A detailed report by Michael Moss and David Rohoe today lays out how the incompetent and corrupt Bush administration blew any chance of establishing a stable, friendly government in Iraq: Misjudgments Marred U.S. Plans for Iraqi Police.

As chaos swept Iraq after the American invasion in 2003, the Pentagon began its effort to rebuild the Iraqi police with a mere dozen advisers. Overmatched from the start, one was sent to train a 4,000-officer unit to guard power plants and other utilities. A second to advise 500 commanders in Baghdad. Another to organize a border patrol for the entire country.

Three years later, the police are a battered and dysfunctional force that has helped bring Iraq to the brink of civil war. Police units stand accused of operating death squads for powerful political groups or simple profit. Citizens, deeply distrustful of the force, are setting up their own neighborhood security squads. Killings of police officers are rampant, with at least 547 slain this year, roughly as many as Iraqi and American soldiers combined, records show.

Again and again, practical people told the administration that a strong. immediate effort would be needed to establish law and order after Saddam fell. The first man they hired to form an occupation government in Iraq told them that:

In March 2003, three weeks before American forces invaded Iraq, Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, who retired from the Army in 1997, met with senior National Security Council officials to brief them on his plans to manage the country after the overthrow of Mr. Hussein.

Plucked from his civilian job at a defense contracting company six weeks earlier, General Garner, a blunt 64-year-old who led relief operations in northern Iraq after the Persian Gulf war in 1991, was scrambling to put together a staff and a plan to control a fractious nation the size of California.

General Garner and his aides said they believed that a large number of American and European police officers would be needed to train a new Iraqi force and help it police a country they feared could quickly slip into lawlessness.

In the March meeting, General Garner raised an ambitious plan by Richard Mayer, a Justice Department police-training expert on his staff, to send 5,000 American and foreign advisers to Iraq. Mr. Mayer said his detailed, inch-and-a-half-thick plan included organizational tables, budgets and schedules.

Rumsfeld's Defense Department pooh-poohed Garner's proposal as "unnecessary" and it was never implemented. The result was chaos:

As American forces advanced across Iraq in late March and early April of 2003, Iraqi police officers abandoned their posts by the tens of thousands. In the resulting security vacuum, mobs looted and burned police stations and government ministries.

American troops stood by, having received no orders to stop the looting. When General Garner and other American officials arrived in Baghdad, 16 of 23 major government ministries were stripped shells.

General Garner, though, would never have the chance to raise his police training proposal again. Three weeks after arriving in Baghdad, he was replaced by L. Paul Bremer III, a retired career diplomat and counterterrorism expert. Mr. Bremer said he participated in no prewar planning and was never told of General Garner's plan.

"I had only two weeks to get ready for the job," Mr. Bremer said. "I don't remember being specifically briefed on the police."

Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner, was sent by the administration bunglers to get a handle on the situation:

Two days after Mr. Bremer's appointment, Mr. Kerik, who had never trained police officers outside the United States, received his assignment from the Pentagon. He also said he was never told of General Garner's plan.

When Mr. Bremer landed in Baghdad on May 12, 2003, a month after the city fell, government offices were still burning and looting had not stopped. That night, Mr. Bremer gave his first speech to his staff.

"I put the very first priority on police and law and order," he recalled. "I said we should shoot the looters."

 

...

On May 18, Mr. Kerik arrived in Baghdad and found "nothing, absolutely nothing" in place. "Twelve guys on the ground plus me," he recalled. "That was the new Ministry of Interior."

Mr. Mayer, the author of General Garner's police training plan who worked in the Department of Justice, had fallen ill in the United States, and the Justice Department team was apparently unaware of his prewar plan. Working from scratch, the team pulled together a new plan to train 50,000 to 80,000 members of an Iraqi police force.

"If you took all of the postconflicts from the 1990's and combined them together, it would not equal what you're up against in Iraq," recalled R. Carr Trevillian IV, the senior Justice Department official on the team. "Even if it were a benign environment."

At first, members suggested that Iraqi police recruits receive six months of academy training, the amount trainers settled on in Kosovo. Mr. Kerik said he "started laughing," and calculated that it would take nine years to train the force.

The team reduced academy training to 16 weeks, and eventually 8 weeks. Later, a 2005 State Department audit found that translating classes from English to Arabic ate up 50 percent of training time. With translation, Iraqi recruits received the equivalent of four weeks of training.

To make up for the shortened classes, the Justice Department team proposed a sweeping field training program similar to Mr. Mayer's. The team calculated that more than 20,000 advisers would be needed to create the same ratio of police trainers to recruits in Iraq as existed in Kosovo.

Deeming that figure unrealistic, they recommended placing 6,600 American and foreign trainers in police stations across the country to train Iraqis and, if necessary, enforce the law.

Two weeks after the Justice Department team arrived in Baghdad, they submitted their proposal to Mr. Bremer. The administration now had a second plan for training the Iraqi police. On June 2, Mr. Bremer approved it, he and Mr. Kerik said.

The 6,600 police trainers never showed up.

And so it was that our government lost its opportunity in Iraq:

Mr. Bremer said he repeatedly complained in National Security Council meetings chaired by Ms. Rice and attended by cabinet secretaries that the quality of police training was poor and focused on producing high numbers.

"They were just pulling kids off the streets and handing them badges and AK-47's," Mr. Bremer said.

As 2003 came to a close, criminals running rampant in Baghdad diminished popular support for the American-led occupation, Mr. Bremer said.

"We were the government of Iraq, and the most fundamental role of any government is law and order," Mr. Bremer said. "The fact that we didn't crack down on it from the very beginning had sent a message to the Iraqis and the insurgents that we were not prepared to enforce law and order."

Mr. Burke, the retired Massachusetts State Police major, said he was impressed by the eagerness of Iraqi police officers to build a professional new force but appalled by the American effort.

"We had such a golden opportunity in the first few months," he said. "These people were so willing. Even the Sunni policemen wanted change."

Instead, the administration decided to pay $50 million per month to DynCorp, a company from Texas (what a surprise), to train the Iraqi police forces. People working for that company succeeded in stealing $600,000 worth of fuel, but failed to train a professional police force.

Now, neighborhoods have established their own armed patrols to protect themselves from rampant lawlessness, and our government is universally regarded by Iraqis as untrustworthy and incompetent.

Which, of course, it is.

The question now is, "How many more must die for Dubya's bungling?"

The following facts underscore some important truths about our president:

1,702 days have now passed since since September 17, 2001, when President Bush pledged to take Osama bin Laden "dead or alive."

1,116 days have now passed since May 1, 2003, when President Bush gave his Iraq "mission accomplished" speech.

Been There