Dancing in the streets, part Deux!

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
BTW, good job in Mosul of shooting at cops and a crowd because the cops fired at some looters.

Good job at stopping robbers from completely looting the Rasheed Bank in central Baghdad as well. They saved dozens of sacks of currency. Or are we still looking for negative examples?

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Ned
gsmoove, looking back, as I said before, I do not believe that Franks had planned for a total collapse of government authority across the country. We certainly did not have enough troops in country to both fight the war and to police the cities. We needed the local police.

There's nothing at all that indicates that the White House delegated occupation planning and other post-war duties to CentCom. Bush decided when to give Saddam his ultimatum, and a large number of elements of the war plan itself are out of CentCom's operational responsibility (for example, transfer of units out of CONUS are a FORSCOM responsibility, there's a big burecratic overlap between SOCOM/JSOC and the CentCom SOF command, transfer of forces out of Europe are a EurCom responsibility, etc.)

Franks essentially moved when he was told, with what he had on hand. Franks had no control over the failed negotiations with Turkey, or the positioning of 4ID assets and the schedule of their redeployment.

Availability of more forces along the line of advance would have allowed for much greater security of supply lines, would have likely prevented the mess that the 507 Maint Coy. got itself into (with some 27 USA and USMC KIA's largely avoidable), and would have allowed for much more rapid provision of security and control of large cities along the coalition line of advance.

But when Saddam's regime fell, every form of government vanished: police, local government, utility workers ...everything. I don't think anyone had planned on the collapse being so great. As an example of this, I never once saw a single post in this forum predicting such a total collapse of government.

And there's no posts predicting we'll all continue breathing oxygen tomorrow, either.

The collapse of Iraqi government authority is so obvious and predictable it's nothing but a copout to say nobody anticipated it. Iraq was a cult of personality dictatorship with a centralized one party, top down bureacracy. Why in hell would Iraqi police go to work immediately during/after an invasion? They're armed Iraqis in uniform, thus extremely likely to be either treated as enemy combatants by US forces, and/or pressed into paramilitary service if there was any effective resistance. There's no electricity, nothing is safe to move, so there's no effective courts, minimally functioning jails, no likelihood of getting paid for risking your ass in meltdown conditions, no top-down supervision or authority, etc. More to the immediate point, there's tons of people running amok with better weaponry than the cop has, and no fear of party discipline keeping them in line, so the cop is outgunned and has no authority. Why in hell would anyone knowing anything about the functioning of the Saddamite Iraqi government assume there would be any functional local government or services immediately during and after the invasion?

We apparently are going to repeat history. Some of the new government are going to be Ba'ath party members. We have no choice but to use them.

And the smart Iraqi *******s know that the best way of preserving "options" isn't to take on US forces directly, but to lay low, engage in low-level sniping and harassment, and wait for the US to get bored, like it has every other time in recent history.

edit - damned quote tags.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
Good job at stopping robbers from completely looting the Rasheed Bank in central Baghdad as well. They saved dozens of sacks of currency. Or are we still looking for negative examples?

Since the ordinary state of a functioning country is the absense of people running amok with weaponry, preventing the occasional running amok is more of a neutral case than a positive one. That currency is going to be a collector's item eventually, so good job of saving it. I have a few thousand dinar of my own.

BTW, while currency worth less than it's weight in toilet paper is being saved (trouble is, the *******s have billions of dinar hidden away, and there's no accounting for money supply, so no way of valuing the currency against durable goods), the top two medical types from USAID got plinked at enough times in Baghdad, despite their military escort, that they decided to high-tail it back to Kuwait.

Two or three more divisions of troops would be a whole lot more useful, augmented by independent MP forces.

[Ned]

MTG, Thanks for your informative post concerning Franks responsibilities. It seems there may have beeen a screwup somewhere in the chain of command from DC to Oman. Franks seems to be a very careful commander. It does not seem to be likely that he would have failed to plan for policing by his troops once the shooting stopped were that his responsibiliy. But it was very clear that the commanders in Baghdad had no orders to prevent looting when it began.

Another indication of the screwup is the failure to protect the National Museum. Apparently the appropriate people in Washington were informed of the likelihood that the museum would be looted. But word do not get from Washington to the Marine Corps or the Army to post a sentries at the museum. In fact, it appeares that at one point the our troops actually fired shots to scare looters away from with the museum. However, rather than stay there on sentry duty, they left and the looting resumed.

[Lincoln]

"while currency worth less than it's weight in toilet paper is being saved"

Hey, I can remember a few times when I would have given a few dollars for a scrap of toilet paper. Don't knock it if you haven't tried it. And aren't you the one who told us about the left hand thing??

[Lancer]

Saddam is gone, likely dead. The regime of torture and murder is over, the Iraqi people freed, and the museum got ripped off.

Oh the humanities...

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Lancer
Saddam is gone, likely dead. The regime of torture and murder is over, the Iraqi people freed, and the museum got ripped off.

Oh the humanities...

Yep. Let's ignore that little detail called "reality." Nothin' happened but that one museum and some palaces, and they're welcoming us with loving arms everywhere.