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Synced to file: No.End.in.Sight.2007.720p.WEBRip.AAC2.0.x264-FGT

DONALD RUMSFELD (Secretary of Defense 2001-2006) The...

great respect that I have...

for your leadership, mister President...

in this...

little understood

unfamiliar...war

The first war in the 21st century.

It is not well known, it was not well understood...

It is complex for people to comprehend...

and I know with certainty that over time...

the...

contributions you made, will be recorded by history.

NO END IN SIGHT

Thank You U.S.A

Baghdad, Iraq 2006

We severely condemn criminal action by U.S forces.

We mourn the catastrophe by the hands of evil forces.

We demand the execution of the Wahabi unbelievers

who have the support of the Americans.

They have been arrested

and admitted their guilt before all who saw them.

We demand their execution.

On May 1, 2003, president George W. Bush...

declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq, and said...

" In the battle of Iraq, the US and our allies have prevailed. "

Four years later, after over 3,000 american deaths...

and over 20,000 american wounded,...

Iraq has disintegrated into chaos.

Baghdad suffers from ten to fifteen bombings a day...

perhaps 50 deceased in act of service...

but I suspect that's drastically underreported

We're probably catch a third of what's actually occurring.

Millions of Iraqis have lost access to drinking water...

sewage treatment and electricity since the invasion.

Baghdad, a city of 6 million...

has been under an 8 PM curfew since March of 2006.

Over 3 million Iraqis have fled to neighbouring countries.

Estimates of the civilian death toll range as high as 600,000

People who... die are lucky...

But people living,... they are dead while they're alive.

The west and the north of Iraq are controlled by the insurgents.

The rest of Iraq is controlled by the militias.

Iraq's two major moslem groups, the Chiít majority and Sunni minority...

are increasingly in war.

They executed them for being Sunnis.

We have been living together until this day.

This is an Iranian wave against us. An Iranian wave.

We are Muslims. How is this possible?

They say they are the Army of Mahdi.

Is this what the Mahdi army does?

Look what he's become.

Open the sack, let them see his face.

From January, 2003 until January, 2005...

I was a president of the National Council of Intelligence.

We produced the first national estimate on the state of the insugency in Iraq.

The estimate delivered pretty bad news.

It basically laid out bad, worse and worsed scenarios.

The president called it guesswork...

and his press spokesman called it...

Hand-wringing and Nay-saying.

What was only reveling to me was the president hadn't read it.

This is the history of America's invasion of Iraq.

It is a story in which many people tried to save a nation.

On September 11, 2001 was a very clear, bright beautiful day.

I had just come back from the Pentagon barber-shop.

walked by my office and glanced up on the TV-screen, and...

there was...

one of the twin-towers burning.

Pentagon Surveillance Camera

We never heard the plane comming in at least I didn't.

Suddenly, the whole world turned upside down.

I saw that fire-ball... and... I tell you...

I saw that.. and I said to my self I'm going to die today.

That plane had come directly under our section of the offices.

The Army budget office.

where 38 Army employees where killed was directley beneath us.

and the Navy's new command center, was two floors beneath us

everybody was killed in those two sections.

This was something Osama Bin Laden had orchestrated...

because he was the only terrorist I could think of...

who could have

coordinated this kind of activity.

- So you had this thought think immediately? - Immediately. Immediately.

A month after September 11, the US entered Afghanistan...

in search of Al Qaeda and of Osama Bin Laden.

But even before the Afghan war several senior administaration officials...

were looking at another target.

One that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

When the plane(s ?) hit the Pentagon, I was in the building.

And then...I guess the next... big thing that sort of happened, was we...

immidialely got tasked...

to see if we could draw any relationship

between Saddam and Al Qaeda.

I went right away to the...

to the counter terrorism...group...

to their chief Iraqi analyst..

And the two of us sat down over a few days...

and looked at... all the historical reportning that we could go through

In which you conclude?

Well we concluded that there was no relation.

His regime aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda.

We continue to watch Iraq's involment in terrorist activities.

What I want to bring to your attention today, is...

the potentially much more sinister nexus between...

Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network.

We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

Iraq has drones

and they'ar gonna take this drones and put them on this ships

and they'ar gona arm the drones with... chemical biological weapon...

and they'ar gona fly these drones of the ships...

and attack the east coast of US.

You know, this is absolut fantasy land.

I don't know what they were smoking...

but it must have been very good.

George W. Bush's, foreign policy inner circle.

Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz...

set the administration on course for war with Iraq.

Condolezza Rice sided with them.

Colin Powell and Richard Armitage...

the only senior officials with combat experience...

expressed concerns privately....

but supported the administration in public.

HISTORY

Bush's advisors had been involved with Saddam Hussein...

since he invaded Iran in 1980...

in a brutal war that killed nearly a million people.

Iraq used chemical weapon...

against both the Iranian military and innocent civilans.

Saddam invested billions (n x 10^9) of dollars...

in nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs

while murdering 300,000 of his own citizens.

But the Reagan administration, fearing Iran

supported Saddam with military intelligence and economic aid.

Donald Rumsfeld met with Saddam in 1983.

Colin Powell was Reagan's national security advisor

from 1987 to 1989.

The 80s really summed up...

in a dreadfull... but very very telling

State Departement document...

from 1987...

which said...

human rights and chemical weapons used aside,...

our interest run roughly parallell to those of Iraq.

The Iran - Iraq war ends in stalemate in 1988.

In 1990, Saddam invades Kuwait.

A US lead coalition expelles him...

in a war masterminded by Dick Cheney, then Secretary of Defense...

Paul Wolfowitz, then Under Secretary of Defense for Policy...

and Colin Powell, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The first President Bush urges the Iraqi's to stage a coup against Saddam.

There is another way for the bloodshed to stop...

and that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people...

to take matters into their own hands

and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator....

to step aside...

Yet when Iraq's southern Shiit's rise up

the administration allows Saddam to repress them

14... out of Iraq's 18 govenors (provinces)...

where under rebel control...

when general Schwartzkopf... allowed... Saddam Hussein

to use... helicopter gunships...

to massacre... the rebels..., men, women and children.

The 1991 armistice requires Iraq to disarm.

but Saddam refuses to comply.

As a results Iraq's economy crumbles

under a UN embargo instituted in 1993

and continued by the Clinton administration

Saddam's favored elite remain welthy

but ordinary Iraqis are plunged into extreme poverty

and many turned fundamentalist Islam

In 1993, when George Bush senior visits Kuwait...

Saddam attempts to assissnate him.

Seven years later, his son is elected president of the US.

When you see the same architects of those policies...

on the one hand, talking about

getting right what they had gotten wrong, back in 1991, you know...

finishing the job.

I was tempting to say, well... mybe they've learned.

Saddam Hussein and his sons... must leave Iraq within 48 hours.

A refusal to do so, will result in military conflict...

commenced... at a time of our choosing.

NATIONAL SECURITY PRESIDENTIAL DIRECTIVE - NUMBER 24

If you want to date the beginning of the disaster of postwar Iraq...

it would be January 20, 2003...

when Bush signed without, as far as I can tell...

any real discussion within the White House or the administration...

National Security Presidential Directive - Number 24

which gave control of postwar Iraq to the Pentagon.

That document essentially made Donald Rumsfeld...

the main actor on postwar Iraq.

This war was conceived by a very small group of people inside

the Bush administration.

they had an entirely and naive vision of what Iraq was

and what Iraqis would do once the regime fell.

In formulating its views on post-saddam Iraq

the administration relied heavily on a man named Ahmed Chalabi.

Since 1992, Chalabi had been president...

of the Iraqi National Congress, or INC.

Widely viewed with suspicion.

Chalabi had been convicted in Jordan over a huge bank fraud.

The intelligence comunity found his information unreliable...

or even fraudulent.

At best I think...

they were liars.

and at worst, they were provocateurs.

If it's an INC source...

it was always looked at very very sceptically...

by the analyst.

But that wasn't the case with policy makers.

Chalabi asserted that postwar Iraq would be pro-american

and easily stabilized...

particularly if Chalabi himself was in charge

And so the plan was, essetially...

we'll stay for three or four months

we will install... a goverment made up of exiles..

and lead by Ahmed Chalabi...

and then, in August or September, 2003...

we will begin...a drastic reduction of troops.

Larry Di Rita addressed us in one form and said

by the end of August, 2003...

we will have all but 25 to 30,000 troops out of Iraq.

