iraq: there really was no plan - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

roachboy · 06-17-2007, 08:36 AM

Quote:

Blair knew US had no post-war plan for Iraq

· PM committed troops despite chaos fears
· Bush 'offered to fight without UK'

Nicholas Watt, political editor
Sunday June 17, 2007
The Observer

Tony Blair agreed to commit British troops to battle in Iraq in the full knowledge that Washington had failed to make adequate preparations for the postwar reconstruction of the country.

In a devastating account of the chaotic preparations for the war, which comes as Blair enters his final full week in Downing Street, key No 10 aides and friends of Blair have revealed the Prime Minister repeatedly and unsuccessfully raised his concerns with the White House.

He also agreed to commit troops to the conflict even though President George Bush had personally said Britain could help 'some other way'.

The disclosures, in a two-part Channel 4 documentary about Blair's decade in Downing Street, will raise questions about Blair's public assurances at the time of the war in 2003 that he was satisfied with the post-war planning. In one of the most significant interviews in the programme, Peter Mandelson says that the Prime Minister knew the preparations were inadequate but said he was powerless to do more.

'Obviously more attention should have been paid to what happened after, to the planning and what we would do once Saddam had been toppled,' Mandelson tells The Observer's chief political commentator, Andrew Rawnsley, who presents the documentary.

'But I remember him saying at the time: "Look, you know, I can't do everything. That's chiefly America's responsibility, not ours."' Mandelson then criticises his friend: 'Well, I'm afraid that, as we now see, wasn't good enough.'.

Opponents of the war, who have long claimed that the Pentagon planned a short, sharp offensive to overthrow Saddam Hussein with little thought of the consequences, claimed last night that the programme vindicated their criticisms. Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat leader, told The Observer: 'These frank admissions that the Prime Minister was aware of the inadequacies of the preparations for post-conflict Iraq are a devastating indictment.'

Blair's most senior foreign affairs adviser at the time of the war makes clear that Blair was 'exercised' on the exact issue raised by the war's opponents. Sir David Manning, now Britain's ambassador to Washington, says: 'It's hard to know exactly what happened over the post-war planning. I can only say that I remember the PM raising this many months before the war began. He was very exercised about it.'

Manning reveals that Blair was so concerned that he sent him to Washington in March 2002, a full year before the invasion. Manning recalls: 'The difficulties the Prime Minister had in mind were particularly, how difficult was this operation going to be? If they did decide to intervene, what would it be like on the ground? How would you do it? What would the reaction be if you did it, what would happen on the morning after?

'All these issues needed to be thrashed out. It wasn't to say that they weren't thinking about them, but I didn't see the evidence at that stage that these things had been thoroughly rehearsed and thoroughly thought through.'

On his return to London, Manning wrote a highly-critical secret memo to Blair. 'I think there is a real risk that the [Bush] administration underestimates the difficulties,' it said. 'They may agree that failure isn't an option, but this does not mean that they will avoid it.'

Within a year Britain lost any hope of a proper reconstruction in Iraq when post-war planning was handed to the Pentagon at the beginning of 2003.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's envoy to the postwar administration in Baghdad, confirms that Blair was in despair. 'There were moments of throwing his hands in the air: "What can we do?" He was tearing his hair over some of the deficiencies.' The failure to prepare meant that Iraq quickly fell apart. Greenstock adds: 'I just felt it was slipping away from us really, from the beginning. There was no security force controlling the streets. There was no police force to speak of.'

The revelation that Blair was 'exercised' in private will raise questions about his public assurances. The former Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, told the programme he was given a personal assurance by Blair that he was satisfied by the preparations. 'I said to Tony, are you certain?' Kinnock told the programme. 'And when he said: "I'm sure," that was a good enough reassurance.'

Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's national security adviser, confirms that the President offered Blair a way out. Bush told Blair: 'Perhaps there's some other way that Britain can be involved.' Blair replied: 'No, I'm with you.'

· The Rise and Fall of Tony Blair will be screened on Channel 4 next Saturday.

