QandO

August 27, 2004

The Abu Ghraib Report
Posted by Dale Franks

Former career soldier Ralph Peters takes a critical look at the report on the Abu Ghraib Abuses. He's not happy. He's especially unhappy with the senior leadership at the pentagon, who shouldn't've have created the situation that led to it.

he problem isn't that we did the wrong thing. We did a great thing by ridding the world of Saddam Hussein. But we did it needlessly badly. Because we tried to do it on the cheap. Well, the truth is that you don't always get what you pay for — but you never get what you don't pay for.

Why was our military prevented from conducting its standard, detailed planning processes? Why were troop levels held artificially low?

Because ideologues in the Bush administration feared that, if the American people were given honest answers about the potential cost, it might be politically impossible to go to war...

The administration clutched at the straw that the Schlesinger report didn't call for Rumsfeld's resignation (the Army's internal report could not have done so). Cold comfort: The report damned his performance. Besides, the Schlesinger team was drawn from the Washington old-boys' club, of which Rummy is a long-term member. The old boys never call for each other's resignation. It's remarkable they were as critical as they were.

The fact that the same bloodstained civilian leadership remains in place in the Pentagon is an insult to our troops — and a prime cause of our occupation stumbles.

Keep in mind, that Peters is a bush supporter.

I could write a book on everything the Bush administration has done wrong in Iraq. If there was any possible mistake the Bush Administration could make in being too tentative, or too risk averse, they made it. For example, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Moqtada al-Sadr. If I had been president, al-Sadr would've been dead or in prison a year ago.

And, while we're on the subject, Fallujah would be nothing but a very wide, flat place on the highway out of Baghdad, because, as soon as the trouble started there, I'd've evactuated it, razed it to the ground, leveled the rubble, and sowed the earth with salt.

And I'd've had enough troops in Iraq to do it, even if I'd had to empty out Germany to do so.

But, where were we? Oh. Yes. Abu Ghraib. Nasty business that. But apparently, though the senior leadership committed enough sins of omission to fill a book, they can't bear the blame for Abu Ghraib directly. That lies on the heads of the perpetrators. That doesn't mean the penatgon's leadership should be held blameless, though.

Whatever the sins of omission and commission at the top of the chain of command, the thugs in uniform at Abu Ghraib were self-starting criminals. Which is why they're pleading guilty, one after the other. No sympathy for those devils...

The reports also found officers in the Abu Ghraib chain of command derelict in the performance of their duties. They need to be court-martialed.

The easiest link in the chain of command to sympathize with is Lt.-Gen. Rick Sanchez and his staff in Baghdad. They had a growing insurgency to fight with too few troops, too small a staff, too few resources and indecision in Washington. It's easy to grasp why Sanchez and his deputies concentrated on the combat situation and slighted other matters. As a former soldier, I can easily imagine a sweating general snapping, "Look, I'm busy fighting a war, colonel. Just handle that prisoner business, all right?"

In the military, it's always the issue for which you don't have time that bites you on the backside.

And sometimes they take a big bite.

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