I heard him say that in a room full of people

And I turned to my colleagues

I said this guy doesn't know what he's talking about

It's physically impossible.

The Future project of Iraq of the department of the state...

a 13 volume study on postwar Iraq...

was ignored by the Pentagon.

It was an awful lot of thinking at state department

boards feet of volumes on how we should do this.

Almost non of this...

was integrated in the Pentagons thinking.

Secretaries frustration, along with my own, grew

as we watched our carefull planning, our detailed planning...

essentially discarded...

and the people involved in it, essentially discarded

so that more loyal...

in line with the the republican party's view and so forth...

people could be apointed key positions in Iraq.

THE WAR

At this hour,...

American and coalition forces

are in the early stages of military operations...

to disarm Iraq, to free its people...

and to defend the world from great danger.

I joined the Marine because I always thought it as a really important job...

and didn't feel I'll be content with myself going through life

knowing that other people had fought for my freedom.

I joined the army to ah...

support my country...and ah...

thought it was a good thang to do, ya know...

It was...

an honor...

To go there and help my fellow soldiers...

to do...

what they telled us to go and do there

maybe... take out a... dictator...

out of the... power...

to reestablish the democracy.

I just... was waiting for the war to happen

because it was the...

the only ray of hope I had to look for...

And when it happened, I was... excited,

that things would move slowly...

but... towards better circumstances.

Thank you, mister Bush.

We very like mister Bush!

Not, not to Saddam! Yes, yes to Bush!

Not, not to Saddam! Yes, yes to Bush!

Oh people, look what he's done,

look what he's done to Iraq!

It was a confusing, laud, noisy...

scarry, hopefull place all kind of wrapped up together.

I would se kids with...ski caps on that would say FBI across it.

They were giving me the big thumbs up

And other young men...

who probably were fedayin, in civilian clothes

giving me very hard stares...and...

kind of sizing me up and...

always looking at the licens plate of the car.

The Iraqis were...waiting to see what this was going to bring them.

The presence of the Americans had not been rejected...

yet, by the Iraqis.

No Saddam, no Saddam!

I've seen people welcoming the coalition troops...

Because we thought...

everything is planned, everything is prepared.

There you go!

During World War 2, the US started planning the occupation of Germany...

2 years in advance.

But the Bush administration didn't create the organization...

that would manage the occupation of Iraq...

until 60 days before the invasion.

ORHA - Organization for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance

Reported directly to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld.

I got a call from the office of Secretary Defense...

in late January and they were life meeting.

Handle humanitarian affairs, reconstruction.

Retired Army General Jay Garner, was appoited to run ORHA.

In the first Golf War he had commsnded 22.000 soldiers...

resposible for humanitarian operations...

in the Kurdish zone of northen Iraq.

This time, he would be running the entire country.

Did you... think you were prepared to run Iraq.

I don't think we were ever prepared, I mean...

A task of that magnitude probably takes years to prepare.

Because nobody had years.

I got a call on my cellphone

From someone at the State Department,

telling me that Rich Armitage was looking for me...

and wanted me back in Washington,... right now.

Ambassador Barbara Bodine was placed in charge of Baghdad...

only 3 weeks before the war.

She was a career Foreign Service officer

who had served in Yemen, Iraq...

and had been a hostage in Kuwait five months...

after Saddam's in 1990.

She was one of the few State Department middle East experts,

that the Pentagon allowed into Iraq.

She was one of the few we could get in.

I thought they initially made a misstake

They thought they had a woman and she would be an easy mark

But Barbara was the toughest member of the service.

By 2003, army colonel Paul Hughes...

had worked in the Pentagon for 6 years...

doing planning and strategy work...

for senior Defense Department officials

I wound up being assigned to the...

Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian assistans...

under Jay Garner.

And I was the director of strategic policy, for him.

ORHA started work at the Pentagon 50 days before the invasion of Iraq.

We were given a sweat off offices

that had been unoccupied for a couple of years.

Had no computers in it, you have people showing up daily

asking "Where do I sit?"

They had no staff.

I had no personnel, I had nothing from...

either a senior deputy down to a secretary

There is only one meeting at the National Defense University.

and it was the...I think concensus opinion.

of the people who went to that meeting...

with whom I spoke afterwards.

That hey... "This is a crazy".

that was our first meeting...

and we're not given a hole lot of confidece by there first meeting...

because, essentially...

we didn't do anything except meet each other.

It was completely unstructured.

There were no plans.

There truely were... no plans.

On the 16th of March, ORHA flew out to Kuwait City.

we had 167 people that flew with us.

167 people that were to essetially become the

government of a country of 25 millions.

BAGHDAD, APRIL 9th, 2003

After the fall of Baghdad...

we had no idea what really was gonna happen

and there certainly didn't seem to be much of a plan

What we generally were being told

is that we'd be getting back on the ships

within a month or two... of..., essentially conquering Iraq.

As American forces entered the capital, looting broke out everywhere.

While we were in Kuwait, we were as glued to the TV, as everyone else.

There was the realization...

that there was absolute lawlessnes

and chaos going on in Iraq.

The Americans were'nt doing anything. They....

would... sit at certain intersections, but...

they wouldn't actually get out of the HUMV's or out of the tanks and really do much.

Time passed and we didn't see any progress.

The only progress we found is the uncontrolled freedom.

Looters had... to loot all the govermental buildings

and even private ownd companies.

The looting was partly a factor of the troop levels...

and the sens that Rumsfeld communicated to his commanders...

and his commanders communicated down the chain...

to the...platoon and compay level.

That... we were not there to run Iraq.

We were there to get rid of the regime, and get out.

We are not under martial law here.

In his order, general McKiernan was not told...

to establish martial law.

Not once was martial law declared.

I just...I'll tell you honestly. We're in a transition period.

I mean, there is an Iraqi civil law...

but there is no...

You just heard we just opened up they first two courts today...

so, I mean when you starting at nothing

Had martial law been declared, wich would have been...

authorized under the 4th Geneva Convention...

maby we would have had... a bit more security.

We are a platoon of marines', I mean we could...

we could certainly stop looting, if we...

if that was our assigned task.

The greatest mystery... of postwar Iraq

involves that month or so after the fall of Baghdad...

Why the US didn't do anything to...

to control the looting. Because in a way...

everything that has been a problem since then, started that first month.

People at the National Security Council

secretary Powell, myself and others...

CIA director, did express concern about the looting.

Did you express any concern to president Bush?

I was at the meeting where it was expressed by my boss.

Tell me what mr Powell said at that meeting.

Well you know, it's not the way we generally work.

Our advice to the president is generally kept that way, private to the president.

The word came from Washington...

that we're not getting involved in that

we're not going to stop the looting...

we're not doing police work...

that's not what we're here for.

And I think...

So there were explicit instructions from Washington...

to not interfere with the looting.

Yes.

The looting of Baghdad quickly transformed inno organized, violent, large scale destruction of the city.

Hospitals, governmental offices, universities, ministries...

One CPA estimate had the cost of the looting

at 12 billion dollars (i.e 12,000 million).

That was the revenue for Iraq ... in 2003-2004.

I picked up a newspaper today ... and I couldn't belive it.

I read... 8 headlines... that talked about...

" Chaos! Violence! Unrest! ".

And it just was "henny-penny" the sky is falling.

Just imagine the room/the suite that we're sitting in.

and all that you have is concrete walls everything is gone.

We're talking of people comming in with industrial cranes...

and walking off with parts of a power plant.

Think what's happening in our cities...

when we've had riots and problems...and looting

Stuff happens!

This was not just people stealing stuff from grocery stores.

I mean, this was people chipping concrete, walls...

into little pieces so they could take the rebar out.

The images you were seeing on television

you were seeing over and over and over,

and it's the same picture.

Of some person walking out of some building with a vase.

I think that was probably the day that we lost the Iraqis.

You think "my goodness" , were there that many vases?

It is possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?

Thats when it became very clear, that...

this liberation realy didn't have anything to do with the average Iraqi.

There was a belief that the Americans actually encouraged the looting or wanted it to happen.

The destruction of our country.

How could they let this happen?

So wether you're suni or chia.. you're outraged about the looting.

We had done... a list of 20 sites...

that we thought needed to be protected.

Historical, culturel, artistic, religious

And we had provided that and it realy made no difference, what so ever.

The oil ministry, was the only major facility protected by the US Military.

