.. or at least so the thinking goes in this article:
Persistent problems in Iraq nudge the White House toward more candor (Daniel Sneider, Knight Ridder Newspapers 05/23/05)
The ruthlessly efficient White House spin machine may have met its match in Iraq. After months of upbeat talk about the march toward democratic government and an insurgency in retreat, a more sober tone has emerged in recent days.
The shift in tone was compelled by a surge of violence after a lull that followed the Iraqi election at the end of January. In the past two weeks, nearly 450 people have been killed in Iraq, mostly in the Sunni-populated areas of the country.
The administration points a finger at foreign fighters based in Syria for this escalation, fueled by a rash of suicide bombings. U.S. officials see this as a desperate attempt to undermine the formation of the new Iraqi government. They believe the violence may isolate the insurgents and encourage Sunni leaders to join the government.
Most analysts share the view that the insurgents aim to prevent the Shiite-led coalition that won the election from establishing its authority. But there is great skepticism about the characterization of the enemy as mainly external to Iraq.
The article includes information from a report by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (
CSIS), an organisation
described by Rightweb as "a right-wing, neoconservative think tank".
As well as being "skeptical about the characterization of the enemy" (describing it as "not one insurgency but many insurgencies"), the report has some harsh things to say about the strategic and tactical planning for the post-war situation: "key decisions ... bypassed the interagency proceess, ... ignored the warnings of US area and intelligence experts, ignored prior military war and stability planning by the US Central Command and ignored the warnings of policy makers and experts in other key coalition states like the United Kingdom."
According to the report, "Too much credence was given to ideologues and true believers ... These included neoconservatives in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Office of the Vice President ... as well as in several highly politicized 'think tanks'."
The report goes on with a 20-item bullet-pointed list of additional areas of failure and miscalculation by the administration in the planning and implementation of the war and post-war occupation, before stating that "many, if not most, of these problems" were "brought to the attention of the President, National Security Council, State Department, Department of Defense, and intelligence community in the summer and fall of 2002, and in interagency forums ... The problem was not that the system did not work in providing many key elements of an accurate assessment, it was that the most senior political and military decision makers ignored what they felt was negative advice out of a combination of sincere belief, ideological conviction and political and bureaucratic convenience."
Those quotes are from the introduction. The rest of the report goes on to analyse the Iraqi resistance movement and the US response to it (one notable subheading: "Denial as a method of counter-insurgency warfare".)
If you're interested, the full report, in draft, is at
http://www.csis.org/features/050512_IraqInsurg.pdf )
(Edit: still getting the hang of url syntax!)
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