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Ex-Iraq general blasts war planners, media

The former top commander of forces in Iraq lambasted reporters Friday for having “agenda-driven biases” he called “a threat to democracy,” and then laid out the Bush administration and Congress for bad planning and no clear end state for the war in Iraq.

“There is no question America is living a nightmare with no end in sight,” said retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez at an annual professional conference for military reporters outside Washington, D.C. “There is nothing going on today that would give us hope.”

Sanchez was head of coalition forces in Iraq from June 2003 to June 2004.

when asked where accountability lay while he headed the forces, as well as for his part in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Sanchez said it was too late for him to do anything when he took over.

Sanchez retired in 2006 after he wasn’t offered another command position after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in April 2004. Leaked photographs depicting mistreatment of detainees at the prison outside Baghdad erupted into an international story that harmed U.S. efforts to build support for the war. Nine enlisted soldiers were court-martialed and convicted of crimes in connection with the scandal.

Sanchez said his career was a casualty of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

He berated the room of about 30 to 40 reporters, saying he had been portrayed as a “liar” by people who had never met him. Many of the reporters, in Arlington, Va., for a Military Reporters and Editors conference, had covered the trials that came from photos leaked to the media showing pyramids of naked Iraqi prisoners, a hooded man convinced that if he fell off a crate he would be electrocuted, and dogs snapping inches away from a prisoner.

Watchdog organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union complained that lower-enlisted soldiers took the brunt of the blame for what many called a “leadership void.”

“I’m still being sued by the ACLU, so I have to be careful,” Sanchez said, after he was asked if he was happy with the conclusions of the Abu Ghraib trials.

Jaws dropped as Sanchez glared out at the room, and then eyes rolled as he spent an hour blaming everyone but himself. Most of what he said about the military has been said before: There’s no grand strategy, the Iraqi Army should not have been disbanded, there was no planning for stabilization or recovery past the initial invasion and, “the administration has failed.”

He said deployment cycles aren’t working with current troop levels, that it will take decades to fix the “military’s full-spectrum readiness,” and that if the U.S. were to withdraw from Iraq, it would lead to “chaos that would lead to instability in the Middle East.” And, he said the Powell Doctrine — which requires a clear exit strategy as part of a war plan — was violated.

He said some poor strategic decisions in Iraq had become “defeats because of the media,” and that some reporters feed from a “pigs’ trough.”

He lamented the media’s treatment of Federal Emergency Management chief Michael Brown during Hurricane Katrina. Brown resigned from FEMA after accusations that he had mishandled the hurricane.

Sanchez took command of Joint Action Force 7 in Baghdad on June 15, 2003.

He said he soon realized “this operation went off the skids.”

After talking with Gen. John Abizaid, then-head of U.S. Central Command, he said he realized there were “clearly some problems.”

He said he wasn’t involved in initial planning and that the mission did not change from liberation to occupation: The U.S. automatically became an occupying force when the Army “totally destroyed” Iraq.

“There was a significant disregard ... in addressing the follow-on phase of this war,” he said.

There was “no focus on resourcing during the entire first year,” and the coalition provisional authority was heavily understaffed.

“There was no focus in Washington,” he said. “There’s a lot of horror stories inside that statement.”

He said the partisan politics of Congress are “killing soldiers,” and that the focus needs to be not at Capitol Hill, but in Iraq. And, he said, the media’s coverage of partisan politics was driving a wedge in democracy. He called for newspapers to run corrections more prominently and noted that television and Internet outlets often don’t run corrections at all.

The Bush administration, he said, failed to plan economically and politically for Iraq, and has continued to fail in expressing its plans and strategies to the American people. The best the administration could hope for with the current approach is to “stave off defeat.”

When asked for specific names involved in failures he cited, he said, “I’m not into second-guessing decisions of our political leadership.”

He said military officers should not go public with their opinions about politics while still serving, but that officers not coming forward privately to denounce the lack of plans for the war in Iraq “was an absolute lack of moral courage.”