It’s no secret that Colin Powell clashed with the defense secretary many times while he was running Foggy Bottom. And Powell’s recent critical remarks on inadequate troop levels are not a case of Monday morning quarterbacking. He argued for more troops before the invasion, but most importantly, Powell (and others privately and publicly) pressed for more troops after the invasion in the face of a rapidly deteriorating security situation and an insurgency that was gaining steam. As General Sanchez put it two years ago when asked what he could do with two more divisions, “I’d control Baghdad” (see here for another example). From Agence France Presse:
Former US secretary of state Colin Powell said Sunday he had expressed concerns to President George W. Bush that they were not sending a large enough military force to Iraq before the US-led invasion in early 2003. “I made the case to General (Tommy) Franks and (Defence) Secretary (Donald) Rumsfeld before the president that I was not sure we had enough troops,” Powell told Britain’s ITV1 television. “The case was made, it was listened to, it was considered … a judgment was made by those responsible that the troop strength was adequate.” Powell, a former US Army general and Vietnam veteran, said he did not agree with the assessment by Bush’s military advisers that they were sending enough troops in March 2003 to topple former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. “The President’s military advisers felt that the size of the force was adequate; they may still feel that years later. Some of us don’t, I don’t,” he said. “In my perspective I would have preferred more troops, but you know this conflict is not over.” In an apparent sideswipe at those advisers, he said: “At the time the president was listening to those who were supposed to be providing him with military advice. “They were anticipating a different kind of immediate aftermath of the fall of Baghdad; it turned out to be not exactly as they had anticipated.”
From the Sunday Times of London:
“There were enough troops to defeat the army. (But that) was only part of the battle. The difficult part was taking control of a very large country with 25m people and you have just taken out the whole government. And guess what: who then becomes the new government? You do, under the laws of land warfare. We were not able to take control, nor did we have the right political approach. “We were characterizing the insurgents as a few dead-enders and saying, ‘This isn’t all that bad’. A larger troop presence would have been helpful. I raised the question. The Pentagon says that is not what the generals thought. But the generals were working under political direction that said ‘this is not going to be that bad’. But it did turn out that bad – we were unable to strangle the insurgency in its crib – and now it is raging.”
While Secretary Rumsfeld deserves a lot of credit for the many things that went well — the speed of the toppling of Saddam and the Taliban, for example — reassessing the size of the post-Iraq invasion force needed “to strangle the insurgency in its crib” wasn’t one of them.
