do not feel safe in their own country. Iraqis resent the fact that American forces take such pains to protect themselves and do so little to protect the Iraqi people.”

3. To address the lack of security, the Administration dramatically shortened the training schedule, and placed barely trained and vetted Iraqi security personnel on the streets
   

   These hapless and ill-equipped forces command neither respect nor authority. In the last few weeks, at the first sign of trouble, whether in the north or south, the Iraqi Army and police vanished, in some cases siding with the militias and insurgents, in others simply running away.

4. They allowed militias to gain strength
   

   Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army is currently in the news, but also armed and at large are the Badr Brigade, Ahmad Chalabi’s troops, Iyad Alawi’s ex-Baathists, and the two Kurdish political parties’ peshmerga. In some sense, American strategy in Iraq mirrored the mistakes of Afghanistan. Here too we failed to disarm the warlords.

5. They have too few civilian authorities involved
   

   The Coalition Provisional Authority has about 1,300 people working for it. Douglas MacArthur had four to five times as many when he was in Japan—and that was in circumstances where the Japanese state was fully intact and functioning. As a result, the CPA has virtually no presence outside Baghdad. Across much of the country, its acronym is jokingly said to stand for “Can’t Provide Anything.”

Legitimacy

1. Bush refused to let the UN handle the nation-building part
   

   Weeks after formal hostilities ended, France and Germany made clear that they would be willing to provide major support for postwar reconstruction in Iraq. But they asked that it take place under U.N. auspices, as had all recent nation-building, including Afghanistan’s. Tony Blair urged that the United States accept these offers, but Washington spurned them, finding the requirement for U.N. control intolerable.

   (cue Timmy’s Food for Oil Scandal comments…but keep in mind even Blair thought this was necessary)

2. Bush U.S. paid insufficient attention to Grand Ayatollah Sistani’s ability to help with internal legitimacy
   

   Once Sistani heard of American plans for transferring power to an unelected Iraqi interim government, he objected. But the United States did not try to satisfy him. Indeed, it did not make many overtures to the aging cleric. Sistani’s objections were taken lightly until, finally, after weeks of increasingly critical statements, he issued a fatwa declaring the American transition plan unacceptable. Even then it took months—and street demonstrations—for the CPA to appreciate Sistani’s power.

3. The Administration mistakingly believed that its hand-picked Governing Council gave the occupation legitimacy
   

   besides the Kurdish leaders and a few others, the members of the Governing Council have little support within Iraq. The Council is stacked with Iraqi exiles who are mostly disliked and suspected by Iraqis. Shia leaders in particular are suspicious that American plans for a phased transition and an unelected interim government are ways to empower exiles like Ahmad Chalabi. Sistani has told gatherings of tribal leaders that it is they who must take power in Iraq, not “those from abroad.” In the CPA’s own polling, Chalabi has the highest negative ratings of any public figure in Iraq. And yet he continues to get plum positions and generous funding (for intelligence!) from the U.S. government.

Zakaria goes on to list solid reasonable steps Bush can take now to salvage the situation. Let’s just hope he’s able to recognize the mistakes he’s made, even if he’s unwilling to admit them.