Last September, Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid explained that Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forbade military strategists to develop plans for securing a postwar Iraq in early 2003, at one point going so far as to threaten to “fire the next person” to mention the need for a postwar plan.
“The secretary of defense continued to push on us … that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we’re going to take out the regime, and then we’re going to leave,” Scheid said. “We won’t stay.”
Rumsfeld’s bizarre and tragically mistaken optimism was, alas, not an isolated incident.
When Gen. Tommy R. Franks and his top officers gathered in August 2002 to review an invasion plan for Iraq, it reflected a decidedly upbeat vision of what the country would look like four years after Saddam Hussein was ousted from power.
A broadly representative Iraqi government would be in place. The Iraqi Army would be working to keep the peace. And the United States would have as few as 5,000 troops in the country.
Military slides obtained by the National Security Archive under the Freedom of Information Act outline the command’s PowerPoint projection of the stable, pro-American and democratic Iraq that was to be.
Granted, this isn’t entirely new. The fact that the administration had ridiculous expectations before the invasion has been documented so thoroughly, it’s no longer open to question. But as the NYT noted, the newly declassified slides “provide a firsthand look at how far the violent reality of Iraq today has deviated from assumptions that once laid the basis for an exercise in pre-emptive war.”
Going through the slides, it’s breathtaking.
* The State Department was expected to rebuild Iraq’s political institutions — before shock and awe even started.
* “Co-opted” Iraqi Army units would stay in their garrisons and later help secure the country — because Americans would ask them to.
* The “stabilization” phase of the conflict would last two to three months.
* We would only need 5,000 troops in Iraq by December 2006.
I thought hilzoy summarized the problem nicely.
There are, in these slides, various contingency plans. What will we do if we don’t get to fly over various countries? How will we respond to a Predator being shot down, to the Iraqis using WMD against us, to a major attack on the Kurds? It’s a pity we didn’t plan for other contingencies, like an insurgency or a civil war.
Of all the bizarre and irrational things about the administration’s prosecution of the war, the nearly total lack of planning for the occupation is the strangest of all. If I try very hard, I can wrap my mind around the idea that people who were supposed to know what they were doing thought invading Iraq was a good idea. But there is no point of view from which the failure to plan for the occupation makes any sense at all.
Exactly. A fair number of serious people believed the invasion was a good idea. A significant number of them believed toppling Saddam’s regime would be fairly easy. But there was an underlying assumption that nearly all of these people made: that Bush would have some idea about how to prepare for what would happen next.
The fact that the administration never bothered is borderline criminal. History will not be kind.