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/tonyb...104989,00.html

i know quite what to say about this.
it seemed clear that this amounted to being true from the way in which things have played out in iraq..but it is another matter to KNOW that there really was no plan.
no plan.

so the bush administration was willing to commit the american military to this debacle not only on at the very best dubious grounds, but worse to do so without assuming the most basic responsibility toward the military, which was to have a fucking plan.

this is a most basic responsibility because it enables the military to enter a situation, do its thing--which is only possible if it has a clearly defined thing to do, yes?--and get out. a plan outlines the objectives, the route to those objectives--it provides a logic relative to which situations can be evaluated and remedies implemented---without a plan, what can a military apparatus actually do? how can it possibly be coherent if there is no logic and no set of procedures and so nothing that can be used for evaluation?

at the symbolic level, the bush administration's debacle in iraq has performed the theater of an illegitimate war--problems with premise recapitulate in problems of operational execution. it's like the zeitgeist takes over and expresses itself through such symmetries. but at the same time, given that the military is made up of actual human being whose lives are not just material for theater in the hegel mode....i would expect that the information raised in the above article would anger more than just those of us who opposed the war from its outset...i imagine it would anger anyone in the military, or who was in the military or who has family in the military--or anyone who imagines that it is the responsibility of a political regime that commits its military to an action to at least have a fucking plan...

and they say incompetence is not criminal.
surely there has to be a point beyond which that is not true.
how much more criminal an act of incompetence can there be than this?
think of the number of people who are dead on all sides because there is and was no plan.
think of what tactics like "the surge" mean in a context shaped by no plan.

no wonder there's chaos. how could there be anything other than chaos? and without a plan--without an operational logic--how could an apparatus distinguish chaos from its inverse in any event?

no. plan.

un-fucking-believable.

seretogis · 06-17-2007, 09:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

so the bush administration was willing to commit the american military to this debacle not only on at the very best dubious grounds, but worse to do so without assuming the most basic responsibility toward the military, which was to have a fucking plan.

Though the scope and size is different, you'll note that in the past 50 years we have committed troops to all sorts of places which they should not be, and that the war in Iraq is still being funded by a Democrat-controlled congress.

Apparently no group with political power is willing to strip themselves of the ability to throw our troops into a war-like situation on a whim. Instead, they will blame whoever uses that ability without realizing that to be able to do so at all is contrary to our interests as a nation.

trickyy · 06-17-2007, 10:43 AM

i know that one of the first things rumsfeld asked bremer after the war was "when are we leaving?" ... apparently he was not expecting to stay

host · 06-17-2007, 02:45 PM

The "non-plan" in Iraq, clearly was a concious abuse of the troops, beginning with Gen. Shinseki.
Where are all of the posters who once, unquestioningly supported these war criminals?

roachboy, "the troops" have been commanded by malevolent "monsters"....and the officers and carrer non-coms must know it, and it's impossible for me to respect them, because they know, and yet they remained silent. It's even difficult to respect the rank and file enlisted volunteers who allow themselves to be subjected to the abuse and indifference that they ignore or minimize when they "volunteer".

,,,,and why the fuck......are "the democrats" blamed for "not supporting the troops"?????

Quote:

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/014655.php

....Hmm, the president <a href="http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/11138.html">fired</a> Gen. Pace, after he devoted his entire life to the Marine corps, the service of our country, defense of our country. Did Lieberman find that offensive? Put it another way -- which is more "upsetting" to Lieberman, a senator's mild, <a href-"http://electioncentral.tpmcafe.com/blog/electioncentral/2007/jun/14/obtained_a_tape_of_reids_conference_call_with_bloggers_reid_did_blast_pace">one-sentence criticism</a> of a general's judgment, or the president firing that general in the midst of a war?.......

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Dec18.html
After Outcry, Rumsfeld Says He Will Sign Condolence Letters

By Dana Milbank
The Washington Post
Sunday, December 19, 2004; Page A05

The Pentagon has acknowledged that Donald H. Rumsfeld did not sign condolence letters to the families of soldiers killed in Iraq, but it said that from now on the embattled defense secretary would stop the use of signing machines and would pick up the pen himself. .....

Quote:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.co...nraveling.html
The Unraveling

16 Jun 2007 08:35 pm

A major witness to this White House's direct link to Abu Ghraib and the torture regime has come forward. And he couldn't have better credentials: General Antonio Taguba.

