British army chief attacks US as 'intellectually bankrupt' over Iraq

I have long argued that Donald Rumsfeld lost the Iraq war in the first few weeks through his failure to deploy enough troops. When he was stating nonsense like, "Freedom's messy" he was actually applauding Iraq's descent into anarchy. The first requirement of any occupation army is to restore order. Order is the most basic requirement any civilisation needs.

Rumsfeld's army not only failed to provide it, but they appeared, as they stood around whilst looting took place all around them, not even to accept that providing it was their primary responsibility.

Now the former head of the British army, General Sir Mike Jackson, has stepped up to the plate and said what many of us have been thinking. He has attacked the US postwar policy and has gone as far as to call it "intellectually bankrupt". Nor does he miss the target when it comes to assigning blame for the situation we find ourselves in:

General Sir Mike Jackson, who headed the army during the war in Iraq, described as "nonsensical" the claim by the former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that US forces "don't do nation-building".

Mr Rumsfeld was "one of the most responsible for the current situation in Iraq," Gen Jackson says in his autobiography, Soldier. He describes Washington's approach to fighting global terrorism as "inadequate" for relying on military power over diplomacy and nation-building.

The current US approach - with it's continuing emphasis on military power through the surge - goes against the advice given by the bipartisan Baker report, which advised a diplomatic solution to the problems in Iraq:

The United States should immediately launch a new diplomatic offensive to build an international consensus for stability in Iraq and the region. This diplomatic effort should include every country that has an interest in avoiding a chaotic Iraq, including all of Iraq’s neighbors. Iraq’s neighbors and key states in and outside the region should form a support group to reinforce security and national reconciliation within Iraq, neither of which Iraq can achieve on its own.

Bush, of course, famously ignored this bipartisan advice, as it called for Iran - the next country the neo-con loons would like to attack - to be included in negotiations, and opted instead to try to apply even more military force by sending more troops, the antithesis of the Baker report recommendations.

Once again, the neo-cons favoured force over diplomacy. Indeed, force appears to be the only language they truly understand, even when - finding ourselves in the fifth year of the conflict - it appears to have yielded so little in the way of concrete results.

Jackson also found Rumsfeld at fault for taking charge of the post war situation:

The general also attacked the decision to hand control of planning the post-invasion administration of Iraq to the Pentagon.

All the planning carried out by the State Department had "gone to waste," he argued.

He also said disbanding the Iraqi army and security forces after toppling Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was "very short-sighted.

"We should have kept the Iraqi security services in being and put them under the command of the coalition."

That Jackson, the man who famously refused orders from General Wesley Clarke, lest his orders start World War III, should be on the money when it comes to what went wrong should be no surprise to anyone.

Nor, sadly, should it be any surprise to anyone that his calls for the US to seek a diplomatic solution to this crisis will fall on to deaf ears.

This is the dumbest US administration of my lifetime, a group of ideologues who continue down a path even when it is plain to anyone who can read a statistical chart that the strategy that they are employing is not working.

Indeed, unbelievably, they are making noises about wanting to widen the current disaster to include a direct assault on Iran.

The Republicans, as fashioned by Karl Rove, have become almost anti-intellectual; selling Bush as the kind of guy you might like to find yourself sitting next to in a bar and seeking to make a virtue out of his lack of intellectual curiosity.

The disaster in Iraq should be enough to make Americans rethink that inverted snobbery. But when I look at how some people are trying to sell Fred Thompson....

MATTHEWS: Can you smell the English leather on this guy, the Aqua Velva, the sort of mature man‘s shaving cream, or whatever, you know, after he shaved? Do you smell that sort of—a little bit of cigar smoke? You know, whatever.

... I realise that, for some people, image will always matter more than substance.

And, as long as this is the case, disasters - like the one we are witnessing in Iraq - are sure to be America's destiny.

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