Early U.S. Decisions on Iraq Now Haunt American Efforts

Officials Let Looters Roam, Disbanded Army, Allowed Radicals to Gain Strength Failure to Court an Ayatollah 

FARNAZ FASSIHI, GREG JAFFE, YAROSLAV TROFIMOV, CARLA ANNE ROBBINS and YOCHI J. DREAZEN
Wall Street Journal p.A1, 19apr04

As soon as U.S. troops occupied Iraq a year ago, an orgy of looting erupted. Telephone wires were pulled out of the ground, while hospitals, schools and government buildings were stripped bare of windows, door frames and faucets. The crime wave seemed a passing embarrassment at the time, so the U.S. made a conscious decision not to use military might to stop it.

It's now clear that decision led to lasting problems that have reverberated through this month's wave of violence in Iraq. The looting alienated Iraqis who questioned the intentions of their new U.S. protectors. It made the job of rebuilding Iraq much harder, delaying improvements that would have lessened the appeal of radicals. It even allowed a then-obscure cleric named Muqtada al Sadr to build up goodwill among the country's downtrodden by collecting and redistributing some looted merchandise.

The battles U.S. forces are waging, against Sunni insurgents around the town of Fallujah and Shiite forces loyal to Mr. Sadr across the south, may have seemed to erupt suddenly. In reality, they have been long in the making, fed by a year's worth of decisions and calculations about the Iraqi army and security, about the depth of popular tolerance for occupation and about the role of the country's important Shiite leaders.

The problems are rooted most firmly in one basic but faulty assumption about the level of postwar stability. In prewar days, the U.S. planned to administer Iraq for two years or more, as the country's Baath party was purged, war-crimes trials held, a new constitution written and new democratic institutions built from the ground up.

But the luxury of that long and quiet occupation never materialized. Iraq's infrastructure and its economy were in far worse shape than the U.S. had calculated, meaning public patience with the occupation wasn't as extensive as imagined. Difficulties in establishing a respected media network undercut U.S. efforts to turn around opinions.

The failure quickly to find and lock down the huge stocks of weaponry in Iraq meant insurgents could quietly arm themselves without much trouble. An early decision to disband the Iraqi army—and a long debate over which of three new security forces to build up—left the U.S. without any sizable Iraqi force to help quell the unrest. The security situation grew more troublesome yesterday when Spain's new prime minister announced he would withdraw his country's troops from Iraq as soon as possible. And in Baghdad, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer said Iraqi forces won't be able on their own to deal with security threats by the time the U.S. hands power to an Iraqi government on June 30.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is still scrambling to recover from a key political miscalculation. When launching an accelerated plan to create an Iraqi government, U.S. officials assumed, incorrectly, that they would have the tacit support of the nation's most powerful Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. An agreement with him would have left Mr. Sadr little room to maneuver among Shiites.

The Bush administration says the political situation is being sorted out with help from the United Nations and that this month's violence obscures a much brighter overall picture. "It's not a popular uprising," President Bush said last week. "Most of Iraq is relatively stable. Most Iraqis by far reject violence and oppose dictatorship."

Iraqi oil output is now back to about what it was before the war, as is production of electricity. School enrollments are up, with far more girls than previously attending classes, according to U.S. officials. And a country ruled for decades by a brutal dictator has an interim constitution and a rebirth of free speech.

Still, some of the difficulties the U.S. has encountered were forecast within the U.S. government before the war. A look back at some of the key events and decisions that led to crises in Fallujah and the south provides clues about what the U.S. now needs to do: Reach a quick understanding on Iraq's political future with the country's Shiite political establishment, fix Iraq's own security forces and convince Iraqis their lives are improving.

Ignoring the Looting

There never was much doubt in Washington that the U.S. could fight and win a war against Saddam Hussein on its own. But some officials in the White House and many more in the State Department knew that rebuilding Iraq would be different—and that a broader coalition would make the postwar occupation more tolerable to Iraqis and to Americans by making clear that the international community stood behind it. The Pentagon was more grudging but willing to share some of the burden, so long as its own political vision for a democratic and pro- American Iraq was strictly followed.

