Jet City Journal

Dereliction of Duty

General Ricardo Sanchez, who commanded US troops in Iraq from 2004-2004, has written a new book, Wiser in Battle.  In a Time excerpt, he describes former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's tendency to forget inconvenient facts that would reflect negatively on his decision-making.  But even worse, Sanchez reveals that Rumsfeld buried a report that had documented a proposed troop plan that might have prevented the chaos that engulfed Iraq after Saddam's military was defeated.  The plan, of course, was never implemented.

I had never seen any approved CENTCOM campaign plan, either conceptual or detailed, for the post-major combat operations phase. When I was on the ground in Iraq and saw what was going on, I assumed they had done zero Phase IV planning. Now, three years later, I was learning for the first time that my assumption was not completely accurate. In fact, CENTCOM had originally called for twelve to eighteen months of Phase IV activity with active troop deployments. But then CENTCOM had completely walked away by simply stating that the war was over and Phase IV was not their job.

That decision set up the United States for a failed first year in Iraq. There is no question about it. And I was supposed to believe that neither the Secretary of Defense nor anybody above him knew anything about it? Impossible! Rumsfeld knew about it. Everybody on the NSC knew about it, including Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, and Colin Powell. Vice President Cheney knew about it. And President Bush knew about it.

There's not a doubt in my mind that they all embraced this decision to some degree. And if it had not been for the moral courage of Gen. John Abizaid to stand up to them all and reverse Franks's troop drawdown order, there's no telling how much more damage would have been done.

In the meantime, hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were unnecessarily spent, and worse yet, too many of our most precious military resource, our American soldiers, were unnecessarily wounded, maimed, and killed as a result. In my mind, this action by the Bush administration amounts to gross incompetence and dereliction of duty.

That pretty much sums it up, doesn't it?

The Photo that "made" Al Qaeda?

Journalist Paul Watson won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his graphic and disturbing photo of a dead American serviceman being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia by an angry mob. In a new book and an interview with NPR's Terry Gross, Watson discusses how that photo has affected him personally (he has PTSD). He also suggests that the photo inadvertently provided a propaganda boost that propelled Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden to new heights of popularity in radical Islam. While Watson makes no apologies for taking the photo, he struggles with its unintended consequences. I haven't yet read the book, but the interview was quite interesting.