Truth - Al Franken [101]
But, of course, I am not free to loot. Looting has nothing to do with freedom, any more than any other crime does. Rumsfeld was sending a clear message to the Iraqis: You’re not as good as us. We don’t care about you.
It wasn’t just words that sent that message. The 3rd Infantry Division, which had heroically led the drive to Baghdad, didn’t have enough troops to prevent the ransacking of almost every official building and major business in Baghdad. But they were able to surround the oil ministry with fifty tanks, reinforcing the suspicion that America was in Iraq not for Iraqis but for their oil. There could be an innocent explanation for this. Maybe we had to protect Iraq’s oil ministry, because only the oil could provide the money to rebuild what was being destroyed—for example, the other ministries. But, boy, did it look bad.
It’s not like the looting wasn’t anticipated. Every expert had warned that looting would pose a crucial challenge in the aftermath of the war and had suggested specific measures to prevent it.
One of those experts, Robert Perito, had given a presentation to the influential Defense Policy Board about this very danger:
It was very likely, we thought, that there was going to be widespread civil disturbance. It was also going to be necessary for the U.S. to be prepared going in to deal with that. So my presentation was largely about the kinds of forces that we would need in order to deal with that kind of violence. The recommendations were to create a constabulary and a police force and rule-of-law teams that would be able to go in and deal with civil disturbance.
But Rumsfeld had made ignoring experts like Perito a top priority. And that’s why nobody told the 3rd Infantry what to do when the chaos began. As the 3rd Infantry’s after-action report says, there was “no plan from higher headquarters,” and “no guidance for restoring order in Baghdad.” Had they been told from the beginning that preventing looting would be part of their mission, things almost certainly would have been different. Listen to Lieutenant General James T. Conway, who commanded the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force:
CONWAY: When the troops entered Baghdad and there was a level of looting, I think I understood, so long as Iraqis were taking office furniture out of the government buildings in a regime headquarters location, those types of things. We watched it for two or three days, I think, pretty much with that attitude.
FRONTLINE: And you think you could have stopped it?
CONWAY: I think so. I think—if we had been told to stop the looting and secure key elements of the city, we could have brought a force to do that.
Army Secretary Thomas White summed it up:
We immediately found ourselves shorthanded in the aftermath. We watched people dismantle and run off with the country basically.
Of course, it’s one thing to allow looters to plunder Iraq’s cultural heritage along with computers, bathroom fixtures, and insulation from the Irrigation Ministry. It’s quite another to allow looters to make off with hundreds of tons of high-grade explosives from sites that had been previously identified as probable WMD caches.
In 2003, Christmas came early for Iraq’s burgeoning bombmaker class. The weapons dump at al Qaqaa, some thirty miles south of Baghdad, held 377 tons of extremely powerful explosives. Enough high explosives to make an Improvised Explosive Device for every Iraqi man, woman, and child, with enough left over to detonate the six nuclear bombs that North Korea has developed while we were concentrating on Iraq.
Here’s how the U.S. troops who witnessed the looting described it to the Los Angeles Times :
“We were running from one side of the compound to the other side, trying to kick people out,” said one senior noncommissioned officer who was at the site in late April 2003. “On our last day there, there were at least 100 vehicles waiting at the site for us to leave” so that they could come in and loot munitions.
“It was complete chaos. It was looting like L.A. during the Rodney King riots,