US failed to honestly assess Iraq threat

The United States is facing increasingly deadly attacks in Iraq because, as in the Vietnam war, it failed to honestly assess facts on the ground, according to a new think tank report. The report, prepared by Anthony Cordesman, senior fellow of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said administration spokesmen had appeared to live "in a fantasyland" when giving accounts of events in Iraq. Cordesman, a former Pentagon official who has made several trips to Iraq, said Iraqi spies were a serious threat to US operations and that there was no evidence insurgent numbers were declining despite vigorous US and Iraqi counterattacks.
The report was updated after Tuesday's attack on a US base in Mosul which killed 22 people. Defence officials said the explosion was apparently caused by a suicide bomber, underscoring the problem of infiltrators in US operations.
After the 2003 invasion to oust Saddam Hussein, the United States "assumed that it was dealing with a limited number of insurgents that coalition forces would defeat well before the election" of a new Iraqi government, Cordesman asserted.
"It did not see the threat level that would emerge if it did not provide jobs or pensions for Iraqi career officers or co-opt them into the nation-building effort. ... It acted as if it had years to rebuild Iraq using its own plans, rather than months to shape the climate in which Iraqis could do it," he said.
Cordesman said in the first year of the US occupation, Washington "failed to come to grips with the Iraqi insurgency ... in virtually every important dimension."
Under the heading "Denial as a method of counter-insurgency warfare," the report accused the United States of minimising the insurgent and criminal threat in Iraq and of exaggerating popular support for US and coalition efforts.
Washington "in short ... failed to honestly assess the facts on the ground in a manner reminiscent of Vietnam," Cordesman wrote.
He said that as late as July 2004, administration spokesmen still lived "in a fantasyland in terms of their public announcements," including putting the core insurgent force at 5,000 individuals when experts in Iraq knew the correct number to be 12,000 to 16,000.
As in most insurgencies, including Vietnam, sympathisers within the Iraqi government and Iraqi forces, as well as Iraqis working for the coalition, media and non-governmental organisations, "often provided excellent human intelligence (about US and coalition operations) without violently taking part in the insurgency," the report said.
Cordesman said US attempts to vet these Iraqis cannot solve the problem because "it seems likely that family, clan and ethnic loyalties have made many supposedly loyal Iraqis become at least part-time sources."
Since early 2004, insurgents have suffered tactical defeats in Baghdad, Falluja and elsewhere. Still, "there is no evidence that the number of insurgents is declining as a result of coalition and Iraqi attacks to date," Cordesman said.
US troops left Vietnam in 1973 after the war lost support at home. Many Americans became disenchanted with their government's failure to tell the truth about US operations in Vietnam and about casualty levels.