The 2003 invasion. It seemed that everything that could go wrong went wrong, except for the military operation to remove Saddam and to seize Baghdad. But following on—what do you call them, the Orders,
Orders 1 and
2?
Crocker: Yeah. The disbanding of the Iraqi army and the de-Baathification process. Again, you know, the conventional wisdom that we disbanded the Iraqi army and therefore created the insurgency, you know, that’s not true. I’m no great defender of the policy. I argued against the invasion.
But, you know, when asked to go out and try and put things together, there I was. That’s what you do. Well, I’ll say this, but you’re not going to use it. It’s too insider baseball, but it’s important. The Turks denied the 4th Infantry Division request to have two fronts, to move the division into northern Iraq via Turkey. What that did was allow the Iraqi forces north of Baghdad, when they could see what was coming, they just dropped their guns, took off their uniforms, and just a bunch of good old civilians up here. So had we wanted Saddam’s army, we would have had to reconstitute it. We would have had to take a positive action to bring these guys back.
Sure, but [Coalition Provisional Authority head Gen. L. Paul] Bremer’s order, I think, was that the army would be disbanded, was it not?
Crocker: The point I’m making is that the army already was disbanded.
I understand. But still, I mean, in terms of the message delivered to many of those officers and servicemen, the message was coming down from Bremer that the army was to be disbanded.
Crocker: Which they already knew, because again, they were the officers who disbanded the army.
Well, the larger question here is getting at the sectarianism that erupts as a result of these orders.
Crocker: Well, so here’s the point on that. Because I was out there at the time and something of a student of history, when I could bend my bandwidth to it, I was thinking a lot about the post-World War I period, when the British and the French carved up the Middle East into mandates for their respective countries.
The Brits got Iraq. So they wanted occupation on the cheap. They basically preserved the Ottoman structures, both on the civilian side and the military, Sunni-dominated. What they got was a fatwa from the grand ayatollah of the day forbidding all cooperation with the British forces and calling on right-thinking Iraqis to stand against them.
That kicked off a decade-long insurrection. Had we taken the step of calling Saddam’s officers back and dealing with them as a legitimate army, we would have had a Shia rebellion that would have made the rebellion of the ’20s look like a cakewalk.
We almost got it anyway the next year in Najaf, with Sadr’s guys. So it was pretty clear, if you were on the ground, you couldn’t get the three big pieces all to fit together: Arab Sunni, Arab Shia and Kurd.
You could get two out of three. And I think it would have been madness had we bent over backward to accommodate Saddam’s former officers. Then we would have had a much greater insurgency that we faced anyway. I mean, look, this is a world of no black, no white, no good choices, just least-bad alternatives. And to this day, I think that it would have gone worse for us had we made a different decision.
Had you asked for the army to be reconstituted.
Crocker: Yeah. I think that would have sent the Shia to the barricades.
But it’s hard to imagine more violence than what erupted eventually by 2005, ’06, ’07.
Yeah. That’s, again, failure of imagination. Things in the Middle East can always be worse than they are. And give it time, and they’ll get there. Was there much to choose between a Sunni rebellion and a Shia rebellion?
It was possible for us during my time out there, not because I had anything to do with it — a lot of brave Iraqis and brave Americans in uniform did — where we could get the situation under control through the “surge.” And it wasn’t by dominating Anbar or other predominantly Sunni areas; it was by cooperating.
Even [former Iraqi Prime Minister] Nouri al-Maliki got that. And in 2007, Iraq passed its first budgetsupplemental — we taught them a lot of bad things; budget supplementals was one of them — $250million for the province of Anbar. Now, I mean, basically had to sit on Maliki’s head to get him to do it. But he came to realize that this would be a pretty good investment. And indeed, it did bring a number of Sunnis back into cooperation with the government.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/the-frontline-interview-ryan-crocker/