corrente

Knight-Ridder, amazingly, is still doing, like, actual reporting. What a weird business model, when everyone knows that the "news" is just entertainment!

The KR piece has two themes: (1) Bush had no postwar plan, didn't think one was needed, and ignored the plans that existed. Bush's guys had a theory, but a theory is not a plan. (2) Bush ruthlessly suppresses all who disagree with him. Did it then, does it now. Any wonder he has issues dealing enlightenment concepts like "evidence" and "reasoning"?

In March 2003, days before the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, American war planners and intelligence officials met at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina to review the Bush administration's plans to oust Saddam Hussein and implant democracy in Iraq.

Near the end of his presentation, an Army lieutenant colonel who was giving a briefing showed a slide describing the Pentagon's plans for rebuilding Iraq after the war, known in the planners' parlance as Phase 4-C. He was uncomfortable with his material - and for good reason.

The slide said: "To Be Provided."

Heh. Strange to think of a PowerPoint briefing revealing the truth about anything, eh? Who said there are no present-day miracles?!

Knight Ridder review of the administration's Iraq policy and decisions has found that [the administration] invaded Iraq without a comprehensive plan in place to secure and rebuild the country. The administration also failed to provide some 100,000 additional U.S. troops that American military commanders originally wanted to help restore order and reconstruct a country shattered by war, a brutal dictatorship and economic sanctions.

"We didn't go in with a plan. We went in with a theory," said a veteran State Department officer who was directly involved in Iraq policy.

The review found that the president and many of his advisers ignored repeated warnings that rebuilding Iraq would be harder than ousting Saddam and tossed out years of planning about how to rebuild Iraq, in part because they thought pro-American Iraqi exiles and Iraqi "patriots" would quickly pick up the pieces. The CIA predicted up until the war's opening days that the Iraqi army would turn against Saddam, which never happened.

This report is based on official documents and on interviews with more than three dozen current and former civilian and military officials who participated directly in planning for the war and its aftermath. Most still support the decision to go to war but say many of the subsequent problems could have been avoided.

Every effort was made to get those who were interviewed to speak for the record, but many officials requested anonymity because they didn't want to criticize the administration publicly or because they feared retaliation.

Meaning that, so far, the felony of outing Valerie Plame had netted out positive for Bush. If only these guys were as good at "politics by other means" as they are at politics!

One official who was deeply involved in the pre-war planning effort - and was critical of it - initially agreed but then declined to cooperate after expressing concern that the Justice Department might pursue a reporter's telephone records in an effort to hunt down critics of the administration's policies.

The weird thing about this that Bush always claims the reason for executive privilege is that he gets unvarnished advice. Then he fires the people who disagree with him in public (Shinseki) and emasculates the ones who disagree with him in private (Powell, I imagine). Go figure. I guess The Holy Gut™—farmer, you picturing that?—tells Bush all He, and we, need to know....

After more than a year of internal squabbling, U.S. military commanders, intelligence officers and diplomats in Baghdad are acting as a team.

Wow, that's really good news! Especially after 1000 of our troops have died....

But the hole created by the absence of an adequate plan to rebuild Iraq, the failure to provide enough troops to secure the country, the misplaced faith in Iraqi exiles and other mistakes made after Baghdad fell is a deep one.

"We've finally got our act together, but we're all afraid it may be too late," said one senior official who's engaged daily in Iraq policy.

Gee, sounds like some sort of, um, management problem...

The Bush administration's failure to plan to win the peace in Iraq was the product of many of the same problems that plagued the administration's case for war, including wishful thinking, bad information from Iraqi exiles who said Iraqis would welcome American troops as liberators and contempt for dissenting opinions.

I don't get the point of this. Since The Holy Gut™ made these decisions, how could they be wrong?

And now we get the list of ignored warnings that there was no plan to win the peace:

[1]"The possibility of the United States winning the war and losing the peace in Iraq is real and serious," warned an Army War College report that was completed in February 2003, a month before the invasion. Without an "overwhelming" effort to prepare for the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the report warned: "The United States may find itself in a radically different world over the next few years, a world in which the threat of Saddam Hussein seems like a pale shadow of new problems of America's own making."

A half-dozen intelligence reports also warned that American troops could face significant postwar resistance. This [2]foot-high stack of material was distributed at White House meetings of Bush's top foreign policy advisers, but there's no evidence that anyone ever acted on it.

"It was disseminated. And ignored," said a former senior intelligence official.

The [3]Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency was particularly aggressive in its forecasts, officials said. One briefing occurred in January 2003. Another, in April 2003, weeks after the war began, discussed Saddam's plans for attacking U.S. forces after his troops had been defeated on the battlefield.

