A new report published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy confirms what most of us knew already. The Administration’s plan for invading Iraq was poorly planned because of a tug-of-war between civilian and military planners, and when we went into Iraq there was no plan to get out.
Here are excerpts from a Knight Ridder article published in today’s Seattle Times.
Planning for the Iraq war was hobbled by tensions between Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and military planners over the staying power of Saddam Hussein’s regime, by leaks of highly classified war plans and by little attention to the war’s aftermath, according to a new insider account.
A top intelligence analyst at the U.S. military’s Central Command writes that near-constant demands from Rumsfeld and his aides for new versions of the war plan using fewer American troops wasted time and diverted attention from fleshing out a blueprint for the March 2003 invasion.
…Hooker’s account echoes other assessments of the run-up to the war in Iraq, but it’s one of the first on-the-record accounts by someone in his position as a military intelligence analyst.
…For example, he says some officers at Florida-based CENTCOM were so stunned by leaks of the classified war plans to the news media that they assumed the leaks must have been part of a U.S. propaganda campaign to unsettle Saddam.
“To some planners, this theory seemed the only logical way to explain the seemingly outrageous and reckless revelations of classified material by senior officials,” he wrote.
It turned out that the leaks were apparently part of a battle among top policymakers in Washington over whether to invade Iraq with a relatively small force and lightning-quick maneuvers, as many Pentagon civilians favored, or the larger, more traditional force that senior generals preferred.
…Postwar planning was fractured among civilian agencies and, unlike combat operations, lacked an overall commander or explicit plan, Hooker wrote. “This turmoil was evident to CENTCOM planners,” he adds.
…President Bush, in a speech Wednesday night, made a rare acknowledgement that preparations for postwar Iraq were lacking. “You know, one of the lessons we learned from our experience in Iraq is that while military personnel can be rapidly deployed anywhere in the world, the same is not true of U.S. government civilians,” Bush said in a speech to the International Republican Institute.
In a related article published by the Seattle Times, they report that, “The Army discovered 20 percent of its citizen soldiers arrived at mobilization sites with dental conditions that made them nondeployable.”
We’ve corrected the dental problems, but there is still is no exit strategy that will bring our citizen soldiers home. We’re not building permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq so we can leave.
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