None of the sites on ORHA's list were protected.

The Iraq National Museum in Baghdad...

number one on ORHA's list...

contained some of the worlds most important artefacts...

of early human civilization.

The museum was never protected.

It is a property of our nation,

and the treasure of 7.000 years of civilization.

Why do they allow it?

Iraq's National Library and National Archives...

containing thousands of ancient manuscripts... where burnt down.

All what was written

was keeping in this library.

Now we have no national heritage.

Three days ago...

me and the doctor Jabar Khalil...

chairman of the State Board of Antiquities,

went to the headquarter of the marine in the Hotel Palestine.

We waited there for about four hours...

til we met a colonel there.

And at that day, he promised that he would send armored cars...

to protect what's left from the museum.

Three days ago, til now nobody came.

To try to lay off the fact of that... unfortunate...

activity...

on a defect in a war plan...

it strikes me as stretch.

Would you urge specifically, by scolars and others,...

about the danger to that museum and what you urged to...

provide a greater level of protection and security...

in the initial phases of the operation?

Not to my knowledge.

No one can claim that they where caught by surprised by the looting.

I just don't think they wanted to know. They didn't wanna hear it.

In the months leading up to the invasion...

a debate over troop levels required in Iraq...

had been privately brewing between military leadship...

and Donald Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld and his depute Paul Wolfowitz...

believed that a force of under 100.000 troops, would be sufficient.

for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

A month before the invasion...

the fight over troop levels became public...

as the Chief of Staff of the Army, Eric Shinseki...

testified before the Senate Arms Services Committee...

ignoring pressure from Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.

General Shinseki...

could you give us some ideas to the magnitude

of the army's force requiremnt for an occupation of Iraq?

Somthing on the order of several 100,000 soldiers are...

um... are .. are probably...

you know I figure that would be required

Reaction was immediate.

What is, I think reasonable cerain here is...

the idea that it would take several 100,000 US forces...

I think is far from the mark.

It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces...

to provide stability on postwar Iraq...

than it would take to conduct the war itself...

and to secure the surender of Saddam's security forces in his army.

Hard to imagine.

Hard to imagine.

Anyone who had any experience in...

in the interventions of the 90s, knew...

that the opposite was true.

You need... X number of soldiers per thousand citizens...

simply to provide... a modicum of security.

But Paul Wolfowitz couldn't imagine it.

Paul Wolfowitz refused to be interviewed for this film.

We're talking about.... of post hostilities

control over a piece of geography... that's fairly significant with a...

the kinds of ethnic tension... that could lead to a...

other problems

and so it takes significant ground force presence...

Did general Shinseki get it right?

He was asked for his best military opinion,

and his experience exceeds mine.

He commanded our forces in Bosnia.

He did it for a year plus.

He knows what he's talking about.

Secretary Powell and to the same extent myself...

we argued for more and more troops... and we made some difference..

but ultimately...it didn't seem that we made enough of a difference.

Rumsfeld eventually sent a force of 160,000 troops to Iraq.

Personally I feel the war would be going differently

if you had a..hm...

leadership that really understood...

#1 What it's... like to be on the ground

had actually served in the armed forces...

and...

#2 really had a good... manegerial (ministerial) grasp

of making this thing work.

The senior administration officials...

who overruled the military and state department...

had no experience with postwar reconstruction effords...

and little or no military experience.

Cheney avoided the military service in Vietnam...

thru five draft affirmants.

Rumsfeld was a navy pilot in 1950, but had nevver seen combat.

Wolfowitz and Rice had never served in the military.

Bush had avoided the Vietnam draft...

by joining the Texas National Air Guard.

He also had no foreign policy experience prior... to becoming president.

We were looking at it, I say "we", those of us...

who had military experience...

and we would talk abot this often...

this doesn't look good.

In mid April 2003, with the looting still under way.

Rumsfeld cancelled the deployment of the First Cavalry Division

A force of 16.000 soldiers.

It chocked us.

How can you turn off that division?

If we've had that division following us into Iraq...

we would have stabilized a lot more of Iraq...

just to our presence.

On April 19th, ORHA finally entered Iraq...

to begin postwar operations.

Of the 20 ministries we wanted to bring back

16 of those buildings were destroyed as a function of looting...

We were starting from zero.

I mean, if there are no desks, no chairs and no typwriters left...

Where do we go and meet the Iraqis to start working?

Ther was no structure left.

Physical structure or bureaucratic structure.

I had put people out on the street walking around asking:

" Do you know anybody in medicin... ministry of Health...Interior...Education...?"

Within the group itself, we had...

I think probably five who spoke any amount of Arabic.

We had no phone list...

We had no phones for a while...

so I guess having no phone list was not really that important.

We had no information, we had no place to go...

we did not know who to contact.

Not the best way to...

Not the best way to start an occupation.

And what followed was...

this pervasive sense of lawlessness

that Iraq never recovered from

And guys with the guns took over...

and they were the Iraqi guys with the guns.

THE VOID

The fire fights I got cought up in..

were not fire fights where Americans were being attacked

it was Iraqi on Iraqi fire fights.

You just be driving down the street and suddenly...

there a fusel out of fire that just opens up on you.

and you're just in the middle of these guys shooting at each other.

The streets were chaotic.

People could kill and get away with it.

There was no working police force.

Just prior ... the invasion...

Saddam released about a 100.000 prisoners...

common criminals, from the jails.

In February, 2003...

I got an invitation, to come and brief the advisory panel

led by advising secretary Rumsfeld...

on defense policy matters.

What I told them was that...

based on our experiences in previous peace operations...

and what had happened in Iraq historically

it was very likely that if the USA intervened...

in captured Baghdad, that we were likely to face...

massive civil disturbances.

I suggested that we needed about 2500 constabulary forces. officers...

About 4000 civil police street cops.

And then teams of judicial advisers and corrections officers.

In the end they...

agreed that this was a good idea...

there was'nt enough time, but maby for the next war.

Prior to the war, the Baghdad morgue received...

one murder case a month.

Within a month, the were getting about 25 a day.

They were seeing rapes, ..often for the first time.., rapes and murders.

Iraqi girls were being kidnapped.

Iraqi women disappeared from the streets...

they stopped going to the school, the stopped driving.

The Americans were not acting as the police.

They didn't know the streets of Baghdad, they didn't speak the language...

they didn't have interpreters in sufficient numbers

They didn't have intelligence about what was going on.

So...it was a free for all.

and you just felt of... a void here.

Very quickley, the mosque... came in and filled the vacuum...

that the Americans created by getting rid of Saddam and leavinhg nothing in it's place.

In Shiite neighborhoods they very quickley,... established control,

in particulary the clerics associated with Muqtada al-Sadr.

Muqtada al-Sadr was the son of a famous Shiite clerick,

and started a bid for power based on his fathers network,

of mosques and charities.

As I said, the small Satan has left,

and the great Satan has come.

The exit of the occupation and their withdrawal

is a victory for Iraq and for the Iraqi people.

Only a few days after American troops entered Baghdad...

he assassinated a pro-American Shiite leader.

Then he began creating a heavily armed militia,...

the Mahdi Army...

which took over Baghdad's shiite ghetto

and much of southern Iraq.

If you tended to the issues of policing...

if there hadn't been the looting...

then you wouldn't have people turning to sectarian militias...

as their sources of neighborhood security.

ORHA worked on recalling the Iraqi military...

to deal with the security vacuum.

The army central command, CENTCOM, supported this policy.

What CENTCOM had done, they had factored into their planig,

in bringing back the Iraqi army.

They used Iraqi army to seal the borders...

to provide static security for things...

and also help in the reconstruction of their own nation.

But on April 23, 2003, Jay Garner received a phone call.

Rumsfeld called me and he said, hey Jay...

"I like everything what's going on,"

"You'r doing a great job, you and your team"

"I'm glad you'r in Baghdad, and all that"

"by the way, the president is supporting...ah...

"Jerry Bremer..."

"as the presidential envoy."

Bremer was a former foreign service officer.

Like most officials sent to Iraq...

Bremer did not speak Arabic...

had no previous experience with the Mid East...

or postwar reconstruction...

and had never served in the military.

After Bremers' arrival , ORHA would be fased out

and the Coalition Provisional Authority, CPA...

would take its place.

We intend to have a very...

effective, efficient and well organized hand-over.

General Garner and I, are...

pledged to working very closely together.

He has done an outstandig job.

