The Architect of Mr. Bush’s Plan

By Jason Leopold

One of the key architects of President Bush’s disastrous Iraq war policy was responsible for writing the president’s new plan calling for an increase in US troops in the region.

By relying on the recommendations of neoconservative scholar Frederick Kagan, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, on what steps the White House should take to address the civil war between Sunnis and Shi’as in Iraq, President Bush has once again ignored the advice of career military officials and even some Republican lawmakers–many of whom in recent weeks have urged Bush to resist implementing a policy that would result in escalating the war–and instead has chosen to rely on the proposals drafted by hawkish, think-tank intellectuals that could very well backfire and end up embroiling the United States in an even bloodier conflict.

Perhaps the most alarming element of Bush’s “new” plan for stabilizing Iraq is how much it relies upon the recommendations of individuals who have never set foot on a battlefield. Much of what the president outlined in a prime-time speech Wednesday evening–specifically, sending more than 20,000 additional soldiers into Iraq–was culled from the white paper, “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq,” written by Kagan last month.

Some of the key points of Kagan’s proposal include:

We must change our focus from training Iraqi soldiers to securing the Iraqi population and containing the rising violence. Securing the population has never been the primary mission of the US military effort in Iraq, and now it must become the first priority.

We must send more American combat forces into Iraq, and especially into Baghdad, to support this operation. A surge of seven Army brigades and Marine regiments to support clear-and-hold operations starting in the spring of 2007 is necessary, possible, and will be sufficient.

These forces, partnered with Iraqi units, will clear critical Sunni and mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhoods, primarily on the west side of the city.

After the neighborhoods have been cleared, US soldiers and Marines, again partnered with Iraqis, will remain behind to maintain security.

As security is established, reconstruction aid will help to reestablish normal life and, working through Iraqi officials, will strengthen Iraqi local government.

In fact, this “new” plan has actually been collecting dust for two years.

In January 2005, Kagan, who at the time was associated with the controversial Project for the New American Century, signed a letter sent to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate urging lawmakers to deploy an additional 25,000 US troops to Iraq, not so much to quell the violence between Sunni and Shi’a factions as to intimidate Iraq’s neighbors in the Middle East by maintaining bases. Kagan, his brother Robert, and PNAC founder and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol wrote that the Bush administration had ignored its suggestions, and chose to stick with a plan drafted by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who said the Iraq war could be won with fewer ground forces and superior air power.

“We write to ask you and your colleagues in the legislative branch to take the steps necessary to increase substantially the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps,” states the January 28, 2005, letter sent to Senators Bill Frist and Harry Reid, Congressman Dennis Hastert, and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. “While estimates vary about just how large an increase is required, and Congress will make its own determination as to size and structure, it is our judgment that we should aim for an increase in the active duty Army and Marine Corps, together, of at least 25,000 troops each year over the next several years. The administration has been reluctant to adapt to this new reality.”

As US casualties piled up, Kagan publicly criticized Rumsfeld’s plan for post-war Iraq and began to peddle his ideas for a substantial increase in US troops.

“The secretary of defense simply chose to prioritize preparing America’s military for future conventional conflict rather than for the current mission,” Kagan wrote in the January 17, 2005, issue of the Weekly Standard. “That position, based on the hope that the current mission would be of short duration and the recognition that the future may arrive at any moment, is understandable. It just turns out to have been wrong.”

The lack of soldiers on the ground has been a hot-button issue since the start of the invasion. Career military officials believe that is the reason the war hasn’t been a “cakewalk.” They blame former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld for designing a flawed war plan that has resulted in the deaths of more than 3,000 US soldiers and led to deep divisions between senior military officials and the defense secretary.

In Wednesday’s speech, but without identifying him by name, Bush put the responsibility for the quagmire squarely on Rumsfeld’s shoulders. But the president also lauded Rumsfeld’s war plan. In a televised news conference last year, Bush said there was no need to send additional troops into Iraq.