Similar warnings came from the [4]Pentagon's Joint Staff, the [5]State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and the [6]CIA's National Intelligence Council. The council produced reports in January 2003 titled "Principal Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq" and "Regional Consequences of Regime Change in Iraq."

That was the list of warnings The Holy Gut™ ignored. Now here's the list of problems The Holy Gut™ didn't handle:

In the first weeks of 2003, as war appeared inevitable, it began to dawn on many officials throughout the government that the United States was unprepared to stabilize and rebuild Iraq after Saddam was defeated.

At the CIA, the national intelligence officer for military issues, retired Maj. Gen. John Landry, became concerned that the military wasn't preparing adequately for postwar Iraq.

He and fellow officer Paul Pillar, acting on their own, convened a [1]brainstorming session of government and private experts at the CIA two months before the war.

It uncovered many problems, including some that couldn't be solved before the war began.

The head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Andrew Natsios, [2]couldn't get Pentagon approval to pre-position in Kuwait all the relief supplies he thought would be necessary. [3]The White House was slow to release funds for rebuilding Iraq.

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay [3]arner wasn't named to lead Iraq's reconstruction until January 2003 and didn't oversee the first major interagency conference on postwar Iraq until Feb. 21, less than a month before the invasion.

Franks' Central Command did have an extensive plan to restore order and begin rebuilding the country, called Operation Desert Crossing, said retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, who drew up the plan and updated it continuously when he led Centcom until 2000. [6] [The stabilization plan] was never utilized.

And now the most revealing detail of all:

[6]On March 17, 2003, two days before the war began, ground force commanders asked the Army War College for a copy of the handbook that had governed the U.S. occupation of postwar Germany, which began in 1945.

Love that deadpan military humor. Unbelievable? All too believable.

And now, Rummy and The Holy Gut™ micromanage the war:

Rumsfeld and his aides made it clear what would happen to generals who bucked them. When, under persistent congressional questioning in February 2003, the Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, said he thought several hundred thousand U.S. troops would be needed to secure Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz publicly called his estimate "wildly off the mark." Then Rumsfeld's office leaked word of Shinseki's replacement 15 months before Shinseki was due to retire, both embarrassing and neutralizing the Army's top officer. "Rumsfeld just beat up on the military," said the senior intelligence official. "And so they just shut up and did what they were told."

Four senior officers who were directly involved said Rumsfeld and Franks micromanaged the complex process of deciding when and how the troops and their equipment would be sent to Iraq, called the Time-Phased Force and Deployment Data, canceling some units, rescheduling others and even moving equipment from one ship to another.

As a result, two Army divisions that Centcom wanted to help secure the country weren't on hand when Baghdad fell and the country lapsed into anarchy, and a third, the 1st Cavalry from Fort Hood, Texas, fell so far behind schedule that on April 21 Franks and Rumsfeld dropped it from the plan.

And who did The Holy Gut™ rely on to secure Iraq, instead of US troops? Why, the neo-con man-slut, Ahmed Chalabi:

Instead of providing a plan and enough troops to take control of Iraq,
officials, advisers and consultants in and around the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's office bet on Iraqi exiles such as Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, who assured them that Iraqis would welcome American troops as liberators.

Douglas Feith, the Defense Department's No. 3 official, and former Pentagon consultant Richard Perle both acknowledged that their vision for post-Saddam Iraq included putting pro-Western exiles in power.

"We had a theme in our minds, a strategic idea, of liberation rather than occupation, giving them (Iraqis) more authority even at the expense of having things done with greater efficiency" by coalition military forces, Feith told The Philadelphia Inquirer last month. Perle, in an interview, said he and others had for years advocated "helping the Iraqis liberate themselves - which was a completely different approach than we settled on."

"We'll never know how it would have come out if we did it the way we wanted to do it," he said.

Nice to see the "Perle of Great Price" taking responsibility....

The CIA, the DIA and the State Department all warned that Chalabi was a charlatan, and the uniformed military dragged its heels in training exiles to join the fight against Saddam.

The battle over Chalabi was one of numerous bitter interagency fights about Iraq that neither Bush nor his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, never resolved.

"I'm not going to put my thumb on the scale," Bush said at a White House meeting where Chalabi's bona fides were hotly debated, according to an official who was present.

"Thumb on the scale"? Or ass on the line? Seems like The Holy Gut™ has a hard time actually, um, making a decision.

That left Pentagon officials to plow ahead with their attempt to position Chalabi and his militia, the Free Iraqi Fighting Forces, to take power after Saddam's fall.

Iran's intelligence service, and that Chalabi or his security chief provided classified U.S. military information to Iran. Chalabi has denied the allegation.
(via Knight Ridder)

Well.

Everything we've been saying for the last year is true, isn't it? Surprise!