We set up a series of brief inform

he spent a day going through what everybody was doing

and he took charge.

I came home, like, 3rd, 4th or 5th of June.

Between May 1st and his departure for Iraq on May 10th,

Bremer worked at the Pentagon...

and met frequently with Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz...

and undersecretary Doug Feith.

Bremer also worked closely with Walter Slocombe...

a former undersecretary of Defense...

whom Rumsfeld had appointed to be in charge of postwar policy

for Iraqs military.

They contacted me in mid March 2003.

Did it cross your mind to think... isn't it kind of late for them to be thinking about this

Yes.

- Did you tell them that? - No.

Like Bremer...

Slocombe had never served in the military...

had never been to Iraq...

had no postwar reconstruction experience...

and no Arabic.

In Bremer's first 10 days at work...

while still in Washington DC...

he made three fateful policy decisions.

His 1st decision was to stop the formation of an iterim Iraqi government.

Even though Jay Garner had been workig to establish one.

Jay Garner was certainly suportive...

for getting some governing body for Iraqi's, but...

this was done away with on the way to Baghdad

and I didn't think general Garner knew about it beforehand...

and nor did I.

We had... expected.

I think I can say we had been promised...

that there would be a sovereign government...

virtually immediately.

" I am in charge..."

"and everyone will do what I say..."

"and... that's it.... Understand?"

And that's kind of the way...

L. Paul Bremer came across.

Much, much, much too...hardcore and to... mission driven

to see that his exclusion of the Iraqis...

early on, from major paticipation in the deccsion making process

it was a grievous error.

L. Paul Bremer refused to be interviewed for this film.

In May of 2003, we got the... legal occupation of Iraq.

I said at that time and I believe now

that, that was a misstake.

We want the American troops...

basically to leave Iraq completely...

and let the Iraqi people basically rule Iraq.

The reaction to his next two decisions...

would be dramatically worse.

De-Ba'athification.

I am today establishing an Iraqi de-Ba'athification counsel.

to ensure

that the structure and influence of the Ba'ath party...

is elliminated for good.

Bremer's second decision...

his first formal order as the head of the CPA...

purged an estimated 50.000 members of the Ba'ath party,

which Saddam had used to rule Iraq.

For moste, Bremer's order meant permanent unemployment.

The policy also crippled Iraqi's government...

educational system and economy.

Because a purged senior government officials, who had joined the party simply to survive under Saddam's regim.

I was walking down the hall and Ambassador Robin Raphel came to me and said...

- " Have you seen this? ". - I said, what is it, Robin?

- She says de-Ba'athification - I said, no.

So I read it realy quick and I said I...

don't think we can do this.

She says, "well I think you got to talk to Jerry".

So I went to see him and said...

How about letting us go through this

and lets get on the phone with Rumsfeld...

and see if we can soften this a little bit

He said: I don't not have that flexibility.

I'v been given my orders, and want to execute'm.

So that ended that discussion.

He may have come in... and spoken to me in great lenght

I just don't remember it, honestly don't remember it.

You don't remember these guys comming in and saying...

this is 30 to 50.000 people, and ...

my god, what are you doing?

It was working 20 hours a day in that period, as well.

This wasn't the only thing on my...

list of things to do the first five days I was there.

Bremer appointed Ahmed Chalabi...

to head the de-ba'athification counsel.

Chalabi used the position to elliminate political rivals.

The de-ba'athification was so deep...

that we wheren't able to get the government running...

as a efficiently as we should have,

as fast as we should have,

and you had a lot of disenfranchised ba'athis

What do we want?

Work! Work! Work!

There were people who were kicked out of there job...

Even though they were just professionals...

engineers, directors.

The technocrats, the intelligencia...

the elementary school librarianl.

Beeing conquered and then loosing your job, and...

and not having any means to support yourself or family...

was an incredibly humiliating experience.

It was Bremer's 3rd decision however

that was the most explosive.

To disbanding the Iraqi military and intelligence services...

the most important institutions in Iraq.

CPA-order #2, disbanded the Iraqi army...

Republican Guard, Special Republican Guard,

and Secret Police.

Over night Bremer rended unemployed

and thereby infuriated half a million armed men...

equivalent to firing over five million people.

in the United States.

And so these men rather than helping to prevent an insurgency...

instead created one.

Demonstration by former Iraqi soldiers.

I can't believe they did that.

Hundreds of thousands of families, depending on the army.

They didn't have an income, the didn't have providers.

We are hungry, there is no bread, no food, no money, we want job.

Children, women, wives, sisters, fathers...

stopped eating because they didn't have enough money.

Officially. I thinkl it's 27% unemployment... officially

It's almost certainly much higher.

I would guess anywhere from 40 to 50 %.

Is it any wonder that many of these people, who...

almost all had at least some military training, since...

you had to serve in the army in Iraq

or they were active military...

would turn to...

joining the insurgency

just as a means to feed their family.

and as a means of regaining some of that pride.

In deciding to disband the Iraqi military

Bremer was undoing a policy

supported by both the US military and by ORHA.

Paul Hughes had a team...

that was seeking out the Iraqi army...

and he's beginning to find a lot of them...

and he had found a lot of them.

And we had made overtours to bring them back.

These soldiers, when they registred had to sign...

or fill out a questionnaire...

about who they were, what unit they were with,

what they did, what their skills were

what military equipment they had at home...

just... a lot of information...

that would have been useful to us.

And I was collecting all of that.

But the DoD advisory team in charge of

dealing with the Iraqi military...

headed by Walter Slocombe...

had remained in Washington DC and had never visited Iraq.

I said, I don't see any reason to go out there.

I can get ready better, here in Washington.

And I urged them time and again...

in my conversations with them from Baghdad...

that they needed to get over there.

Because there were people waiting ON THEM...

and on one man in particular..., to show up

so he could make decisions and get the ball rolling.

In his absence,...

I was left with the duty of

having to deal with the Iraqi army...

just to keep contact with them.

The Iraqi army was essentially standing there... waiting.

They were waiting for an overture.

They were waiting for what they thought would happen...

that someone would come to them and say...

"This is the plan",...

" and you are integral to that plan..."

"and we need you."

No one ever did that.

When the war was over...

when the major maneuver fighting was over...

There were simply no units... still in existence.

Everybody had gone home.

Generals and commanders were coming back with entire divisions

saying here are my people.

One of the Iraqi officers...

towards the end of ...

the second or the third meeting, when...

Baghdad was going,...

it was in chaos... said...

" Colonel Paul,... I can have 10.000 military police men,

"for you next week, you just tell me."

I took that back to Bernie Kerik's staff

and nothing was done with it.

Instead, Bremer issued the disbanding order

Five days after, Bremmer issued his order.

we were farewelling Jay Garner...

because it was going to leave Iraq... for good the next day.

We had two Humvee's on the highway...

hanging out from the Green Zone...

and they were ambushed and two soldiers were killed

And that was when, in my mind, the insurgency began.

We go, go, go! We go, go, go!

My colleagues and I could sit on the...

balcony or on the roof of the Republican Palace, at night

and we could watch the tracers throughout Baghdad.

We could watch the flares of different colors that went up...

marking... where American convoys

of certain compositions... were moving,

and being followed by the insurgents.

*>

These guys all knew where those munitions were.

They knew how to get to those weapons and how to use them.

And you just sent them away and said they don't exist?

Common sense tells me you don't do that.

When you have huge ammunition dumps...that...

weren't guarded until several weeks if not a couple months

after major combat action ended

I'm standing there watching these insurgents

pullout...

rockets and mortars and bombs

from these weapons caches that the Iraqis sto...

stashed everywhere.

And you go to the British or to the US, whoever is there,

with your little GPS... receiver

to " Hey guys..."

you know "we have found like 18.000 million tons of bombs, and...

" and there're a bunch of Iraqis with AK-47s...

" taking it away."

" Probably not the best idea... here's where its located."

And they say to you...

" We just don't have enough people to cover it ".

And...I just couldn't believe it, it wasn't the right answer.

Go there and take care of it for your security,

for the civilian security for everybody, its just a bad idea.

Did anyone warn you, that disbanding the army in this way...

would, and then was, fueling major growth of the insurgency

Certainly not in these terms.

Nobody said that to you?

No. I also don't believe it's true...

but nobody said it, nobody said...

You don't believe it's true?

No. I don't believe that it's true.

