on the eve of the American Invasion Saddam Hussein's Iraq suffered little robbery and violent crime Saddam after all was an authoritarian his police while brutal ensured that street crime was almost unheard of in fact prior to the invasion Iraq had a crime rate that was among the lowest in the entire world that all would change practically overnight in October of 2002 Saddam bracing for a U. S Invasion would empty Iraq's prisons in what was seen as an attempt to Garner support on the international stage and at home president Saddam officially declared quote all jailed prisoners detainees and sentenced fugitives for political reasons are granted a complete comprehensive and final amnesty this ultimately amounted to many thousands of people mostly political prisoners but it also included thousands of common criminals and some of Iraq's most violent those imprisoned for murder or armed robbery thus it was that following the American bombing campaign all hell broke loose public order had evaporated the so-called shock and awe campaign was so overwhelming that by mid-april the Iraqi Army had ceased to exist with criminals roaming The Straits Carnage ensued although amid the chaos lines began to blur with the breakdown of society Common People moms and dads became Petty criminals themselves as in the first Gulf War the aerial campaign had once again targeted water and sewage treatment plants along with the electrical grid that powered them as a result even bottled water became scarce starvation and disease became a serious danger for the population naturally looting became a form of shopping the desperate poor driven by hunger and criminals driven by greed formed gangs that proud the streets looking for targets the police had drifted away from their stations to join either the Vigilantes or the gangs crime became rampant including homicide but defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld chose a Bare Bones approach running the defense department like something of a corporation slashing employees and using the bare minimum of troops hoping to fill the rest via contracts awarded to defense contractors among the first fissures in the military was a very public feud between Rumsfeld and army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki Shinseki thought that Iraq should follow America's so-called Bosnia model or one U. S troop for every 50 bosnians that would amount to three hundred thousand U.
S troops in Iraq but rums felt scoffed and allowed less than half that amount about a hundred and thirty thousand troops during the Algerian war of independence the French used over three times that many nearly half a million in all to fight about the same number of insurgents as the U. S would fight in Iraq needless to say they lost among the first fissures between American forces and the Iraqis the breakdown in security Drfake Amin batir who was the head of the city Morgan Baghdad spoke about the gravity of the situation nobody knows when he will be killed when he will be attacked when he will be looted this is the real situation there are a lot of criminals because of the lack of security lack of police control you know Iraq was controlled by many security systems being in control the lack of security reflected poorly on the Americans and was among the first and most important factors undermining their credibility among the Myriad mistakes made in the lead up execution and aftermath of the invasion the decision itself to Target Iraq choosing the Iraqi people as a people to pacify and subdue also proved to be unwise never mind the fierce national pride of a people who had kicked out the British and gained independence nearly 70 years earlier Iraq was also historically a Hardy Agricultural Society another way of putting that would be they were heavily armed we tell the Americans we are prepared for them says Abdul Amir nasira al-abadi my grandfather has a gun from 1895 and I'm going to use it to kill American soldiers I'm keeping this gun in my hand I also have a pistol and a Russian Kalashnikov all Iraqis have these indeed Iraq was one of the most heavily armed Societies in the world and on a per capita basis Iraq's gun ownership rivaled other Clan based societies like those of Yemen and Somalia where virtually everyone is armed but those corroded rifles and pistols passed down along Generations were the least of the Americans problems along with emptying prisons Saddam also made life difficult for the Americans by dumping small collections of weapons and explosives among the Iraqi population and distributed rifles but some weapons dumps were massive the size of small cities there were also the Iraqi military arsenals just right for the picking with the Army effectively non-existent and a lack of U. S troops to guard these Depots Iraqis began breaking into them the result was that Iraq which was already a heavily armed Society became overflowing with Weaponry estimates put the number at up to 1 million metric tons there is more ammunition in Iraq than any place I've ever been in my life and it is all not securable these weapons would be sold or simply passed out for free to friends and family now almost every Iraqi had a Kalashnikov or other variant and many had machine guns and RPGs for example the American Congress and subsequently the public would not be informed until the end of October of 2004 more than 18 months after the War Began that a cache of over 380 tons of artillery shells plastic explosives mortar rounds TNT and other powerful conventional explosives was cleaned out by looters this storage site which was just 30 miles from Baghdad was left unguarded by the U.
