Oops, we left the plan in our other pants! (IRAQ)

[Apos]

Holy crap:
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/9927782.htm

WASHINGTON - 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.”**

A Knight Ridder review of the administration’s Iraq policy and decisions has found that it 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.

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.

Why don’t we know more about this? Well, that should be obvious by now:

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.

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. **

Utterly, completely damning. There is absolutely no excuse for any of this, none. Pride, arrogance, and a certainty in bordering on unquestioning zealotry have pointlessly cost thousands of lives, American, coalition, and Iraqi, and crippled Iraq’s chances as a new democracy. And if Bush is re-elected, he and his team will never, ever, have any reason to question his own judgements, never be held accountable.

[jshore]

And, this is an interesting article on the disastrous ideologically-driven plan that they eventually did settle on…Making Iraq into a free-market eutopia for foreign investment. Unfortunately, all that did in the short run was to throw a lot of Iraqis working for the state-owned industries out of work where they had little left to do but join up with the insurgency…And now the chances of being beheaded seem to have put a little bit of a damper on foreigners’ desires to invest.