....“From what I knew, troops just don’t take it upon themselves to initiate what they did without any form of knowledge of the higher-ups,” Taguba told me. His orders were clear, however: he was to investigate only the military police at Abu Ghraib, and not those above them in the chain of command. “These M.P. troops were not that creative,” he said. “Somebody was giving them guidance, but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority. I was limited to a box.”....

Quote:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...printable=true
Annals of National Security
The General’s Report
How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties.
by Seymour M. Hersh June 25, 2007 ....

Quote:

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/06/17/hersh-taguba/
Abu Ghraib Investigator Details Pentagon Cover-Up: ‘I Thought I Was In The Mafia’

taguba.jpg In a New Yorker article today, Seymour Hersh interviews Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba, who led the Pentagon’s investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib. This article is the first time that Taguba has publicly spoken out about the scandal, revealing that the Pentagon forced him to retire early because of his aggressive pursuit of the issue.

Taguba also reveals that he believed high-level military officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, knew about the abuses but feigned ignorance, putting all the blame on low-level soldiers. Key highlights:

Taguba was threatened by Gen. John Abizaid:

A few weeks after his report became public, Taguba, who was still in Kuwait, was in the back seat of a Mercedes sedan with Abizaid. … Abizaid turned to Taguba and issued a quiet warning: “You and your report will be investigated.”

“I wasn’t angry about what he said but disappointed that he would say that to me,” Taguba said. “I’d been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia.“

White House “didn’t think the photographs were that bad”:

The former senior intelligence official said that when the images of Abu Ghraib were published, there were some in the Pentagon and the White House who “didn’t think the photographs were that bad” — in that they put the focus on enlisted soldiers, rather than on secret task-force operations. Referring to the task-force members, he said, “Guys on the inside ask me, ‘What’s the difference between shooting a guy on the street, or in his bed, or in a prison?’” A Pentagon consultant on the war on terror also said that the “basic strategy was ‘prosecute the kids in the photographs but protect the big picture.’”

Taguba was demoted and eventually forced to retire because of his investigation:

Taguba had been scheduled to rotate to the Third Army’s headquarters, at Fort McPherson, Georgia, in June of 2004. He was instead ordered back to the Pentagon, to work in the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs. “It was a lateral assignment,” Taguba said, with a smile and a shrug. … A retired four-star Army general later told Taguba that he had been sent to the job in the Pentagon so that he could “be watched.” Taguba realized that his career was at a dead end. …

In January of 2006, Taguba received a telephone call from General Richard Cody, the Army’s Vice-Chief of Staff. “This is your Vice,” he told Taguba. “I need you to retire by January of 2007.” No pleasantries were exchanged, although the two generals had known each other for years, and, Taguba said, “He offered no reason.”

Pentagon pressured Sen. John Warner (R-VA) “to back off” the investigation:

A former high-level Defense Department official said that, when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Senator John Warner, then the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was warned “to back off” on the investigation, because “it would spill over to more important things.” A spokesman for Warner acknowledged that there had been pressure on the Senator, but said that Warner had stood up to it — insisting on putting Rumsfeld under oath for his May 7th testimony, for example, to the Secretary’s great displeasure.

U.S. commander in Iraq “knew exactly what was going on”:

Taguba came to believe that Lieutenant General Sanchez, the Army commander in Iraq, and some of the generals assigned to the military headquarters in Baghdad had extensive knowledge of the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib even before Joseph Darby came forward with the CD. Taguba was aware that in the fall of 2003 — when much of the abuse took place — Sanchez routinely visited the prison, and witnessed at least one interrogation. According to Taguba, “Sanchez knew exactly what was going on.”

Rumsfeld’s claims of ignorance about the abuse were “simply not true”:

Nevertheless, Rumsfeld, in his appearances before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees on May 7th, claimed to have had no idea of the extensive abuse. “It breaks our hearts that in fact someone didn’t say, ‘Wait, look, this is terrible. We need to do something,’” Rumsfeld told the congressmen. “I wish we had known more, sooner, and been able to tell you more sooner, but we didn’t.”

Rumsfeld told the legislators that, when stories about the Taguba report appeared, “it was not yet in the Pentagon, to my knowledge.” As for the photographs, Rumsfeld told the senators, “I say no one in the Pentagon had seen them”; at the House hearing, he said, “I didn’t see them until last night at 7:30.” …

Taguba, watching the hearings, was appalled. He believed that Rumsfeld’s testimony was simply not true. “The photographs were available to him — if he wanted to see them,” Taguba said.