S military this was certainly an error that would come to haunt them though rumsfeld's DOD failed to emulate the so-called Bosnia model and share numbers of troops they adopted another bosnia-era policy which would come to uniquely Define the American occupation known as dab or driving around Bosnia U. S forces would adopt patrols as a routine daily exercise it was thought that the presence of soldiers on the ground would bring an air of security to cities and populated areas but these ground operations also brought troops door to door conducting constant raids on Iraqi homes otherwise known as cordon and sweep operations the Cavalier and often cruel nature of these raids became another major point of contention among the Iraqis these sweeps were indiscriminate nabbing so-called military-age males which included young teens and children up to adult or even older men these men without any due process were hauled off to American Military prisons including the notorious Abu grave prison the saddam-era torture chamber which was reopened by the Americans who even reinstituted the old prison warden from the Saddam era just that alone of course along with the ensuing torture Scandal was yet another rage-inducing insensitivity which made many Iraqis ready to take up arms Iraq was a socially conservative society and placed great importance on not only National but also personal and family dignity Iraq's social norms of honor and privacy especially for women and girls was thoroughly violated by strange foreign men busting down doors and violently arresting the head of the household the vast majority of the time without any evidence of wrongdoing whatsoever we would in 2003 and early 2004 collect up huge numbers of Iraqis and put them in Abu garib the number eventually grewed over thirteen thousand probably 99 percent of those people were guilty of absolutely nothing but the way we treated them the way we abuse them turned them against the effort in Iraq forever an independent report sanctioned by the defense department would conclude that they reverted to rounding up any and all suspicious looking persons all too often including women and children as many as 120 000 Iraqis would be detained John Bruns of third Brigade First Armored Division first Battalion took part in around 1 000 Iraqi home raids summarizes a typical Iraqi home raid as follows quote you grab the man of the house you rip him out of bed in front of his wife you put him up against the wall then you go into a room and you tear the room to shreds so you've just humiliated this man in front of his entire family and terrorized his entire family and you've destroyed his home and then you go right next door and you do the same thing in a hundred homes now next week 10 roadside bombs go off and nobody can understand why according to Colonel Thomas hamms the Marine expert on counter Insurgency who worked for the American occupation many of the arrests were done with a boot on the head in front of his woman you've created a blood debt when you do that perhaps the single most devastating move for the American occupation was the outright firing of roughly half a million Iraqi state workers at the drop of a hat on May 16th and May 23rd the occupation's leader Paul Bremer III would issue CPA orders number one and two respectively CPA stands for the Coalition provisional Authority the name given to the American occupation these orders were known collectively as de-bathification and went a long way toward fueling the growing resistance order number one fired anyone who worked in the top three management layers of all government of all government Ministries state-owned Industries universities even hospitals these employees were deemed automatically to be senior bath party members and they would be banned from future employment in the Iraqi government this was controversial even within U. S circles for instance the CIA chief of station in Iraq was Gravely worried that by Nightfall you'll have driven thirty thousand to fifty thousand bathys underground and in six months you'll really regret doing this in fact the number would be as high as 85 000 people just fired outright order number two fired the entire Iraqi armed forces and the interior Ministry which included the National Police together these two orders would put out of work over 500 000 people Marine Colonel Thomas Hamm summarized the move like this now you have a couple hundred thousand people who are armed because they took their weapons home with them who know how to use the weapons who have no future and who have a reason to be angry at you when Bremer did that the Insurgency went crazy May was the turning point according to an official U.
