Towards the end of 2003 about nine months after the U.S. invaded Iraq, the Army commissioned the RAND Corporation, a federally financed research center, to conduct a detailed study of the planning for post-war Iraq. In the summer of 2005, after 18 months of careful research, RAND reported back, including an unclassified version that the think tanks hoped would contribute to the public debate.
Fat chance. Given that the Bush administration’s planning was rather pathetic, the RAND study was not only ignored, it was hidden.
The Army is accustomed to protecting classified information. But when it comes to the planning for the Iraq war, even an unclassified assessment can acquire the status of a state secret. […]
[T]he study’s wide-ranging critique of the White House, the Defense Department and other government agencies was a concern for Army generals, and the Army has sought to keep the report under lock and key.
A review of the lengthy report — a draft of which was obtained by The New York Times — shows that it identified problems with nearly every organization that had a role in planning the war. That assessment parallels the verdicts of numerous former officials and independent analysts.
The study chided President Bush — and by implication Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who served as national security adviser when the war was planned — as having failed to resolve differences among rival agencies. “Throughout the planning process, tensions between the Defense Department and the State Department were never mediated by the president or his staff,” it said.
Rumsfeld’s Pentagon was given too much authority, Powell’s State Department didn’t have an “actionable” plan, and Central Command had a “fundamental misunderstanding” of what the military needed to do to secure postwar Iraq.
No wonder the Bush gang decided a cover-up was preferable to disclosure.
Keep in mind, this isn’t just about accountability.
The administration’s mistakes had devastating consequences.
The poor planning had “the inadvertent effort of strengthening the insurgency,” as Iraqis experienced a lack of security and essential services and focused on “negative effects of the U.S. security presence.” The American military’s inability to seal Iraq’s borders, a task the 2005 report warned was still not a priority, enabled foreign support for the insurgents to flow into Iraq.
And what’s the Army’s take on all of this?
As the RAND study went through drafts, a chapter was written to emphasize the implications for the Army. An unclassified version was produced with numerous references to newspaper articles and books, an approach that was intended to facilitate publication.
Senior Army officials were not happy with the results, and questioned whether all of the information in the study was truly unclassified and its use of newspaper reports. RAND researchers sent a rebuttal. That failed to persuade the Army to allow publication of the unclassified report, and the classified version was not widely disseminated throughout the Pentagon.
Neither General Lovelace nor General Melcher agreed to be interviewed for this article, but General Lovelace provided a statement through a spokesman at his headquarters in Kuwait.
“The RAND study simply did not deliver a product that could have assisted the Army in paving a clear way ahead; it lacked the perspective needed for future planning by the U.S. Army,” he said.
Riiiiight. The only reason this taxpayer-financed research had to be carefully hidden from public view is because it “lacked the perspective needed for future planning by the U.S. Army.”
Please.