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...1600866_2.html
WALTER REED AND BEYOND
The War Inside
Troops Are Returning From the Battlefield With Psychological Wounds, But the Mental-Health System That Serves Them Makes Healing Difficult

By Dana Priest and Anne Hull
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, June 17, 2007; <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/16/AR2007061600866.html">Page A01</a>

......The military is also battling a crisis in mental-health care. Licensed psychologists are leaving at a far faster rate than they are being replaced. Their ranks have dwindled from 450 to 350 in recent years. Many said they left because they could not handle the stress of facing such pained soldiers. Inexperienced counselors muddle through, using therapies better suited for alcoholics or marriage counseling.

A new report by the Defense Department's Mental Health Task Force says the problems are even deeper. Providers of mental-health care are "not sufficiently accessible" to service members and are inadequately trained, it says, and evidence-based treatments are not used. The task force recommends an overhaul of the military's mental-health system, according to a draft of the report.

Another report, commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in the wake of the Walter Reed outpatient scandal, found similar problems: "There is not a coordinated effort to provide the training required to identify and treat these non-visible injuries, nor adequate research in order to develop the required training and refine the treatment plans."

But the Army is unlikely to do more significant research anytime soon. "We are at war, and to do good research takes writing up grants, it takes placebo control trials, it takes control groups," said Col. Elspeth Ritchie, the Army's top psychiatrist. "I don't think that that's our primary mission."

In attempting to deal with increasing mental-health needs, the military regularly launches Web sites and promotes self-help guides for soldiers. Maj. Gen. Gale S. Pollock, the Army's acting surgeon general, believes that doubling the number of mental-health professionals and boosting the pay of psychiatrists would help........

Plan9 · 06-17-2007, 03:10 PM

Bullshit! BULLSHIT-BULLSHIT-BULLSHIT!

There WAS a plan.

...

...

...

DOD needed to rotate MREs and T-rations. We had to start a war to consume them before they all expired. I had Chicken Chow Mein... three meals a day for a month!

(true story)

ratbastid · 06-17-2007, 07:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by seretogis

Though the scope and size is different, you'll note that in the past 50 years we have committed troops to all sorts of places which they should not be, and that the war in Iraq is still being funded by a Democrat-controlled congress.

I propose the following extension to Shakran's law:

As any discussion of Bush Administration malfeasance continues, the odds of congressional Democrats being blamed for said malfeasance shall approach 1.

In this particular case, it happened in post #2, which is, in my estimation, a record.

seretogis · 06-17-2007, 08:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ratbastid

I propose the following extension to Shakran's law:

As any discussion of Bush Administration malfeasance continues, the odds of congressional Democrats being blamed for said malfeasance shall approach 1.

In this particular case, it happened in post #2, which is, in my estimation, a record.

"Democrats being blamed for said malfeasance" implies that I am absolving Bush/Republicans of blame, which I am not. They are ALL to blame, not just Bush, not just Republicans, and not just Democrats. ALL of them have gotten us into and left us in this war and countless other foreign countries in which we do not belong. We cannot and should not attempt to police the world.

Willravel · 06-17-2007, 08:50 PM

I don't see you mention Bush in your post. Just the Dems. You can see where this might be confusing.

roachboy · 06-18-2007, 06:14 AM

meanwhile, there's more:

Quote:

Iraq on verge of genocidal war, warns ex-US official

Patrick Wintour
Monday June 18, 2007
The Guardian

The man who led the initial American effort to reconstruct Iraq after the war believes the country is on the brink of a genocidal civil war and its government will fall apart unless the US changes course and allows a three-way federal structure. He has also urged talks with Iran and other regional players.

Jay Garner, the former US general appointed two months before the invasion to head reconstruction in Iraq, admitted that before the 2003 war coordination between the various US departments and military had been disjointed.

He also disclosed that the US state department official in charge of postwar planning, Thomas Warrick, was prevented from joining his team by Donald Rumsfeld, who was defence secretary. He said he was shocked by the Pentagon's decision to reduce troop levels and disband the Iraqi army.