S Army study of the war just over a day into the Invasion on March 22nd quote expecting a positive reception Sergeant First Class Anthony Broadhead led a hunter killer team of three Bradleys and two M1 tanks toward the bridge where some Iraqis had assembled as his tank approached the bridge Broadhead waved at the Iraqis but rather than waving back the Iraqis responded with AK-47 fire the fight quickly escalated as paramilitary forces engage from pickup trucks armed with small arms machine guns rocket-propelled grenades and mortars the study maintains that this was a significant event since for the first time but not the last time well-armed paramilitary forces indistinguishable except for their weapons from civilians attacked the Squadron a week later saw the first suicide bombing against Coalition forces since the War Began a taxi cab Laden with explosives would kill four U. S soldiers of the third infantry division in the city of najaf by mid-summer the lid on the burgeoning Iraqi resistance had blown off and bombings became rampant and regular the Iraqi resistance sought to Target not only Americans but also their allies and partners August proved to be an important month on the seventh a bomb-filled van parked outside the embassy of Jordan the blast through a nearby car onto a roof in the rubble were 17 dead but among the most momentous and successful attacks Fighters targeted the canal hotel which housed the offices of the United Nations driving a cement truck filled with explosive artillery shells a suicide bomber crashed into the outer wall of the hotel sending a shock wave so powerful that it blasted the windows of the second armored Cavalry Regiment a half mile away the attack killed 23 people including the chief U. N officer in Iraq the effects of the bombing were dramatic the UN mission in Iraq Drw its staff down from 800 International staffers to just 15.
Colonel Thomas hams described the Fallout in a report for the National Defense University quote the august 19 2003 bombing of the UN headquarters in Iraq convinced the organization that continuing to operate in Iraq would be too costly in the following weeks numerous other International organizations including the IMF and the World Bank would pull out of Iraq which was seen as a massive victory for the resistance that was a brilliant campaign they hit the U. N the Red Cross the Jordanian Embassy and the Iraqi police and we were calling them dead Enders who do you think is disorganized at that point the Muslim holy month of Ramadan would commence at the end of October of 2003. this was the first time since the invasion that the foe turned fully on U.
S forces on the 26th a mortar attack on a Baghdad police station killed private first class Rachel boseveld then a flurry of rockets were fired at the Rasheed hotel which housed the CPA offices within the U. S green zone the next day four police stations were bombed simultaneously throughout Baghdad using truck bombs painted to look like police vehicles and filled with over one thousand pounds of plastic explosive these attacks marked the beginning of what is now known as the Ramadan offensive and it would bring the highest rate of American fatality since the start of the invasion attacks would become far more sophisticated during Ramadan and the number of them would increase sharply to compare during the summer of 2003 there were roughly 15 attacks on U. S soldiers a day by mid-november that number jumped to 45 a day and it was also at this time that Iraqis became Adept at attacking aircraft in October and November they managed to shoot down three helicopters including a black helicopter killing six soldiers and a Chinook helicopter killing 16 soldiers helicopters now frequently had to fly back due to gorillas firing at them on November 15th two Blackhawks collided into one another while trying to evade rifle fire killing 17 Soldiers the Army even had to conclude that the Apache helicopter was so vulnerable to Rocket and machine gunfire that it would no longer have a major role in attacks the Iraqis were learning and adapting quickly using what they had at their disposal but they would kill many many American soldiers through a simple device that littered many roads frequented by American Humvees and personnel carriers throughout the country the ieg which stands for improvised explosive device is one of the key Hallmarks of the war in Iraq its Simplicity is both a symbol of the disproportionate Firepower that the Americans wielded as well as the cleverness of the Iraqi resistance to use all manner of essentially scraps of electronics and weapons to Fashion devices that proved to be especially lethal to occupation forces so lethal in fact than in the first year of the Iraqi Guerrilla war against the Americans one-third of dead U.
