Bremer: I need more troops. Saddam: Planned chaos?

We're looking at a bad situation as Paul Bremer calls home to ask for more troops. Some bits from Knight Ridder:

Senior American officials said Bremer had asked for dozens of civilian officials to make up for a shortage of skilled Iraqi administrators who weren't closely affiliated with Saddam's regime. In addition, more U.S. troops were needed as a "stopgap measure" until international peacekeepers start to arrive, one American official said. None of the officials said how many troops Bremer had requested. "It is inconceivable that Rumsfeld and (Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul) Wolfowitz are fighting this because it would mean admitting they were wrong," said a senior administration official.

He was referring to a rejection by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz of an estimate by former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki that several hundred thousand U.S. troops would be required to ensure stability in post-Saddam Iraq.

A senior administration official said Bremer was asking for U.S. officials to be sent from across the government to accelerate the rebuilding of Iraq's central governmental ministries. The State Department has sent a list of roughly 50 Arabic-speaking diplomats to the Pentagon for approval.

Wait, are they suggesting that the destruction of central ministries shortly after the fall of Baghdad might have increased our current problems? We didn't exactly try to catch the Irrigation Ministry as it fell, if I recall. And now a document shows that all the infrastructure sabotage was probably planned by Saddam's intelligence agencies?

Allied officials now believe that a document recently found in Iraq detailing an 'emergency plan' for looting and sabotage in the wake of an invasion is probably authentic. It was prepared by the Iraqi intelligence service in January and marked 'top secret'. It outlined 11 kinds of sabotage, including burning government offices, cutting power and communication lines and attacking water purification plants.

What gives the document particular credence is that it appears to match exactly the growing chaos and large number of guerrilla attacks on coalition soldiers, oil facilities and power plants.

Here's a really marvellous story of how badly the Pentagon tripped over its own feet when Garner couldn't really get ahold of Iraq's problems. Another ongoing struggle in Iraq, besides a chronic and destabilizing shortage of electricity, is the power struggle within the Shia clergy.

The plight of Palestinian refugees in Iraq is very little-known here, but worth looking at. This story also has the tale of a Palestinian who volunteered to fight the Americans, then narrowly avoided death at the Baghdad airport.

A very unusual report in the Egyptian Al-Ahram alleges that Kuwaitis were among the most destructive looters shortly after the war.

At the entrance to Basra stand the charred remains of the Iraqi Oil Company, once the tallest building in town. A friend told me that score- settling between Iraqis and Kuwaitis was responsible for the destruction of that particular building. Other city residents gave a similar account. Shortly following the arrival of British forces in Basra, some of the locals stole furniture from the building. Later, a large number of Kuwaitis allegedly descended on to the city, having crossed the borders between the two countries and burnt the building, thereby destroying all the documents it housed. That act, suggested the people I spoke to in Basra, was in retaliation for Iraqi destruction during the invasion of Kuwait. The Kuwaitis are said to have repeated this pattern in several government buildings, making a point of targeting strategic buildings and documents.

The story of Kuwaiti participation in acts of arson and looting is one that I heard in more than one city near the border with Kuwait. Iraqis in Baghdad expressed their conviction that some of their compatriots had been paid by Kuwait to plunder Iraqi buildings, documents and antiquities.

Posted by HongPong at July 3, 2003 01:41 AM
Listed under Iraq .