A year later, mission still not accomplished

But that being said, the reconstruction period in Iraq has been much more difficult than the White House predicted in the wake of last year's initial push into the country. The ease of the initial military thrust may have been deceptive. To trap the US with a draining insurgency might have been the old regime's strategy all along. In any case, the US underestimated the devastation, both physical and mental, that Mr. Hussein would leave in his wake.

"More could have been done in the pre-war planning for postwar operations," said retired Army Gen. John Keane, who was vice chief of staff of the Army until last fall, in a recent congressional appearance.

General Keane said that he had not predicted how passive Iraq's people would be after 35 years of political repression, and how that would make them skeptical of all authority and wary of the Americans' insistence that they were liberators.

That sentiment is echoed by Mario Mancuso, a former Special Operations commander who spent close to a year in Iraq, including five months around Najaf. "I found a brutalized, traumatized, and paranoid people by and large," he says.

The US knew Iraqis as a whole were educated and industrious - the Germans of the Middle East, in an old Western stereotype. What they hadn't counted on was how much they had been beaten down, and how they would have to try and coax locals out of a battened-down survival mode. "We likely overstated how much they could help us," says Mancuso.

Meanwhile, the infrastructure of Iraq was decrepit. The US had thought it would have to protect electricity plants, oil pipelines, and other key installations against sabotage. It hadn't counted on having to protect them against rust.

"We received the country in terrible shape but not as a result of the conflict - only as the result of the lack of maintenance for the last decade or two," says John Reppert, an expert at the Marshall Center in Garmisch, Germany.

Thus the US is now in a very difficult position, notes Dr. Reppert. The US still must provide physical security for months to come in Iraq, with the steady drain of casualties that entails. Since last May, over 600 US soldiers have died.

Yet at the same time, its political control will inevitably begin to dwindle as the UN becomes more involved and Iraqis themselves agitate for more control. Ultimately, the Iraqi government will almost certainly be better than that of Hussein - but it may be far from the Jeffersonian democracy the US says it wants.

"We are going to have to abide by our decision to empower the Iraqis and to live with the decisions they make," Judith Yaphe, an Iraqi expert at the National Defense University, recently told Congress.

Page: 1 | 2