S troops were killed by these low-tech and inexpensive roadside bombs and they weren't just good at Killing American soldiers but also wounding them two-thirds of soldiers wounded so badly that they needed to be evacuated from Iraq were hit by IEDs aside from the human cost the monetary cost was staggering in 2006 the Pentagon set up an office to deal with the threat of IEDs called The Joint IED defeat organization by 2011 the yearly budget was 2. 8 billion dollars and that's not counting the roughly 45 billion dollars spent on mine resistant vehicles all to fight a bomb that cost roughly 30 dollars to make indeed IEDs were very crude all one had to do was put a Detonator on a bomb or artillery shell and you've essentially made one in the summer of 2003 nearly all IEDs were hardwired meaning they were connected directly to the Detonator a fighter would have to hold the Detonator which was connected by a long wire to the explosive in this instance U. S forces were able to locate the wire then follow it until they found the fighter on the other end and liquidated them but then gorillas figured out how to detonate these devices remotely using RC car controllers Car Alarm transmitters and especially cell phones the people who detonated these bombs also known as trigger men were the front line troops of the resistance and the cell phone became one of the most important Tools in their Arsenal IED explosions would reportedly be videotaped by attackers in order to improve their techniques and use the footage for propaganda and recruitment purposes though the U.
S spent billions outfitting Humvees with armor to resist IED explosions the Iraqis again adapted their ways and began placing IEDs and tree branches and light poles since armor plates were placed on doors the blast would be downward facing in order to blow windows in and also to hit the machine Gunners poking out on top of the vehicles we got better armor they started getting better Ordnance said Colonel Bob Chase of the Second Marine Division Chase was commenting on an IED attack near haditha which killed 14 Marines with a single explosion hitting an amphibious assault vehicle this was at the time a new development in IED technology called the underbelly bomb detonated from deep inside the ground and Blasting vehicles from underneath these bombs were also massive able to utterly destroy a Humvee or even a tank just 100 pounds of explosives detonated under an armored vehicle was the equivalent of a direct hit from a Six-Gun artillery battery yet even a single 155 millimeter artillery round containing just 18 pounds of explosives could easily destroy a tank on its own that's just a damn difficult thing to defeat IEDs were so effective that attacks increased steadily in the Year 2005 an IED attack occurred every 48 minutes twice the rate of the year before the fall there were 1800 of these bombings a month and the distribution of these IEDs was also sending another message to the occupation since they were so widely distributed on roads throughout the country this could only mean that they were unreported by local Iraqis a major blow to morale for U. S forces who of course went into Iraq thinking they'd be welcomed as liberators the violence was detrimental to the Coalition early on along with the UN World Bank Oxfam and the IMF all pulling out other countries militaries also found Iraq ultimately uninhabitable Spain would leave in May 2004 then Honduras the Dominican Republic Nicaragua the Philippines Hungary the next year the Netherlands Ukraine also Poland Bulgaria and Italy probably the three most important European allies in Iraq would announce their plans to get the [ __ ] out of Dodge in the end a 30 bomb was enough to kill probably half of the U. S war dead and the resistance was so overwhelming against such an awesome occupying force that it should indeed be studied in Insurgency in Revolutionary circles for many years to come The Quagmire in Iraq was doomed from the start American arrogance poor planning free market brain rot allowing for the Contracting of vitally important jobs to defense contractors who literally do not give a [ __ ] about anything but their bottom line along with other blunders created something of a perfect storm in Iraq due to the Hopeless corporate Reliance on War profiteering the lessons of the Iraq War are always important to ponder it was Michael ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute who said quote every 10 years or so the United States needs to pick up some crappy little country and throw it against the wall just to show the world we mean business for those watching maybe that country will be yours throughout the year 2023 the 20th anniversary of the second Iraq war I'll be covering stories related to The Invasion and if you want to support me and get a glimpse of behind the scenes action or join my Discord server or watch my two graphic for YouTube Abu grave documentary check the link in the description or go to patreon.
