war, which shows the truth of Herman Goering’s statement that to get people to
back a war, “all you have to do is tell them that they are being attacked” and
denounce opponents for their lack of patriotism. When textbooks like The
Americans repeat the fictional tie between terrorism and Hussein’s Iraq, they
promote support for this misguided war among our young.^36
Whatever its reasons for going to war in Iraq, after its initial victory the
Bush administration forgot the basic rule of any successful occupation:
decapitate the occupied society, then rule it through the structures already in
place on the local level. After all, Saddam Hussein used more than half a
million troops and policemen to keep Iraq quiet. At the insistence of Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who overruled Pentagon brass, we went in with
far fewer troops, almost none of whom spoke Arabic. So we had no alternative
but to use the Iraqi military to cordon off ammunition dumps, direct traffic,
accompany our forces on patrol, and do other useful jobs. Instead, against the
advice of U.S. officials with Iraq experience like Gen. Jay Garner, we simply
declared the Iraqi military illegal. Moreover, we did so without bothering to
have it come in and disarm, instantly creating an illegal armed force outside
our control. Occupying Iraq is not rocket science. All we had to do was
emulate most successful occupations of the last five hundred years. How did
Germany govern France in the 1940s, for instance? Through the French police,
local leadership, and the imposed Vichy government. The course we chose
showed incompetence of a high order.^37
From the standpoint of realpolitik, the war against Iraq was a poor idea
from the start. The United States had Saddam Hussein in a box. His caving in
to the UN’s demand to readmit WMD inspectors exemplified his dilemma: he
ruled his nation by force, yet could hardly mobilize significant force vis-à-vis
the UN and the United States. Moreover, Iraq was a secular Arab state, if not a
democratic one. By 2004, experts on the Middle East, army commanders, and
CIA officials were telling journalist Fallows that our choice to attack Iraq
“hampered the campaign in Afghanistan before fighting began and wound it
down prematurely, along the way losing the chance to capture Osama bin
Laden.” It also distracted our attention from the true sources—in Saudi Arabia,
Egypt, and Pakistan—of the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks and from the gaping
holes in our domestic security apparatus. It “overused and wore out” the army,
Fallows continues, “without committing enough troops for a successful
occupation.” Worst of all, it created new terrorists. Four months after attacking