A number of the most senior Generals

came to the Channal Hotel, to the UN headquarters

and they were very explicit...

of the consequences of letting this order stand

and of marginalizing...

this incredible powerful segment of the society...

would be an insurgency

A Lebanese diplomat named Hassan Salami...

turned to his colleague as the generals walked away

after one of their meetings...

and said " I see bullets in their eyes".

" I see bullets in their eyes ".

Even more remarkable that the decision to disband the army...

it how that this decision was made...

Secretly, over a single week...

by few men in Washington DC who had never been to Iraq.

They did not consult with the military commanders in Iraq...

not with the joint chiefs of staff ...

ORHA,... the state department...

the CIA... the National Security Council......

or even, apparently, ... president of the USA.

Walter Slocombe and Paul Hughes, were reinterviewed.

in order to reconstruct the events...

leading to the dissolution of the army.

These guys called themselves, the Independent Military Gathering.

The Independent Military Gathering had a 100,000 on the 9th of May ...

And they already had 100,000 signatures?

Yeh, this was a nation wide effort.

They brought me... I wanted the print-outs.

all the discs,... and they gave them to me...

and I took them back with me to ORHA.

I said "Here we go", and I told Walt and his crew...

I've got these things, the're here waiting for you.

Hughes belived that he had an...

opening to the Iraqi officers...

who would have been prepared to re-constitute the units.

He already had obtained registration statements from 137,000

No he hadn't. He hadn't done that. He may have, he may have wri...

gotten,...may have...'cause

'Cause nobody could have gotten statements from a 130,000 from anybody from anywhere...

in the chaos that prevailed at that point.

They had a courier system set up...

that was running around the metropolitan area of Baghdad...

of Mosul, of Basora and of Kirkuk.

I don't understand...

Given how difficult it was to do anything...

just...operationally or organisationally...

nobody had 137.000.

Walt was not there.

He never met with these people, he had no clue...

So did you tell Slocombe this. That this was going on?

Yes, he knew this. He and his staff, knew this.

Aambassador Breme, you had already done him...

made a recommendation to him

and hi had already made at least a tentative recommendation...

to secretary Rumsfeld...

about the dissolution of the army...

On the emission of the order he finaly issued, yes.

Yes, on May 9.

- Yes. - Okey.

The 9th of May, was the last time that I had a conversation...

with Walt Slocombe.

We talked on the phone, before we went out.

Did you ever say to him, or thinking of

disbanding the Iraqi army and stopping your efforts to recal the Iraqi army?

One of the things I did was, just...

Did you ever say that to him?

In those words, no.

The conversation was...."I'm coming over

"I'm concerned about where I am going to be living...

you know, "Am I gonna have a motor pool with me

"My own cooks? ". Yada, yada, yada.

I mean... it was nothing about the Iraqi military.

And I was giving him an update on what...l

So he didn't say that he had already...

come to the tentative conclusion

and recommended to Bremer... to dissolve the army?

Absolutely not, because had he said that

I would have been on Jay's door step post haste.

So you guys came up with this idea

and recommended to secretary Rumsfeld...

without having spoken to any of t he senior people in Iraq

resposible for these matters?

that it was subject to...

and precisely because of the fact...

that it had, and actually been only thought of for a few days

because Bremer was going out and Bremmer said to Rumsfeld...

"Before I make a recommendation, I will talk to people on the ground".

Bremer came to Baghdad on May 12. His consultations with the people on the ground were brief to nonexistent.

Was that a surprise to you, that this had been discussed with...

No, it hadn't been discussed with me, it was a surprise... a big surprise.

- Really? - A-hm.

You never called up Garner and said we're thinking of doing this,

do you think this is a good idea?

I don't think I did.

- Don't you think that might have been a misstake? - No.

What was your reaction? What did you think?

I thought it was a poor idea.

I thought we needed to bring them back.

The military commanders were also opposed to Bremer's decision.

John Abizaid and Dave McKiernan were... constantly telling me

" How about hurrying up? " " Let's get the army back! ".

There is a large numbr of former Iraqi soldiers that are unemployed now.

That is a huge concern not only from a security stand point

but from an economic stand point.

They are not earning an incom right now.

And there's the announcement that the Iraqi army has been disbanded.

And I was floored.

And at this particulary point in time,... Walt Slocombe and his team...

still were not... in Iraq.

Colonel Hughes was the person who was in charge of

dealing with the Iraqi army...

because non of the people from your advicery group

had yet showed up in Iraq, including you.

Didn't you think that maybe you should speak with him about this?

I talked with him a lot.

That's funny! He says that the order to disbanding the army...

came as a complete surprise to him

and he learned of it by watching it on a television in an airport.

That is extr... Well if that so, that's surprising me.

But it'is impossible.

When I talked to him...

I...

We work together on a daily bases during the time I was there.

- He came on the 16th of May.

- For 4 day "world wind tour" of the country... - Ooh!

And then he left. And he didn't come back until the middle of June

- Really? - Correct!

He didn't tell you that?

Jay Garner and Paul Hughes weren't the only ones surprised by the disbanding order.

This idea to disbanding the entire army...

came as a surprise.

I see.

What was your reaction when you learned of it?

I thought that we had created a problem.

We had a lot of out-of-work soldiers.

The president already had made a different decision

which was to keep battalion... and below...in force.

- Earlier, yes. - Yes.

...within a couple of days proximity

Most of us where caught relatively or completely unaware of disbanding the army.

Secretary Powell found out about it as I did.

Which was how?

Just the day he announced that he disbanded the army.

- How about Condoleezza Rice? - She ought to speak for he self.

Condoleezza Rice refused to be interviewed for this documentary.

Do you have any idea how much the president knew...

about these decisions in advance? Whether he...

As I said before, I don't know if he was informed by Mr Rumsfeld or not.

No idea!

I wasn't in my office but 2 hours

a young MP comes to se me..

he goes "Colonel Hughes..."

" I got some some Iraqi officers that wanna met with you."

And I was thinking to myself "Holy cow".

What do I tell this guys?

So I finally came downstairs and met with them

in the rotunda of the Republican Palace.

Colonel Mirzan...says... Colonel Paul... what happened?

And I said to him... I don't know what happened.

I have no idea of how this came about.

And he said...

All these soldiers...

they now have no recourse

they have no money comming to them.

What are they supposed to do?

In July, 2003, the insurgents begin planting improvised explosive devices (IED's) all over Iraq.

There is a dramatic rise in casualty rates among American soldiers.

How many times did I tell you?

- Shit! - Carajo!

Moan, my ear!

We need to get the fuck out of here.

There are some who.... feel like that...

the conditions are such that they can attack us there.

My answer is bring'em on.

I was in the bucket.

The bucket is a non armored vehicle.

Anything that happens... you gonna get it.

So, nobody wants to be in there.

In 2003, only 1 in 8 Humvees in Iraq had adequate armor.

I saw the blast almost directly, sir.

I then I started hearing the fire fight...

From the far... to the closest...blam, blam we started firing.

We have a limited problem of some bitter enders...

some small remnants of the old regime

who are using professional military tactics...

to attack and kill our soldiers, as they did...this morning.

- Do you think this is a coordinated campaign

- No, no. - Is this a guerrilla war?

As a consequence of that blast...

I suffer a penetrating... traumatic brain injury.

And I lost... the perception of the light in my right eye.

I suffered damages in the left eye...

that caused a hole in the retina...

but we fight,...

we fight until we hear the cease fire.

I was a gunner... and my driver lost both his legs...

and it ejected me out..

and I suffered a... fractured femur,... nearly lost my right arm...

and colapsed lung and closed head wounds.

I have since gone to the dictionary...

and I've looked up...

several things, one of which I can't immediately recapture

but one was a "guerrilla war"...

another was "insurgency", another was...

unconventional "war". Pardon me?

Wont work!

No, that's someone elses business, Quagmire (Family Guy: Glenn Quagmire)

I don't do Quagmires.

A guy I know, his an counter-insurgency expert.

He was at the palace where the CPA is headquartered...

and he was talking to an army colonel...

whos desk was right outside Bremers office.

And he said...he used the word insurgency...

And the army colonel held up his hand and said "There is no insugency in Iraq".

"There is a high level of domestic violence".

The security problem...

increasingly prohibited our ability to do our job.

I had hoped... to... establish some...

neighborhood advisory councils

These three rejected generals...

gave probably the most coherent...

briefing on the structure and organization of a...

