ate making (creating the institutions necessary for central government). As Bob Woodward writes, Colin Powell and President Bush wanted a downsized army to "demilitarize the society." The armed forces would be depoliticized as well, "subordinate to political control, a civilian control that would represent Iraq's ethnic and sectarian composition." However, they did not plan on hundreds of thousands of soldiers who refused to participate in the new army or join the workforce to reconstruct the country's infrastructure (Woodward, Plan of Attack, 343).
Instead of a national army, Iraq sprouted an insurgency chiefly because militarized sectors of Iraqi society resented the United States' presence and refused to cooperate as per the pre-war plan. As James Dobbins writes, "The only factor that unites Muslim fundamentalist mujahideen, secular Baathist holdouts and Shiite extremists is their desire to expel American forces" (Dobbins, 2). Much of the focus of the U.S. has been in quashing this sentiment over the past three years. With the implementation of the surge plan, some of that resentment began to change, at least temporarily. As President Bush was sure to note in a speech on April 10, "sectarian violence is down dramatically. Civilian deaths and military deaths are also down" (Bush, 1). Violence in Iraq is at its lowest since 2005 (Simon, 1), And conservative pundits have been linking the more visible American presence in the country to the s
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