Yet Mr. Bush never managed to persuade key allies—not only France and Germany but also Turkey and India—that Iraq posed a clear and present danger to international security or that there was no choice besides war. In the end, the U.S. had to settle for support from the British and several smaller states, including some that were seeking to cement ties with the Bush administration but were unable to make more than a marginal contribution.

So when Baghdad fell a year ago, the U.S. was pretty much on its own. One of the first decisions it made didn't seem like much of a decision at all at the time. It involved the unexpected outbreak of lawlessness and looting that accompanied Saddam Hussein's ouster.

U.S. and British commanders, who said they were fearful they didn't have enough troops or the right kind to control urban unrest, rarely interfered to stop looters. Many Iraqis concluded that the vandalism was sanctioned by the U.S. Graffiti on the wall of a wrecked telephone exchange in the middle-class Mansour neighborhood of Baghdad summed up these feelings. "Bush looter," the writing read, in English.

"The occupation forces were not prepared to fill the vacuum and the situation grew out of hand—looting, burning, killing and the complete breakdown of order," says Adnan Pachachi, a member of the governing council that helps the U.S. run Iraq. "That really cast a shadow and affected the outcome of events later. We are still paying for that mistake today."

The seeming anarchy created a vacuum into which clerics, particularly Shiites, stepped. Imams called for looted goods to be handed over to mosques and then donated them to the needy. In the Hekma mosque that was the headquarters of Mr. Sadr's organization in Saddam City, the imam, Abdelzahra al Sweyadi, distributed goods to supporters he deemed worthy. "The people suffered a lot in the past, so now the people must claim its share," he said at the time.

Imams organized food and gasoline drives, deployed young men to act as traffic police on intersections and neighborhood-watch guards, arranged for garbage pickups and even set up free clinics inside the mosques. The clergy's influence on the population grew day by day.

Meantime, a second threat was taking shape. Huge weapons caches had been left by the Iraqi military. It took more than a month for U.S. forces to start removing the most conspicuous ones because of the confusion and distractions as fighting wound down. Late last April, the central meadow of Baghdad's unguarded zoo held thousands of pieces of ammunition—mortars, rockets in crates bearing Yugoslav markings, hand grenades and mines. After guerrilla warfare erupted in May, much of this ammunition was taken by insurgents.

As late as September, U.S. military officials were struggling to find spare troops to stand guard over caches of live artillery shells, which were looted to make remote-detonated roadside bombs.

Disbanding the Army

Meantime, U.S. plans to get Iraqi help to restore order were sputtering. In fact, some of the early moves—such as disbanding the Iraqi military—may have inadvertently fed the insurgency's ranks, say U.S. military officials and Iraqis.

When the U.S. took control, the Iraqi army disappeared. Some leaders of the occupation, as well as Bush administration officials back home, concluded that reassembling that force to provide security as initially planned would be too costly and time consuming. Besides, the loyalties of top army leaders who served Mr. Hussein and his party were suspect.

So when Mr. Bremer arrived in May to take over as the top American administrator in Iraq, he decided to disband the Iraqi army and cancel pensions for soldiers. The decision was widely unpopular among Iraqis, who saw it as a slight to their national pride. (A month later, following several violent demonstrations, the pension decision was reversed.)

Disbanding the army also struck some U.S. military officers as a mistake. "One of the cardinal sins in warfare is losing contact with the enemy," says Army Col. Paul Hughes, who worked for the Coalition Provisional Authority, the organization running the occupation. "And we did it. We don't know where the former army went. We don't know what they did with their weapons."

Disbanding the Iraqi army also left the Bush administration with no plan for building local security forces. Initially, members of the Iraqi governing council and the U.S. military relied heavily on the country's sectarian militias. That left Iraqis wondering why they should have confidence in the country's new security forces if their leaders entrusted their safety to private militias.

"If the security forces are too weak to protect anyone or anything important, how can they have the nerve to tell me I should leave my safety and my family's safety to them," says Ali Jaber, a shopkeeper in central Baghdad.