1500 year old city, that I think anyone could have gotten...

One of them launched..

into... this... plan for

neighborhood advisory groups.

He had this whole grass roots bottom-up democratization...

thing nailed.

- It was an absolutely beautiful plan. - What happened to it?

He was assassinated!

The country was slipping more and more out of control

the entire time, and I think in some ways...

Bremer and his aides didn't know...

how bad things were getting outside the... blast walls.

THE PROVISIONAL AUTHORITY OF THE COALITION

Headquartered in Saddam's former Republican Palace...

the CPA compound called the Green Zone...

was shielded by 7 miles of blast walls.

There were huge lines of Iraqis,... engineers, public officials...

People just wanted to help, to translate...

standing in line at the gates of the palace

Made to wait and not been reached by anyone.

Just told "go away", don't come back.

These people came there and tried once and two times

and three times and then they gave up.

I absolutely hated the Green Zone.

I got out every chanse I could to meet with the Iraqis...

and sit in their homes and hear their complaints and their thoughts.

And I would come back and tell Dan Senor

"You have a problem", you are not communicating to the Iraqis.

Dan Senor, who was Bremer's press spokesman, speaks no Arabic.

Virtually nobody in the CPA and in the senior engineer level, spoke Arabic.

On a count maby five or six...

among the top... 40, 50 or 70 officials.

We had regional experts that had served in Iraq.

But as has been documented, many of them,

where not involved in the initial parts...

after the invasion of Iraq and the initial occupation...

so that expertise was lost.

Tell us how your time there ended.

I understand... the sensitive of the subject.

Say what you're comfortable saying

I would say that it ended much sooner then I had anticipated...

and it ended much sooner than I would have wanted.

I really would have liked to have stayed and tried to

giving the frustrations and the limitations...

it was still a very... worthwhile... place to be,

and a worthwhile thing to be trying to do

Do you know why she was fired?

- I know why, I was told. - What was it?

That she was difficult to get along with, and she...

was offering... opinions...

that would counter the prevailing wisdom in Baghdad at the time

We were getting...

new people in, after Bremer showed up.

Kids,... right out of college,... you know?

They have a baccalaureate degree

just got it before the previous spring.

Daddy made a contribution to the campaign

so the kid gets a chance to go over and experience some fun travel and adventure

Pretty boys that's what I call them

They sat around Bremmer's front door and did nothing

During the course my time and in the Green Zone

when I was in the palace I bumped into one of my students

just graduated.

I asked her what she was doing and... she said well I...

She couldn't belive her luck.

"I'm being asked to..."

"do the traffic plan for the city".

And I... asked her if she had any training in municipal planning...

and she said no.

So she fresh out of school

and had been put in charge of something quite complicated...to say the least

And beeing out in Baghdad traffic, the need was apparent.

Most officials there, where on three month... contracts.

As soon as somebody would develop the apropiate relationships with the Iraqis

in 90 days,... 100 days, 120 days, they'd go home..

And that...

is a terrible way to run an organization

There was a very strong... preference...

on the ... by the Pentagon...

to have American... companies doing the work.

And there are numerous instances where local Iraqi contractors

proposed that they could do pieces of work

for much much less than infact...

the American contractors could have done

Ann and I had a different approach to our work...

than many coalition units have.

Because we worked very very closely with the Iraqis.

If we're sitting in a meeting it was Americans... and Iraqis

and the Iraqis had just as much say as we did

We were building border forts right next to forts being put up

by the Army Corps of Engineers

to that big American contractor Parsons.

I mean, we had our forts designed, build and dedicated

in a period of about five months.

I think we left the Parsons forts

which had been started maybe a year before we arrived

we're still not finished.

Seth Moulton and Ann Gildroy's border forts cost $200.000. Parson's cost $1,200,000.

The military officers would often be out in the field,

expanding the small amount of funds that they had,

for immediate action to, say, clean up street...

effect some temporary improvements in the sewage system...

Once a military had expended it's small amount of money to do that

it would come back to CPA.

"We need this, this and this"

"for these projects, and it's gonna cost as much and so forth".

And... it would disappear... it would simply disappear.

- "What happened to my request?" - Oh, "what request?"

And this happened over and over again.

$18 billion (i.e $18,000 million) in reconstruction money was made available on October 1, 2003.

This $18 billion that was commited by the Congress...

was really misconceived and misspent, if it was spent at all?

We expect to produce enough electricity for all Iraqis

to have electrical service 24 hours daily.

Something essential to their hopes for the future

There was fraud, there was corruption, there was waste.

One year later, only $1 billion had actually been spent.

The ordinary people have their electricity...

only for two or three hours a day.

Water comes every, like now and then, every two or three days.

We spent the winter shivering, covered in blankets...

because we didn't have enough fuel to operate the heaters.

That's, that's....that's the life we live.

In May, 2003...

the United Nations sent its best expert...

in postwar reconstruction to help the USA occupation.

He was a Brazilian diplomat named Sergio Vieira de Mello.

Even though the UN was given nothing meaningful to do

Kofi (Annan) announced "Let me send my best."

"If anybody can... carv out a bigger role for the UN"

"it's my guy, it's Sergio Vieira de Mello".

You know I was part of his team, you know I was his...

principal political adviser, you know, at that time...

and went together to Baghdad.

Our political team were all Arabic speakers...

and with good experience, working in the region and so on.

One of the things that Sergio did, that is very very poignant in retrospect, is that...

seeing that the USA had boarded itself up

in the Green Zone... and... was not accessing the Iraqi Street.

Sergio created a structure in Iraq...

that was precisely the opposite to the Green Zone.

You may call it the anti Green Zone.

I'm listening, I'm listening to political... leaders...

you know I'll be meeting with them on a daily basis

We had various discussions with these military

who came to the UN

and met with Sergio Vieira de Mello...

and ask him, you know, to mediate

in the dispute that they have with the CPA.

You had this long long lines right outside the Green Zone...

but they could not make their complaints felt.

In the UN compound, by contrast, it was incredibly porous

If you wanted to complain, the UN was very very eager to hear your complaint

and Sergio saw this his role

to relate those complaints to Bremmer, at the highest levels

in hopes that somebody saw these things get tended to...

before insurgency took root.

I'm meeting with him regularly

and sharing my advice and my experience with him..

As soon as Bremer had made use of Sergio,

had made use of the UN

he had almost no time for the UN.

And so what Sergio lived through,

was two months, of in effect, being used,

as a vehicle to get to certain segments in Iraqi society

and the for his last month...

what he endured was not having his phone calls returned

and so on issues like detention policy

hoodings was one of the issues that Sergio raised again and again, with...

Bremer and with general Sánchez.

The hoodings of prisoners, Bremer would hear non of it.

Be three or four crucial months after the fall of Baghdad...

the two main things the US military was doing on the ground, were...

looking for WMD supplies and looking for Saddam Hussein

The process of those searches...

busting in the doors at night...

rounding up people, taking them to Abu Ghraib...

having mass arrests, had really an bittering effect.

If you happen to be a military aged Iraqi

in an area of operation where the American military went into

there's a good chance you gonna be arrested

or interned as a suspected insurgent.

Just have been a military aged man and in that area of operation.

In many occasions, you take the

Iraqi man in military age out of his family...

you're taking the breadwinner.

I have no one left, I swear on Muhammad's life

he has done nothing wrong.

Oh my son, Amer!

You anger not just him but you anger an extended family.

Because he's probably supporting more than his immediate family.

Whenever they hear the American helicopters

or American tanks driving in their street

they immediately wake up...

even if it's like two o'clock in the morning...

and prepare themselves for the detention.

Because for them, this is a usual thing happening, even now!

There were attacks on... the American soldiers themselves...

and so they responded those attacks.

by going out and trying to find the insurgents.

And in going out to find the insurgents

they sometimes, arrested the wrong person,

they even sometimes, killed the wrong person.

Once people were arrested, they tended to disappear...

in the American military prison system

for a long time without a trace

Their families couldn't get any word from them.

The U.S. military does not disclose the number of Iraqis arrested or detained in Iraq since 2003.

It is difficult... to understand what it feels like to an occupied person.

They point a gun on you from their jeeps.

They stop you when your driving.

The Iraqis would not understand...

instructions given to them at traffic check points.

Were they approaching to quickly, they would get shot and killed.

Mostly American units that I spent time with

tried very very hard to always do the right thing

and to not kill anyone or injur anyone they haven't

intended to or needed to.

