Book notes

Fiasco by Thomas E. Ricks

• While Bremer's order to dissolve the Iraqi Army is widely seen as the seed of the insurgency, the firing of as many as 85,000 government bureaucrats for being "senior" members of the Baath Party probably did more to create the insurgency. It both paralyzed social services and provided the insurgency with a management class.
• De-Baathification was ordered by Bremer (CPA Order No. 1) as soon as he arrived, and he did so over the objections of the CPA senior staff. The origins of Bremer's order are unclear, but they appear to have been engineered by Chabali as a way to clean out the government so that he could take over.
• The Bagdad police chief in 2003, Col. Spain, says he did not understand the command structure he was working in and didn't know how to resolve conflicting orders from the U.S. military and the CPA. Even in Washington, Rice and Rumsfeld argued over whom Bremer reports to.
• The bible of how to conduct a counterinsurgency, "Counterinsurgency Warfare," says that there must be a uniform strategy that is administered by a single top commander, a civilian to whom the military is subordinate. Ricks says that you can almost open a page of "Counterinsurgency Warfare" and find a rule that the U.S. was breaking.
• The strategic confusion about why the U.S. was in Iraq, such as the Bush Administration's insistence that the war was part of a counterattack against al Qaeda-style terrorism and was somehow a reponse to the 911 attacks, may have led some American soldiers to treat ordinary Iraqis as if they were terrorists. Some indeed were, But many -- certainly the majority of those raided and detained -- were just average Iraqis, not necessarily sympathetic to the U.S. presense but actually not taking up arms against it, at least before they were humiliated on ircarcerated.