CPA officials say their decision to disband the Iraqi Army was a necessity. By the time U.S. forces reached Baghdad, the Iraqi Army had ceased to exist, they say, and dragging the largely Shiite enlisted ranks back to serve under the largely Sunni officer corps would have created tensions. In any case, defense officials note, peacekeeping missions require an exceptionally disciplined force, and the old Iraq army wasn't known for discipline or subtlety in dealing with angry civilians.

The U.S. has tried on three separate fronts to create Iraqi security forces, but hasn't settled on one approach. Perhaps the most troubled has been the new Iraqi army, designed to protect Iraq's borders from attacks by neighboring countries. U.S. officials have set aside about $1.8 billion for this force but so far have produced only about 3,930 of a planned 40,000 soldiers. Half of the first battalion of the new army quit last December, complaining that pay was insufficient. Military officials raised the pay and the retention problems seemed to recede.

Still, when the second battalion was pressed last week to fight Sunni insurgents alongside Marines last week in Fallujah, soldiers refused, saying they had signed up to defend Iraq from foreign threats, not fight fellow Iraqis.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi police force, which military officials hoped would take over much of the daily policing from U.S. forces, has been plagued by an absence of trainers. Today only about 13,000 of the 73,000 police patrolling in Iraq have any training. In places such as Ramadi, the site of some the fiercest fighting in the last month, many of the officers are men in their early 20s with no training, no radios and no body armor.

Some 6,500 international trainers that were supposed to show up in Baghdad last summer to train police never materialized because the situation was too dangerous. An off-site training facility in Hungary that was planned fell through when the Hungarians balked. A training camp was later set up in Jordan, however.

The lack of progress with the police and the new Iraqi army led the Pentagon last July to create a third security force—the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, which would focus on fighting the insurgency alongside U.S. troops. Because of its late start, the Civil Defense Corps has had to battle for money and equipment with Iraq's army and police. Some U.S. commanders say the troops lack radios, body armor and adequate weaponry.

Other officers have complained the troops have been pushed into the field with too little training. In late February, Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack, who until recently commanded U.S. troops in western Iraq, caustically referred to his Civil Defense Corps troops as a "hollow force."

The net result: As the new wave of violence struck, both the police and Civil Defense Corps troops buckled under attacks from militants. Gen. John Abizaid, who oversees all troops in the Middle East, said he had seen video of some police fighting alongside militants allied with the radical Mr. Sadr.

Senior military officials acknowledge that they have been upset with how Iraqi security forces have performed in the past few weeks. "In the south, a number of units, both in the police force and also in the [Iraqi Civil Defense Corps], did not stand up to the intimidators of the forces of Sadr's militia, and that was a great disappointment to us," Gen. Abizaid told reporters recently. But the general and other senior defense officials said some of the problems were to be expected. "It takes a long time to take security institutions from zero up to a level of about 200,000 and expect them to come together and gel the way that they should," Gen. Abizaid said.

The lack of a real Iraqi security force has compelled American troops to be more visible and active—and made them targets for attacks that lead to military reprisals. That is how the first seeds of trouble were sown in Fallujah. The city's unrest started last April with the shooting of schoolchildren by soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division, which had seized a school and turned it into a base. The U.S. military claimed armed Iraqis fired at the school from the behind the backs of schoolchildren who demonstrated for the building's return in time for exams. A Human Rights Watch investigation challenged that account. Fallujah began simmering.

The lack of a national-security force led to another problem with long-term implications: Borders weren't sealed effectively. Islamic extremists, some inspired by al Qaeda, began seeping in to stir up more trouble. In September, after nearly six months both the northern and southern borders of Iraq remained completely unguarded, and a handful of recently trained border guards were incapable of stopping a mob of illegal Iranian pilgrims rushing across the border.

Political Paralysis

Meanwhile, the political rebirth has been equally troubled. Iraqis' hatred of Saddam Hussein was supposed to be so intense they would look beyond historical divisions and become more appreciative of U.S. liberation.