"The problem from my standpoint within the United States was that there had been a lot of planning done by each element ... by the CIA, the state department, the treasury department, defence department," Mr Garner told the Future of Iraq Commission chaired by Lord Ashdown, Lady Jay and Lord King.

"But the problem with that planning is that it had been done in the vertical stovepipe of that agency and the horizontal connection of those plans did not occur".

The Guardian disclosed, in an interview on Saturday, that Andrew Bearpark, the British director of operations for the body that took over from Mr Garner, the Coalition Provisional Authority, discovered the plan to boost Iraq's postwar electricity production ran to one page. He said those who failed to plan for the postwar period were guilty of "criminal irresponsibility".

In a Channel 4 documentary to be screened this week, Tony Blair's foreign policy adviser, David Manning, admits he does not know why more was not done to plan for the war's aftermath. He said: "Well it's hard to know exactly what happened over the postwar planning. I can only say that I remember the PM raising this many months before the war began. He was very exercised about it. ... But it isn't a question I find easy to answer "

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, a former British ambassador to the UN, tells the programme Mr Blair was tearing his hair out asking "What are the Americans up to?"

Mr Garner revealed he spent two frantic days in February 2003 trying to discover what postwar plans existed, and how they related to one another.

He said: "I asked Tom Warrick ... to join our organisation which he did the following Monday, and then about Thursday of that week I was told to remove him from the organisation. So I argued with that. I told Secretary Rumsfeld I didn't want to do that.

"I went to see Stephen Hadley, the number two at the National Security Council and said I don't want to do that but I was told I had to."

Mr Garner also admitted he did not see several of the plans prepared by the Bush administration and does not know why. He also revealed that he rang Mr Rumsfeld to tell him to stop reducing the US troop deployment and warned him that the consequent power vacuums were filling up with " fundamentalists". He also admits he was stunned by the decision in mid-May 2003 to disband the Iraqi army, saying at one stroke, it created a 200,000- strong armed opposition.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/internatio...105307,00.html

i just want to highlight a paragraph from the above: rather than bold it in the above, i'll just copy it again:

Quote:

The Guardian disclosed, in an interview on Saturday, that Andrew Bearpark, the British director of operations for the body that took over from Mr Garner, the Coalition Provisional Authority, discovered the plan to boost Iraq's postwar electricity production ran to one page. He said those who failed to plan for the postwar period were guilty of "criminal irresponsibility".

if this system were self-correcting in any meaningful way, everyone who voted to authorize this farce would resign. everyone who had a hand in planning it would resign. new elections would be held. a significant debate would unfold within the states amongst the population about what course makes sense now in iraq--clearly nothing the bush people have tried is working because THERE WAS NO FUCKING PLAN.

i still find this to be amazing...no plan....amazing....

seretogis · 06-18-2007, 07:56 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

if this system were self-correcting in any meaningful way, everyone who voted to authorize this farce would resign. everyone who had a hand in planning it would resign. new elections would be held. a significant debate would unfold within the states amongst the population about what course makes sense now in iraq--clearly nothing the bush people have tried is working because THERE WAS NO FUCKING PLAN.

Self-correcting? What? It wasn't MY fault, it was.. someone.. else's..! I didn't KNOW there was no plan. I didn't ask, but I assumed they MUST have one, so it's not MY fault!

etc etc.. Sadly, politicians These Days™ have no sense of responsibility and will not resign unless they are cornered by angry mobs with torches and pitch-forks. Also, the public is too apathetic to bother paying attention to any real news that takes longer to digest than a 30 second campaign ad. We are aboard a sinking ship.

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

i still find this to be amazing...no plan....amazing....

Don't worry, practice makes perfect, right? I'm sure the Iran invasion will turn out significantly less terribly, and after that we may even do decently when we invade North Korea. It's only a matter of time before the neo-cons and their ilk perfect their tactics.

aceventura3 · 06-18-2007, 08:09 AM

Here is a link to Bush's plan.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/ir...y_nov2005.html

Quote:

"Our mission in Iraq is clear. We're hunting down the terrorists. We're helping Iraqis build a free nation that is an ally in the war on terror. We're advancing freedom in the broader Middle East. We are removing a source of violence and instability, and laying the foundation of peace for our children and grandchildren."

