> Yup, you've got a point. But so many things that should have been
> accomplished haven't been. . . There may be good answers that don't
> include intentional chaos-mongering, but I can't think of any.
I don't think it's that hard to think of answers. Especially if you start out from the premise that they are incompetent.
> Why did they look the other way when the "looting" was going on last
> April?
What was their choice? Having not even entertained the idea of the dissolving of public order in their scenarios (which was pretty stunningly incompetent, since it's the usual comcommitant of war), and not having brought with them a huge police force and civilian administration -- and not really having any competence or experience at either -- their only other option was to impose martial law and shoot looters on sight in large numbers. They decided the better option was to hope it would blow over. It's not hard to see why they'd make that choice. Because the war was so illegitimate, they couldn't go shooting people. And they simply didn't have near enough manpower to impose order. Shinseki was right, and they should have listened to him. And in those early days, they had only half the man power they planned on having thanks to the Turkey route being cut off.
> Why haven't they guarded water mains and oil pipelines more effectively?
Oil pipelines run for hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles. You can't possibly guard every mile of them. It's why you need legitimacy.
And on top of the fact that no police force can work without being being supported by the omnipresence and omniscience of society, there's the problem that attacks on coalition soldiers reduce its policing power by powers of ten by forcing it to patrol in large noisy units rather than fanning out.
My impression is the main problem with the water system is not as much the mains as the electricity necessary to make it run.
> Why was Saddam able to get the electricity running after GW I while the
> U.S. forces can't?
Simple: he threw money at everyone and they worked around the clock at the jobs they already knew how to do. We gave control to corporations who knew absolutely nothing of the local set up and had to start from scratch. They refused to let the Iraqis take charge or to give them any incentive to work triple time. And they then had to deal (and still do) with the results of the continuous looting and of physical danger to their workers, which Saddam did not. That's three strikes against them and they're out.
As Thurman Arnold once said, in some ways, a city is like an ant-heap. Everyone does their small job, and they connect in such a way that the whole thing runs. But if tomorrow morning we had to consciously figure out from scratch how to get the food into New York and the garbage out, we'd all starve covered with garbage.
Michael