It hasn't turned out that way. From the start, the effort to build a government was marked by unresolved tension between political leaders who are palatable to the U.S. but have little public support in Iraq, and religious figures who have the biggest popular followings but also hold religious views that alarm American policy makers.

The question was complicated by the fact that many of the most prominent religious figures—including Mr. Sistani, the top Shiite cleric—have strong ties to Iran, still a country hostile to the U.S.

The process of trying to create a government began in earnest last summer, when the U.S. began searching for the first members of a hand-picked governing council to help run the country. The coalition settled on a mixture of secular leaders and Shiite and Sunni religious figures. Several of the religious figures back the establishment of a Muslim theocracy in Iraq, a position at odds with the Bush administration's stated goal of creating a democratic government.

The U.S. was careful to include a member of most sectarian and political factions, including the pro-theocracy and Iranian-backed Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Against the advice of other Shiite parties, though, the U.S. refused to include Mr. Sadr and his political organization. Officials didn't consider him a serious player with a large number of supporters, and he represented an extreme version of Islam, calling for a supreme religious ruler of Iraq.

"It's natural that when you marginalize a political group it turns into an opposition," says Governing Council member Ibrahim Jaffari. "The Americans should have given Sadr and his people a role in the political process instead of turning them into the enemy." Mr. Sadr didn't retreat, but instead began mobilizing his followers and delivering sermons with anti-American broadsides.

But none of the religious figures had even remotely as much influence or public support as Mr. Sistani, a man the U.S. made little effort to co-opt. Mr. Sistani had refused to meet with U.S. officials, but met and spoke frequently with the late U.N. envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello. A U.N. official said top American officials didn't ask the world body to ferry messages to Mr. Sistani and rarely asked U.N. officials about their discussions with him.

The U.S. decided against reaching out to Mr. Sistani even after he publicly objected to the appointment of the unelected governing council. American officials involved in the process explain that the coalition was concerned about Mr. Sistani's ties to Iran, and worried that he might be maneuvering to create a Shiite-dominated theocracy. Besides, officials say, Mr. Sistani didn't appear interested in talking directly with U.S. officials, and wanted to communicate only through intermediaries.

The rift widened as U.S. officials and the governing council began tackling their real political task, which was figuring out how to write a new constitution. Mr. Sistani issued a fatwa, or religious edict, last June calling for general elections to choose a constitutional convention, obviously calculating that a general election would be good for Shiites, who are Iraq's largest group. He acted, apparently, after hearing a report on Arab television stations that Mr. Bremer was planning to have U.S. and British experts write the constitution. U.S. officials say that was never true; they expected Iraqis appointed by the council or chosen in local caucuses to write it.

Officials assumed that Mr. Sistani eventually could be reasoned with and persuaded to drop his demand, especially once U.S. officials argued that early elections might favor old Baathists and extremists. But, spooked by Mr. Sistani's stand, the governing council couldn't agree on a plan either.

By last November, the process of creating a constitution and government was in stalemate, while a wave of violence sparked public pressure to restore sovereignty to an Iraqi-led government. Mr. Bremer began holding late-night negotiating sessions with members of the governing council. On Nov. 9, he called national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on her cellphone. Reaching her at a Washington Redskins game, he told her that there had to be a change, and that he needed to return to Washington to talk, U.S. officials said later.

Mr. Bremer flew home and plunged into intense meetings. The decision: to declare that sovereignty would be turned over to a new government on June 30, even though no one was sure what that government would be. Why June 30? It was halfway through the year, but well before the U.S. presidential elections, U.S. officials say.

Mr. Bremer returned to Baghdad and, accompanied by beaming members of the council, announced the new plan on Nov. 15. Council members later complained that they were bullied into accepting it, but Mr. Bremer told others he saw it as a major concession, one that eliminated his job on June 30 and put the writing of a constitution firmly in the hands of Iraqis.

The U.S. assumed Mr. Sistani would go along, because of the guaranteed early turnover of political control. But he immediately demanded that the next government be elected directly, a step the U.S. opposed, putting it in the awkward position of opposing elections in a country it was trying to seed with democracy.

