TRUDY RUBIN Feith must analyze mistakes to improve

If you want to understand why things are going so badly in Iraq, read the profile of Douglas Feith, the No. 3 man at the Pentagon, in the May 9 issue of the New Yorker.
Feith, who will soon step down as undersecretary of defense for policy, was the Pentagon's man in charge of planning for postwar Iraq. He disagrees that the bitter Iraqi insurgency might have been preventable, and denies the administration thought the postwar would be easy. He insists that the Pentagon foresaw the "chilling contingencies" that could follow the war.
"I'm not going to be making some Oprah-like confessions," Feith told the New Yorker's Jeffrey Goldberg.
OK. Never mind that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told me in an interview in November 2002 that he would be "astonished" if there were instability in postwar Iraq, and said the operable historical analogy would be post-World War II France.
Never mind that the State Department's useful Future of Iraq project was shunted aside, and the Pentagon's plan for administrating the postwar started only weeks before the invasion. Never mind that Maj. Isaiah Wilson III, the official Army historian of the Iraq campaign, has written that the U.S. military invaded Iraq without a plan for occupying and stabilizing the country.
Never mind that a brutal insurgency is still killing Iraqis and tying down 140,000 U.S. troops, even as it undermines the reconstruction of the country and the newly elected Iraqi government.
If -- despite all this -- the Pentagon's chief planner for the postwar thinks he was so farsighted, why is Iraq in such a mess?
Answer
The answer is crucial to understanding what can be done to improve the situation. U.S. officials must analyze past mistakes to move forward. Feith clearly isn't willing. When Goldberg asked him to describe some "incorrect decisions," he said, "A lot of questions of that kind are going to take a little bit of distance and historical perspective to sort out."
The administration doesn't have the luxury of an academic timeline. Feith notes that "the Marshall Plan didn't get going until 1948," and it's only two years since Baghdad fell, implying there is a parallel to the U.S. occupation of Germany, where troops remain after six decades.
The parallel is false: Nazi Germany was wholly defeated by the allies; its prostrate people had to accept U.S. occupation. Iraq's Baathists were not wholly defeated, and U.S. policies have fueled an insurgency made up mostly of Baathists and other disaffected Sunnis, along with radical Arab Islamists.
So what are the past errors that must be corrected to stabilize Iraq and avoid making the same mistakes elsewhere?
The original sin was the lack of U.S. preparedness to secure the country postwar. The massive plague of postwar looting set the stage for the insurgency: Former Baathists and Islamists saw this as the signal that the Americans were unprepared to restore law and order.
Nation-building takes mega-manpower. There weren't enough U.S. troops then; it's impossible to send more now. The burden of coping with what flawed U.S. planning wrought must now fall on Iraqis.
The second major U.S. mistake was the lack of a Sunni strategy. Top U.S. officials disbanded Iraqi security forces without pensions and pursued large-scale de-Baathification. This alienated many Sunnis who had committed no crimes and might have been wooed had they not lost jobs and hope. Many insurgents come from this alienated minority.
Rice's efforts
The Bush administration belatedly recognizes this error (even if Feith doesn't). Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice just went to Baghdad to urge the new Shiite-led government to reach out to Sunnis. Shiite officials and religious leaders are willing, but it is harder now to heal the breech.
The third mistake was to misunderstand how little time they had before Iraqis came to resent the U.S. presence. For now, Shiite leaders want U.S. troops to stay because they have no viable army and fear a Baathist comeback. But the U.S. presence also angers many ordinary Iraqis -- killing and injuring innocents while pursuing insurgents. There is a limited time for U.S. troops to stabilize the country and draw down, before they become more of a problem than an asset.
X Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune.