Shortly before last year’s presidential election, the president sought to explain why his administration had been so negligent in planning for Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s regime fell. Bush said it was, in a manner of speaking, the troops’ fault.
Bush…acknowledged in the interview that the administration did not anticipate the nature of the resistance in Iraq, and he said that was his greatest mistake in office. “Had we had to do it over again,” he said, “we would look at the consequences of catastrophic success, being so successful so fast that an enemy that should have surrendered or been done in escaped and lived to fight another day.”
And while “catastrophic success” remains one of the great all-time oxymorons, the truth is the president was warned about gaps in Bush’s plans, but the White House chose to ignore them.
One month before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, three State Department bureau chiefs warned of “serious planning gaps for post-conflict public security and humanitarian assistance” in a secret memorandum prepared for a superior.
The State Department officials, who had been discussing the issues with top military officers at the Central Command, noted that the military was reluctant “to take on ‘policing’ roles” in Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The three officials warned that “a failure to address short-term public security and humanitarian assistance concerns could result in serious human rights abuses which would undermine an otherwise successful military campaign, and our reputation internationally.”
The specific documents, obtained by George Washington University’s National Security Archive under the Freedom of Information Act, are definitely worth reviewing.
I’ve seen some suggest that these documents are particularly damming in light of the Downing Street Memos and I think there’s a lot of truth to that. As the All Spin Zone noted (via C&L), these State Department warnings include a report outlining plans for post-Saddam Iraq as early as October 2001 — just one month after the attacks of 9/11.
The State Department docs, in other words, are a two-fer — they help further prove that the Bush gang was criminally negligent in anticipating the crisis in Iraq and they bolster concerns that Iraq was Bush’s target all along.