But there is no question that the wars are messy...

and, this one in Iraq...

with the way the insurgency is being waged

is particularly so.

One after another you have these short term decisions

which by the end of 2003...

ment you had a country with an insurgency underway.

UN HEADQUARTERS BAGHDAD AUGUST 19, 2003

On August 19, 2003, a massive bomb destroyed the UN headquarters in Baghdad, killing 22 people

Among those killed, the UN's chief envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

A Russian made truck...

pulled up right outside Sergio Vieira de Mello window

and set off...

just a huge amount of explosives.

The entire southwestern corner at the UN building collapsed.

Sergio was under the rubble and alive

for more than three hours awaiting rescue.

We lost many colleagues.... you know, in that moment.

And I think it was the sign that something dramatic...

had happened in the country and the insurgency had become...

very lethal and full fledged...

ready for a long struggle and long fight...

you know, with the... coalition forces.

In 2004, the relation between the army...

and the Iraqi people had grown toxic.

Allright, this is the corner where liitle kids throw rocks at us

God damn!

- Right here! - But we can't use deadly force.

We can't use deadly force.

Fuck you1

Fuck you! Your little shit!

You see...all these civilians who come over to work for

for the private contractors, who are...

doing so much to the work with the reconstruction

because we don't have enough troops

There are more than 45.000 private military contractors in Iraq, more than in any war in U.S history.

I have seen an awful lot of of civil contractors...

who have been... particulary violent...and....

very short sighted in terms of what they're doing.

What follows is a home movie made by a private military contractor in Iraq.

The music is in the original.

Did he already fight the americans?

By early 2004, Faluya...

a city of 350.000 people west of Baghdad...

had become the center of the Suni insurgency.

On March 31, 2004...

four american military contractors were killed...

and their bodies were dragged thru the streets of Faluya.

by cheering crowds.

Beginning in early 2004...

the National Intelligence Council (NIC)...

a powerful 12 person committee...

that sits on top of americas intelligence community...

Conducted several assesments of the growing insurgency...

which they presented to the White House...

and senior administration officials.

Well, we were chronicling... what was a deepening insurgency.

It was broadning and was not limited to foreign fighters...

or...dissaffected baath-ists.

What we... call a the insurgency...

really is a multy-faceted deeply-rooted thing.

It's not just a few baath-ists dead-enders...

not just a few extremists from oversea...

but rather reflected multiple motivations...

and frustrations among the Iraqi people themselves.

Has...the economic situation was deteriorating...

Has peoples personal security was becoming weaker...

and as resentment of the American occupation was growing.

The CIA...

laid out a...

several scenarios.

it said... life could be lousy, life could be okey...

life could be better.

The president hadn't read it...

not even the one page summary over which we worked so hard

to reduce the findings to a single readable page.

- President did not read even the executive summary? - Correct.

And they were just a...

guessing as what the conditions might be like.

What's your estimate of the number of people in Iraq who...

have been active at some level in the insurgency?

Active in some level... if you say supporting

providing safe haven to...

potentially... well over 100,000 people.

Despite the intensification of the insurgency...

there were still not sufficient armored vehicles...

for american soldiers in Iraq.

We never had a single armored Humvee

while we were in Iraq throughout 2003.

We... went to Iraq in 2004 with

unarmored Humvee's.

and they were giving armored kits in Kuwait.

Which were just sort of cut out doors with no windows,

and a bullet proof windshield and... that's about it.

If your Humvee hadn't been armored

what do you think the damage for that idea had been?

I think it would've been deadly.

Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills

for pieces of scrap metal...

and compromized ballistic glass stuff from our armored vehicles

and why don't we have those resources readyly available to us?

It is essentially a matter of physics, it isn't a matter of money

It isn't a matter on the part of the army, of desire...

it's a matter of production and capability of doing it.

We have automobil plants closing down in America

You know...I mean I...

I am not a factory expert...

just retool them to produce some armored Humvees

it should be that difficult.

You go to the war with the army that you have...

and the h"army you might want or wish you have at a later time.

THINGS FALL APART

In November, 2004, the Pentagon decided to attack Faluya...

in an attempt to recapture the city from the suní insurgency.

Faluyas 350.000 residence were warned to leave.

The battle destroyed 70 % of the city...

and renders 150.000 people homeless.

Despite intense combats,... many insurgents escape.

40 marines were killed.

While the US military was preoccupied with Faluya...

Shiít melitias were taking over southern Iraq.

There is nothing like an army or a... major ah...hm

large elements of hundreds of people

trying to overthrow or to change the situation.

In August, 2004...

the holy city of Nayaf is taken over by the Mahdi army...

The Shiít militia controlled... by Muqtada al-Sadr.

Seth's platoon found itself in combat with Muqtada al-Sadr's militia.

Essentially that turnover we got from the army unit that we replaced, was...

that...most things in Nayaf...were pretty peacful.

Except there's a 3.000 men militia force...

that occupies the center of the city.

A lot of rounds flying, a lot of mortars landing.

My platoon was the first into the police station.

We just...took our positions alongside the Iraqi police.

and... defended them from the militia.

But it wasn't until the end of August...

that we did a full scale assault...

on the old city of Nayaf... and took it over.

Muqtada al-Sadr was allowed to escape unharmed.

If democracy can not provide for the Iraqi people...

People will say... "To Hell with the democracy".

"We need a strong man".

And I can see the strong man already in the offing

his name is Muqtada al-Sadr

And I would say this is not a good choice for the future leader of Iraq.

Were you a part of... the liberations...

about wether to capture or kill Muqtada al-Sadr?

Yes, I was.

Had we seen Muqtada al-Sadr as a troublemaker and a thorn in the side...

Absolutely, and we wanted to arrest him.

It gets back in my view to the matter of troop strategy.

Yes, military didn't want to be deverted from their major mission.

To go after what would have been a... probaly short term

but difficult,... and I'm sure bloody...battle

and ultimately that's what went out.

After elections were held in Iraq, on December 15, 2005...

the United Iraqi Alliance...

of witch Muqtada al-Sadrs party is a major participant...

took nearly half the seats in Iraq central government.

It is not easy being a marine who someone, you know...

some of my buddys were killed by him and his... militia.

And now looking at Iraq and see him as a rising polititian.

That's frustrating.

Another shiít group within al-Sadr's alliance is SCIRI...

the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

SCIRI's leadership lived in Iran for 20 years.

and is frequently pro Iranian.

These two shiít groups...

which sometimes engage in armed combat with each other,

are poloticaly allied against suní groups.

Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army...

continues to clash with US forces.

The level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint...

I think ,will clearly... decline, I think they'r in the...

in the last throws, if you will, in the insurgency.

When secretary... Rumsfeld and... vice-president Cheney...

made their comments about the insurgency dying out, being a few defenters etcetera

you knew that... the intelligence estimats...

already indicated that they were wrong.

It had been to Iraq 8 times...

I knew what the facts on the ground were.

They will have to speak and they will be judged by their own words and actions....

but I knew what the facts were.

Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld refused to be interviewed for this film.

Starting in 2005,... the administration slowly began

to correct some of its mistakes.

It accelerated training of the Iraqi army...

and apointed a Moslem diplomat...

Zalmay Khalilzad, as ambassador.

In June, 2006...

ambassador Khalilzad sent an ominous cable

to Condoleezza Rice.

Iraqis working for the embassy...

could not tell their families where they worked...

for fear of being killed.

They asked what will happen if the Americans evacuate.

Many planed ahead for their own abduction.

Six months later...

the day after republicans loose control of Congress...

president Bush announces Donald Rumsfeld's resignation.

The new secretary of Defense, Robert Gates...

he's a pragmatist who had been privately critical of the war .

I am making a change... at the Secretariat of Defense...

to bring a fresh perspective as to how to achive something

I think most Americans want, which is a victory.

THE CHAOS

By the time Rumsfeld is replaced...

Iraq is out of control.

The country increasingly dominated by militias...

insurgents, criminals and Warlords.

The mixed areas are purged by ethnic cleansing.

Shiít militias have infiltrated the police...

using them for sectarian killings.

Kidnappings and violent deaths, have reached several hundred per day.

They kidnapped them from the market...

and they executed them.

They executed them for being Suníes.

There are so many kinds of militia.

You have the Mahdi militia...

you have the Badr militia...

you have many militias in this country.

And they all are very democratic and...

arresting people...

and killing them.

