TV Review: The Lost Year in Iraq

After the fall of a dictator, the rise of confusion

By Anita Gates--NY Times

Dissolving the Iraqi Army in 2003 might not have been such a great idea.

“Now you have a couple hundred thousand people who are armed — because they took their weapons home with them — who know how to use the weapons, who have no future, who have a reason to be angry at you,” Col. Thomas X. Hammes of the United States Marine Corps says in tonight’s PBS “Frontline” documentary, “The Lost Year in Iraq.”

Very few punches are pulled during this disturbing, eye-opening hour, written, produced and directed by Michael Kirk. And clearly Mr. Kirk and Jim Gilmore, who is credited with the reporting for the film, found no shortage of highly placed people who were willing, even eager, to talk about the disaster that many perceive American-occupied Iraq to have become since the spring of 2003, when President Bush declared victory there.

The film begins with the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein, a scene shown over and over on American television, and the portentous observation that “the Iraqis couldn’t pull it down themselves” because it was so heavy. So the American military helped.

“The Lost Year in Iraq” doesn’t bother going into a discussion about whether the war was a good idea to begin with. It moves right to Baghdad’s fall in April 2003 and the looting that began hours later and soon “verged on chaos,” as the narrator says.

“We were totally unprepared to secure the city,” says Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Jay Garner, the Army general (now retired) who was named director of the Iraq Reconstruction Group, adds, “There was no plan and no staff.”

Certainly some of the staff members seemed a bit underqualified. Colonel Hammes recalls that the person given the job of planning for prisons and police was 25 and that this was his first job after college. He didn’t worry about having a staff of only four, the young appointee said, because they were all his fraternity brothers. Colonel Hammes describes the overall effort as “heroic amateurism.”

That description is one of the nicer things anyone in this film has to say.

Aside from members of the Bush administration, the person who comes off worst in this report is L. Paul Bremer III, the managing director of Henry Kissinger Associates, who was quickly named presidential envoy. According to Rajiv Chandrasekaran, author of “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” about the American plans for rebuilding Iraq, Mr. Kissinger had described Mr. Bremer as “a control freak.”

Mr. Bremer’s first decision was to give soldiers the authority to shoot looters. That was quickly countermanded. Next he ordered the “de-Baathification of Iraqi society.” Unfortunately, as others point out, this meant taking away jobs from thousands of people who had joined the ruling Baath party under Mr. Hussein simply because party members earned more money at the same jobs than nonparty members did.

Attacks on American forces increased. The Jordanian embassy was blown up. The United Nations office was blown up. The administration denied there was an insurgency. Four American contractors were murdered. Horrifying photographs of the treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib were released. Mr. Bremer sneaked out of Iraq, using a decoy plane. In the film he chuckles at the memory.

Generals, authors, ambassadors, former officials with the Coalition Provisional Authority (there was a joke that C.P.A. stood for Can’t Provide Anything), a counter-terrorism official with the National Security Council and a counter-insurgency adviser for the Department of Defense all share their opinions of the handling of the postwar period. None of it is pretty, but it is gratifyingly clear.

The still photographs in “The Lost Year in Iraq” are particularly well chosen. One shot of Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, and Donald H. Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, is a portrait of a power play told solely in facial expressions....http://tinyurl.com/tux9s

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Some of us knew all along. We were called names. Really horrible names and threatened by the usual crew of right wing ghouls and fools.
I'm looking for payback.

“This whole thing about not kicking someone when they are down is BS – not only do you kick him – you kick him until he passes out – then beat him over the head with a baseball bat – then roll him up in an old rug – and throw him off a cliff into the pounding surf below!!!!”

Michael Scanlon, Jack Abramoff's partner and Tom Delay employee wrote this in an email during the 'attack Clinton' years. Sounds about right to me.

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