420 notes to pages 301‒304
- Rumsfeld said he had not been involved in or even aware of the decision
to make Sanchez commander in Iraq. Woodward, State of Denial , 297–98.
If so, it was a remarkable failure on his part to permit such a vital decision
to be made without his approval—and likewise a failure by his boss, the
president. - Ricks, Fiasco , 173–74.
- Ricks, Fiasco , 324–25.
- Ricks, Fiasco , 170, 172, 183–84; Woodward, State of Denial , 247; Hess,
Presidential Decisions for War , 2nd ed., 262–63. Bush later acknowledged
the comment to have been a mistake. - Woodward, State of Denial , 475; Ricks, Fiasco , 217–21, 262–64.
- Ricks, Fiasco , 225–28.
- Ricks, Fiasco , 192.
- Ricks, Fiasco , 195, 197, 199–200, 270ff ., 378–80; Hess, Presidential
Decisions for War , 2nd ed., 267–68. - Ricks, Fiasco , 347–48.
- Ricks, Fiasco , 358–59.
- Hess, Presidential Decisions for War , 2nd ed., 271.
- U.S. troops were cautioned against the indiscriminate use of fi repower
in populated areas, and Casey established a counterinsurgency school for
newly arriving American offi cers. Ricks, Fiasco , 393–94, 414. - On problems of morale, see Ricks, Fiasco , 309–10.
- Ricks, Fiasco , 420–21.
- Bremer’s reckless decision to disband the established Iraqi military meant
starting over from scratch to reconstitute a functioning force. Time was
lost, to no purpose—every offi cer and noncommissioned offi cer in the
reconstituted army had served in its predecessor. Recruiting and training
new units proved a slow, fi tful process. Despite claims that Iraqi battal-
ions were ready to assume security tasks, inspections by various American
military and civil offi cials found that virtually none of the supposedly
fully trained troops were considered suffi ciently reliable to commit to
combat on their own. Th ey had to be partnered with American units,
which did most of the heavy fi ghting. Further, despite claims of impres-
sive numbers of Iraqi soldiers by 2006, no one knew how many actually
remained under arms; the desertion rate was extraordinary, with entire
units sometimes vanishing. All of it was eerily reminiscent of the ARVN
during Westmoreland’s days, which said little for what the Iraqi army
would be capable of doing if left on its own.
Abizaid and Casey, convinced that foreign troops were an irritant
to Iraqi society, sought nevertheless to accelerate the transition to Iraqi
military self-suffi ciency. Th us, while paying lip service to COIN doctrine
that stressed the importance of small unit tactics and population security
(which implied dispersing forces among the people), Casey concentrated
U.S. troops in large, cloistered Forward Operating Bases (FOB), lavishly