THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS OF FAILURE IN IRAQ: A RETROSPECTIVE ANALYSIS OF THE RECONSTRUCTION By Kenneth M. Pollack *This article will appear in Barry Rubin (ed.), Iraq After Saddam (Sharpe, 2007). To order, please contact
[email protected]. This article examines the course of the disastrous U.S. reconstruction of Iraq from the invasion through the fall of 2006. It locates the source of America’s many failings not only in the ignorance that governed the Bush Administration’s assumptions about the ease of postwar reconstruction and the absence of appropriate or realistic planning that resulted, but also in a series of equally mistaken decisions by the Bush Administration, the Coalition Provisional Authority, and the U.S. military in the years that followed. It argues that the political deadlock, security vacuum, and absence of a functional Iraqi economy today are all the result of these problems and that only dramatic changes in U.S. policy—not the tactical tinkering that the Bush Administration has engaged in over the past 18 months and that many of its critics continue to recommend today—have any chance of undoing the damage of this long chain of needless mistakes. It never had to be this bad. The consistently failed to provide them with the reconstruction of Iraq was never going to be opportunities and the framework to quick or easy, but it was not doomed to succeed.2 Indeed, perhaps the most tragic failure.1 Its disastrous course to date has evidence of this unrealized potential is that been almost entirely the result of a even three-and-a-half years after Saddam’s sequence of foolish and unnecessary fall, with Iraq mired in a deepening civil mistakes on the part of the United States.