In October 2002, Rumsfeld ordered the military’s regional commanders to rewrite all of their war plans to capitalize on precision weapons, better intelligence, and speedier deployment in the event the US decided to invade.

The goal was to use fewer troops, a move that caused dismay among some in the military who said concern for the troops requires overwhelming numerical superiority to assure victory.

Several longtime military officers said they viewed Rumsfeld’s approach as injecting too much risk into war planning and said it could result in US casualties that might be prevented by amassing larger forces. Those predictions have been borne out over the past 33 months.

Still, Rumsfeld refused to listen to his commanders, saying that his plan would allow “the military to begin combat operations on less notice and with far fewer troops than thought possible–or thought wise–before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks,” the New York Times reported in October 13, 2002.

Rumsfeld said too many of the military plans on the shelves of the regional war-fighting commanders were freighted with outdated assumptions and military requirements, which have changed with the advent of new weapons and doctrines.

It has been a mistake, he said, to measure the quantity of forces required for a mission and “fail to look at lethality, where you end up with precision-guided munitions, which can give you 10 times the lethality that a dumb weapon might, as an example.”

Through a combination of pre-deployments, faster cargo ships and a larger fleet of transport aircraft, the military would be able to deliver “fewer troops but in a faster time that would allow you to have concentrated power that would have the same effect as waiting longer with … a bigger force,” Rumsfeld said.

Critics in the military said there were several reasons to deploy a force of overwhelming numbers before starting any offensive with Iraq. Large numbers illustrate US resolve and can intimidate Iraqi forces into laying down their arms or even turning against Hussein’s government.

According to Defense Department sources, Rumsfeld at first insisted that our vast air superiority and a degraded Iraqi military would enable 75,000 US troops to win the war. General Tommy Franks, the theater commander in chief, convinced Rumsfeld to send 250,000 (augmented by 45,000 British). However, the Army would have preferred a much deeper force.

Kagan resurfaced in early December with another column in the Weekly Standard, “We Can Put More Forces in Iraq,” which suggested sending more troops to the region and continuing to fight the war for up to two years.

“A study of post-conflict operations in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and elsewhere conducted by Ambassador James Dobbins showed that success in those operations–characterized by severe ethnic and sectarian violence–required force ratios of 1 soldier per 100 inhabitants,” Kagan wrote. “Iraq poses challenges that are in some respects more severe, at the moment, but it also offers its own rules of thumb. Successful clear-and-hold operations in Tal Afar required a force ratio of around 1 soldier (counting both US and Iraqi troops) for every 40 inhabitants. On the other hand, in 2004, Major General Peter Chiarelli suppressed a widespread uprising in Sadr City (an area inhabited by about 2.5 million Shi’as) with fewer than 20,000 US soldiers – a ratio of about 1 to 125.”

Following the publication of Kagan’s column, Cheney and senior members of Bush’s cabinet began to speak with Kagan to draft an alternative plan for dealing with the violence in Iraq. The move was orchestrated so the White House could avoid adopting the proposals set forth that week by the Iraq Study Group, led by longtime Bush family confidante James A. Baker III, that called for entering into a dialogue with Iran and Syria and redeploying troops in 2008.

Ultimately, President Bush agreed with Kagan, and used the key recommendations of his study as the foundation for his new Iraq policy–a policy that even some staunch pro-war Republicans have distanced themselves from.

Here is the Wikipedia report on Robert Kagan:

Robert Kagan (born September 26, 1958) is an American neoconservative scholar and political commentator. He graduated from Yale University in 1980. He later earned a Masters from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a PhD from American University in Washington, DC. He is a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and was one of the signers of the January 26, 1998, PNAC Letter sent to US President Bill Clinton. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Robert’s brother Frederick and father Donald are also prominent American neoconservatives, and also affiliated with the PNAC.

Kagan worked at the State Department Bureau of Inter-American Affairs (1985-1988) and was a speechwriter for Secretary of State George P. Shultz (1984-1985). Prior to that, he was foreign policy advisor to New York Representative and future Republican vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp (1983). Kagan is a Senior Associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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