Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, speaking to Brian Lamb on C-Span’s Q&A, 10 December 2006:
LAMB: Would you have gone all the way to Baghdad?
GARNER: From there?
LAMB: The first time.
GARNER: No. If I’d been …
LAMB: Why not?
GARNER: If I had been Schwarzkopf or Colin Powell …
LAMB: Yes.
GARNER: … or the president?
First of all, I don’t know how you do that. I had the same reservations they did.
I don’t know how you – I don’t know how you make all your planning and all your force developments and your deployments to push somebody out of Kuwait, and then you take that another 500 to 600 kilometers into really hostile territory.
And then, how do control the – how do you control 24 million people in something like that? So, I don’t think we could have done that then.
And I agree with what the first President Bush did. I don’t think we should have done that.
The only criticism I had of that operation is, when we didn’t go there, and then we came back and we incited the Shia and the Kurds to rebel, and they did – and they did a pretty good job of it – that when we released the Iraqi army, instead of killing all of them on the road to Basra, when we released them, then they were able to go and take on the Kurds and take on the Shia.
And, of course, they killed hundreds of thousands of Shia. And they killed a lot of Kurds, too. The Kurds were lucky enough to be able to escape up into Turkey and Iran.
And so, when we didn’t support them, after we had we called them to rebel against Saddam Hussein, then we pulled support back from them, I thought that was a mistake.
LAMB: Why didn’t we support them?
GARNER: I have no idea.
Does Garner really have no idea why the U.S. incited the Shia and Kurds to rebel, unleashed the Iraqi army, then pulled back support? Or has that particular truth not cooled off enough yet to be considered safe for public consumption.
He never hesitated to question directives issued by Paul Bremer when Garner was transitioning him to take over as director of reconstruction in Iraq in 2003 and isn’t shy about discussing it. Why fire blanks on this?
Perhaps the fate of hundreds of thousands of Iran-friendly Shia mattered so little to Garner that he didn’t need a reason. Their blood would be on the hands of Saddam who was slated to be deposed by the U.S. eventually. U.S. complicity would vanish down the memory hole. Just one of those occasional slip ups that the U.S. makes and quickly rectifies that Garner spoke about later in the interview.
The argument that, “if Saddam would gas his own people, he would gas anyone..,” would serve U.S. interests well whether securing economic sanctions against Iraq or whenever the U.S. finally decided to go all the way to Baghdad.
Decimating a society of 24 million with 12 years of brutal economic sanctions and no-fly zones before attempting to occupy the country would come next – another 1.4 million dead – what’s a few hundred thousand more or less? The U.S. will get it right eventually.
Robert Gates stated in his confirmation hearing for Secretary of Defence:
I certainly supported the decision to go into Iraq in 2003, and not just because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction… It was clear that the sanctions were weakening, and I had no doubt in my mind that once the sanctions were removed by the U.N. — and it looked like the French and the Russians and others were moving in that direction — that Saddam, if he didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, would move quickly to try and obtain them…
According to Gates, the U.S. is keeping the world safe from France, Russia and the UN.
Jay Garner believes that the U.S. is a very moralistic and compassionate society that has an ethical responsibility to police the world and this is just a slip up.
One of The Iraq Study Group’s recommendations was for the administration “to engage all parties in Iraq, with the exception of al Qaeda. The United States must find a way to talk to Grand Ayatollah Sistani, Moqtada al-Sadr, and militia and insurgent leaders.”
Talks under way to replace Iraq PM
Hamza Hendawi and Qassim Abdul-Zahara, 10 December 2006, Associated Press
BAGHDAD, Iraq – Major partners in Iraq’s governing coalition are in behind-the-scenes talks to oust Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki amid discontent over his failure to quell raging violence, according to lawmakers involved.
The talks are aimed at forming a new parliamentary bloc that would seek to replace the current government and that would likely exclude supporters of the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is a vehement opponent of the U.S. military presence.
[…]
“The question of confidence in this government must be reconsidered,” Parliament Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, a Sunni Arab, told legislators Sunday. “Why should we continue to support it? For its failure?”
In response to an article by Tom Hayden revealing secret talks between US and Iraqi Armed Resistance, Nir Rosen said, “Virtually every single young Shia male in Iraq supports Muqtada Sadr today.” [27 November 2006]:
NIR ROSEN: Well, step into any of the top hotels in Amman, Jordan and you are likely to find people who are affiliated with the resistance, because they use Jordan as a safe haven. So many of the leadership does, wealthy people who sponsor the very many different groups of the resistance, but — and they’ve been making these demands for a couple of years now, impossible as they are. And the Americans have been meeting unofficially in Iraq and outside Iraq, people from the resistance. And a year ago there were meetings in Cairo between the Iraqi Government and member of the resistance. And none of this has ever amounted to anything, because Shias own Iraq now. Sunnis can never get it back. There’s nothing Americans can do about this.
So, for Sunnis, whether these reports are true or not, for Sunnis to ever imagine that they could ever regain power, that the Baathists could ever be restored to power, that Americans actually matter in Iraq anymore is naïve in the extreme. Iraq is Shia now. They have the majority, the security forces, they have the militias. What you are going to see in Iraq I think, in Baghdad especially, is a virtual genocide of the Sunnis. And the Americans are going to be unable to stop that.
The White House is denying the report, despite quotes to the contrary from Iraqi lawmakers:
A key figure in the proposed alliance, Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, a Sunni Arab, left for Washington on Sunday for a meeting with Bush at least three weeks ahead of schedule.
“The failure of the government has forced us into this in the hope that it can provide a solution,” said Omar Abdul-Sattar, a lawmaker from al-Hashemi’s Iraqi Islamic Party. “The new alliance will form the new government.”
The U.S. will blame poor intelligence for the slip up.