I know this is a couple of days old, but Peter Galbraith’s column in the Boston Globe on Wednesday, brought to my attention by B.C., captures the intense, and poignant, regret of a man who backed the war in Iraq and helped make it happen.
Galbraith saw first hand that Iraq was slipping away almost immediately after Baghdad fell.
In 2003 I went to tell Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz what I had seen in Baghdad in the days following Saddam Hussein’s overthrow. For nearly an hour, I described the catastrophic aftermath of the invasion — the unchecked looting of every public institution in Baghdad, the devastation of Iraq’s cultural heritage, the anger of ordinary Iraqis who couldn’t understand why the world’s only superpower was letting this happen.
And now Galbraith is convinced the administration’s mistakes, mishandling, and lack of planning has made us all less safe. For example, he calls the missing weapons that we failed to secure “a preventable disaster.”
Iraq’s nuclear weapons-related materials were stored in only a few locations, and these were known before the war began. As even L. Paul Bremer III, the US administrator in Iraq, now admits, the United States had far too few troops to secure the country following the fall of Saddam Hussein. But even with the troops we had, the United States could have protected the known nuclear sites. It appears that troops did not receive relevant intelligence about Iraq’s WMD facilities, nor was there any plan to secure them. Even after my briefing, the Pentagon leaders did nothing to safeguard Iraq’s nuclear sites.
I supported President Bush’s decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein. At Wolfowitz’s request, I helped advance the case for war, drawing on my work in previous years in documenting Saddam’s atrocities, including the use of chemical weapons on the Kurds. In spite of the chaos that followed the war, I am sure that Iraq is better off without Saddam Hussein.
It is my own country that is worse off — 1,100 dead soldiers, billions added to the deficit, and the enmity of much of the world. Someone out there has nuclear bomb-making equipment, and they may not be well disposed toward the United States. Much of this could have been avoided with a competent postwar strategy. But without having planned or provided enough troops, we would be a lot safer if we hadn’t gone to war.
Guess this is just another “disgruntled former employee,” right?