A Vacuum

Iraq was in a political and a security vacuum after the fighting a year ago. Into it stepped two forces: clerics and insurgents. "For the first time in 30 years, I went to a mosque the other day because I needed a guard for our street and the only way to organize this was through the mosque," Wamid Nadhmi, a professor of political science at Baghdad University and a secular Sunni, said in an interview last April. "Iraq was held together by the army before, now it's being held together by the mosques."

Mr. Sadr's organization of neighborhood guards, traffic police, trash pickup, free health care and other services had won him many hearts and minds in the south and in the poor Shiite areas of Baghdad. His growing influence was troubling, given his harsh anti-U.S. rhetoric.

U.S. and Iraqi officials were convinced that one step he had taken to expand his influence had been to organize the killing of a rival Shiite leader. A secret warrant was issued for Mr. Sadr's arrest. The U.S. military last fall had drawn up a plan to swoop into his base in Najaf and capture him, but officials decided against it, fearing a backlash.

And in the Sunni center of the country, former Baathists and outside Islamic extremists had combined to launch almost daily attacks on soldiers. They had created a problem that was feeding on itself. By attacking U.S. soldiers and international civilians, they slowed down reconstruction, because companies were afraid to move out aggressively. That fed unhappiness, which won support for anti-U.S. insurgents.

"All around the city you see broken buildings, but there are no cranes, trucks, or construction crews beginning to fix them," Adnan Shagi, a newspaper vendor, says as he stands on a bridge in central Baghdad just outside the U.S.-run compound. "If the U.S. is spending so much money, why isn't any work being done?"

The U.S. never found an effective way to get out a more positive message to counter such resentments. For weeks after the U.S. seized Iraq, the average Iraqi relied on one source of news: Al Alam, an Arab all-news channel broadcast from transmitters Iran had constructed along its frontier with Iraq. The channel regaled its captive audience with graphic tales of U.S. "atrocities" and a promo with superimposed shots of a U.S. Marine firing a weapon and an Iraqi mother cradling a blood-soaked infant.

When U.S.-sponsored Iraqi TV started newscasts by the middle of last year, its determination to focus on good news and to avoid mentioning anti-American attacks undermined its credibility.

The ground was fertile for trouble. When the U.S. moved against Mr. Sadr several weeks ago by closing down his stridently anti-U.S. newspaper and arresting one of his aides for the murder of the rival cleric, Shiite areas erupted in protest. When four U.S. contractors were attacked in their car in Fallujah, a ready-made mob was there to mutilate the bodies and hang two of them from a bridge.

Looking Ahead

Now it seems clear that Mr. Bush will have to exit Iraq's political mess by linking arms with the U.N., the organization whose influence he once tried to limit in Iraq -- and that later pulled out of the country over safety concerns. Mr. Bush last week said the political future in Iraq would be charted by a special U.N. envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, who has been sent to stitch together a caretaker government to take over on June 30.

Last week, Mr. Brahimi sketched out ideas that all but doom the U.S.-created Iraqi Governing Council. Under Mr. Brahimi's plan, a U.N.-appointed interim government will take its place at the end of June. The U.S.-run Coalition Provisional Authority also will disappear, but America's large security force and economic aid means Washington will remain deeply involved.

U.S. troop levels, in fact, are going to rise in the short term. A bigger American push to get a real Iraqi security force in place also lies just ahead.

The Pentagon is training some 1,200 U.S. military officers to serve as mentors to the new Iraqi Army. Commanders are also looking at bringing back more senior officers from the disbanded Iraqi army. It's "very clear that we've got to get more senior Iraqis involved -- former military types involved in the security forces," Gen. Abizaid said recently.

---- Neil King Jr. and Jess Bravin contributed to this article.

Write to Farnaz Fassihi at farnaz.fassihi@wsj.com, Greg Jaffe, at greg.jaffe@wsj.com,Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com, Carla Anne Robbins at carla.robbins@wsj.com and Yochi J. Dreazen at yochi.dreazen@wsj.com