Secuirity is...terrible, and in many neighborhoods...

where the ever present threat of cars bombs and IED's (home made explosives).

A car bomb went off over there.

I was here, my father here and my brother there.

My brother was killed in the blast.

And all the people around him were killed.

Cars bombs, IED's, kidnappings...

There are a lot of ways to die.

Kidnappings especially, sheer money-making gangster stuff.

Kidnapping of a small boy right in front of the hotel.

You know, a car just stoped, grabbed the boy and drove off.

Parents will get a ransome note, and somehow have to raise this amount of money in a week.

It's not were you just have 1 or 2 or 3 kidnappings, but you have hundreds...

and you get overwhelmed.

Where were they kidnapped?

They took them from their shops, all four of them.

We went to the Sadr office and begged and pleaded...

but they denied having them.

Influx of delusioned individuals

who are...asking for help or...or...

or...soon don't... ask for help anymore.

Why report it to the police? One: we don't trust them,

Two: they may be committing some of the crime.

The uniforms that they used, just proliferated all over the place

So you really have lots of rouge elements

and people that are using or working under the guise of the security services.

Now you can see people... arrested by many sources.

We don't know who are they.

Fake check-points... in the streets stop people passing...

and looking to their ID's and see if they were shiít's...

sunis, kurds, arabs and then...

either kidnap them or kill them in the same place.

When I say goodbye of my husband...

I think I'm not comming back.

By late 2006, Baghdad had fallen into near anarchy.

The US military controlled the Green Zone...

and the area around the Baghdad airport.

Iraqi security forces controlled areas in the East and South.

The suníe's militias controlled several predominately suní neighborhoods.

Muqtada al-Sadr' Mahdi Army... dominated large areas...

including the enormous shiít slum of Sadr city.

SCIRIs rival shiít militia, the Badr Brigade...

controlled wealthier shiít areas.

Neighborhood organizations controlled many small zones

Large areas were essentially controlled by noone.

CONSEQUENCES

From a study, conducted by Harvard professor Linda Bilmes

and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz...

as of early 2007, the US has spent $379 billion ($379,000,000,000).

directly on the war in Iraq.

Future operating costs are estimated at $389 billion (389,000,000,000).

The costs of veterans healthcare...

and loss of productivity of those serving in Iraq...

it $482 billion ($482,000,000,000).

The costs of demobilization and replacing military equipment

which is being used up 6 times faster than normal

is $160 billion ($160,000,000,000).

The increase in oil prices due to the war...

have cost the US economy. $450 billion ($450,000,000000 million dollars.

In total,... the economic cost of the war...

is projected to reach $1,8 trillion ($1,800,000,000,000)

I'm suffering from...

post-traumatic... migraines...

and post-traumatic epilepsy.

Sometimes,... I... have bad memory about what happened...

But I'm not... scared of them.

Do you feel emotionally okey?

Sometimes, it's a little...

Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, not.

Still have drouble...you know, dealing with...

you know's, what happened to me and to my partner, you know. Sometimes.

The big big cost... in terms of veterans disability

it is for the many hundreds of thousands of people...

who come back, and they find that they can't...

work and hold down a job in a way they used to...

because... there just not quite the same as they were before.

How hot does it get in this country?

- 120F (49C) - 120 yesterday?

The last contract I ever signed with the government.

Some of these units have been there now on their third tour of duty.

and some of them don't see an end to it.

They think they'll be back there for their fifth,

sixth and seventh tour as a duty, before this ends.

We do not have enough troops.

How could we protect against a possible conflict in Pyongyang...

a possible conflict with Iran...

other potentialities in the world...

when we'v got everything tied up

with regard to Iraq and Afghanistan?

Iran is oddly...

given...

how much we disslike... the Iranian regim...

the single greatest beneficiary... of the war in Iraq.

We eliminate their historic enemy...for them.

and put them on top... in...Persian Golf.

I mean when you have... massive civil war

violent nasty civil war

on top of 20% of the worlds oil supply...

that will probably engulf other regional players,

Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, maybe even Egypt.

If Iraq... disintegrates and becomes... an arena of civil war...

much of it will become like a little Afghanistan.

It's where...terrorists all over the world will find refuge.

If Iraq goes back to some sort of... islamo-fascist regim...

like we had under the taliban's in Afghanistan...

then we are back to September 10, 2001.

Except...much larger scale...

and you know...

with billions of dollars of oil-wells at there disposal.

When we were first starting the reconstruction...

we would sort of joke...

that there were 500 ways to do it wrong, and...

two or three ways to do it right.

What we didn't understand is, that we were...

gona go through all 500.

Why do you think all these misstakes were made?

I don't know!

I have no idea!

Puzzling!

President Bush...was... missing in action

on the planning for the postwar.

He deferred to his vice-president and his secretary of Defense...

the control over those decisions.

Why on earth, if you were the president of US

would you plan to use military force and then divorce youself...

from, essentially, the...most important aspect of that use,

and that is the aftermath.

Who is in charge in this war?

I don't wanna go through the list, I mean it was the president, vice president secretary of Defense

Those around...around all those people.

- Do you include national security adviser? - Sure.

- The vice-president, you include? - Yes.

That was the inner team that... produced the thinking behind the war.

My misstake was probably not finding a way to get myself more involved in the planning process of things.

I see.

- So that the dissolution of the army wouldn't have been a surprise? - Right.

Well, and I could have raised hell about it.

They'd had my day in court, I may have lost, but I'd had my day in court.

The system ought to be participatory,

and ought to include people who were going to say...

"This makes no sense, mister president."

"This is a bad idea."

I don't think that kind of decision making process

existed in... the Bush administration.

I certainly didn't feel myself participating...

in such a decision making... process

The administration never asked for any...

estimator community assessments on Iraq, before we went to war.

Nobody... seemed to be... interested in what the community had to say?

I think it's more a matter that minds were made up...

the course was set.

Whatever...

analysys on these sorts of issues...

was to have been done...

the decision makers felt they already done it themselves.

Vice-president Cheney of course has made...

takes the same positions...

as secretary Rumsfeld, on the war.

Does he still have your complete confidence?

- Yes he does!

Campaign is over. Yes, he does!

- And he'll be here for the remaining term. - Yes he will!

There are nights when I don't sleep very well.

And I fault myself for not pushing the issue..

That I think I should have gone, and kicked this door in and said...

"Damnit, listen!"

"This was a misstake." "We need to do something to rectify it."

But I never had the opportunity to do it....

and trying to kick in a door...

you know with an ambassador, who's essentially the...

you know, the czar... of Iraq.

You know, for a colonel to try and do it just wasn't going to happen.

You couldn't get past the front door.

If my speaking out...

adds even inm... infinitesimally...

to...the criticism that counts, of this administration.

Then that's good.

I don't pretend to say that I'v... I'v been effective in that regard

but I...I just can't hold my peace any longer.

We will bring to the Iraqi people, food...

and medicines...

and supplies...

and freedom.

Look at what contentments!

And it just was Henny Penny the sky is falling.

General Garner and I are...

pledged to working very closely together

WE WANT OUR EMPLOYMENTS AND WAGES

There is a large number of former Iraqi soldiers that are unemployed now.

One was a "guerrilla war" another was "insurgency"

another was "unconventional war",

- Pardon me? - Impasse.

No. That's someone else's business, quagmire.

I don't do quagmires.

Come on, come on!

I'm listen. I'm listen to political... leaders.

- Stop! - Below, below, below. - Get Down! Get Down!

Some day in my life in the future, I got to look back to Iraq.

And got to see something done in there.

So I can look back and say...

I was part of this...

and that my suffering... and my lost...

have a...have a meaning.

If the situation gets better, I'm going to leave Iraq.

I will go leave Iraq, but now...

I'm a fighter, I'm in all my life.

I won't leave Iraq now.

From here we can't change anything because it's...

it's out of control now

I don't have... future plans for... being in Iraq.

I don't see the...bit of light in the...at the end of the tunnel yet.

This is what it is.

This is how we live it this is how we see it this is how we smell it

and feel it.

It's not a situation that... you can say "Let's try this".

"it will help". "Let's try this, it will help". No it's not!

And then you telling me that that's the best America can do?

Not.

Don't tell me that. Don't tell the... marines who fought...

for a month in Nayaf for that.

Don't tell the marines who...

who are still fighting every day in Faluya...

that that's the best America can do.

That makes me angry.