Usual Suspects

It's not that the Bush Administration keeps making mistakes. It's more that they keep making the identical mistake over and over. The New York Times has an extensive series examining the attempt to create an Iraqi police force.

As chaos swept Iraq after the American invasion in 2003, the Pentagon began its effort to rebuild the Iraqi police with a mere dozen advisers. Overmatched from the start, one was sent to train a 4,000-officer unit to guard power plants and other utilities. A second to advise 500 commanders in Baghdad. Another to organize a border patrol for the entire country.

Three years later, the police are a battered and dysfunctional force that has helped bring Iraq to the brink of civil war. Police units stand accused of operating death squads for powerful political groups or simple profit. Citizens, deeply distrustful of the force, are setting up their own neighborhood security squads. Killings of police officers are rampant, with at least 547 slain this year, roughly as many as Iraqi and American soldiers combined, records show.

The police, initially envisioned by the Bush administration as a cornerstone in a new democracy, have instead become part of Iraq's grim constellation of shadowy commandos, ruthless political militias and other armed groups. Iraq's new prime minister and senior American officials now say the country's future — and the ability of America to withdraw its troops — rests in large measure on whether the police can be reformed and rogue groups reined in.

Like so much that has defined the course of the war, the realities on the ground in Iraq did not match the planning in Washington. An examination of the American effort to train a police force in Iraq, drawn from interviews with several dozen American and Iraqi officials, internal police reports and visits to Iraqi police stations and training camps, shows a cascading series of misjudgments by White House and Pentagon officials, who repeatedly underestimated the role the United States would need to play in rebuilding the police and generally maintaining order.

The same mistake as always: assume the best case scenario, ignore and disparage the advice of experts, depend on political cronies and contractors when experience is needed, and, when everything falls apart, lie, cover-up, claim up is down. The suspects to are the same old bunch, Rumsfeld, Condi, Feith, and, of course, the Decider. As usual, Colin Powell played the role good soldier who gave reasonable advice, saw it ignored, and rolled over to be kicked again.

After Baghdad fell, when a majority of Iraqi police officers abandoned their posts, a second proposal by a Justice Department team calling for 6,600 police trainers was reduced to 1,500, and then never carried out. During the first eight months of the occupation — as crime soared and the insurgency took hold — the United States deployed 50 police advisers in Iraq.

Against the objections of Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, the long-range plan was eventually reduced to 500 trainers. One result was a police captain from North Carolina having 40 Americans to train 20,000 Iraqi police across four provinces in southern Iraq.

If stupidity were a crime under American law, we could send the whole bunch to the gallows. Instead, our whole country will continue to suffer the casualties, the expense, and the well-earned hatred of all those whose lives we have destroyed.

The whole series is well worth reading, if you can stand it. Someday, no doubt, it will be part of all the textbooks on how not to run an occupation - where it will lie unread by the idiots who start wars to win elections.