-- President George W. Bush
June 28, 2003

It seems to me that some people had an unrealistic expectation that our enemy would not respond and adapt to our strategy and tactics. We are fighting a real war against real enemies.

Can anyone cite an historical war that went in exact accordance to a plan laid out in advance?

seretogis · 06-18-2007, 08:17 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

Can anyone cite an historical war that went in exact accordance to a plan laid out in advance?

Can anyone cite another historical war that was commenced in order to clean up Papa's mess from thirty years ago? Let's hope not.

aceventura3 · 06-18-2007, 08:22 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by seretogis

Can anyone cite another historical war that was commenced in order to clean up Papa's mess from thirty years ago? Let's hope not.

Alexander The Great initiated his first war on behalf of his father.

I am not sure I got the point of your question, but many wars have been fought over generational issues.

I think the current war in Iraq is being fought because we did not finish the job during the first war. I also think if we leave Iraq now, we will fight there again in the future.

roachboy · 06-18-2007, 08:32 AM

ace: let's not be ridiculous.
you know elmer fudd, yes?
what was his plan?
"i am hunting wabbits"
but at least in elmer fudd's case there were wabbits to be hunted.
they were built into the same cartoon.

in this case, the empty notion of "terrorists" is substituted for anything like a coherent plan for the post-war situation in iraq. if you read the "strategy" outlined by the white house, and assume that the category "terrorist" does not refer to anything in particular, you can see that there is no there there.

but this is not really about white house pr: this is about the concerns of the blair government from very early on in this debacle that there was, in fact, no plan.

that there are statements which purport to be plans means little---that there are individual plans seems actually symptomatic of the problem itself--if you read this quote from the article above, which i assume you overlooked:

Quote:

"The problem from my standpoint within the United States was that there had been a lot of planning done by each element ... by the CIA, the state department, the treasury department, defence department," Mr Garner told the Future of Iraq Commission chaired by Lord Ashdown, Lady Jay and Lord King.

"But the problem with that planning is that it had been done in the vertical stovepipe of that agency and the horizontal connection of those plans did not occur".

so it would follow, ace, that there probably are any number of individual plans but there is no plan.
this goes well beyond the unpredictability of war in general.

please do not waste your time posting defenses of the bush people that amount to nothing more than the usual relativizing nonsense ("well, everyone did x... so what the bush people have done is hunky dory.")

Willravel · 06-18-2007, 08:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by seretogis

Don't worry, practice makes perfect, right?

1 word: Vietnam. Think about the situation where the people we're said to have been protecting don't want us there and we're in the middle of a civil war. We're not going to win in Iraq, just like we lost in Vietnam.

We'll probably pull out of Iraq in 2008 when Barak Obama, Johnny Edwards, Hillary Clinton, or Ron Paul wins.

That's right. Suck it, Tancredo.

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

Here is a link to Bush's plan.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/ir...y_nov2005.html

It seems to me that some people had an unrealistic expectation that our enemy would not respond and adapt to our strategy and tactics. We are fighting a real war against real enemies.

Can anyone cite an historical war that went in exact accordance to a plan laid out in advance?

So we're still on that 9/11 Iraq thing? Is this 2003?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bush

The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11, 2001

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bush

We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th

This is the deceptive language of the Bush administration, and it's stupid. Iraq clearly had nothing to do with 9/11, and the only weak ass connection to terrorism is... wait for it... paying Palestinian suicide bombers! And guess what? They never got paid. Iraq has nothing to do with terrorism.

It seems people draw an unreasonable association between the 'war on terror' and the war in Iraq. We are in a civil war in Iraq, and we're trying to located and disable radical militants. Two separate causes. Two separate fuck-ups.

host · 06-18-2007, 08:43 AM

roachboy, all of this is interrelated and....at it's core, is the OSP:

Quote:

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0712-05.htm
Published on Saturday, July 12, 2003 by Knight-Ridder
Pentagon Civilians' Lack of Planning Contributed to Chaos in Iraq
by Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel

....The Pentagon group insisted on doing it its way because it had a visionary strategy that it hoped would transform Iraq into an ally of Israel, remove a potential threat to the Persian Gulf oil trade and encircle Iran with U.S. friends and allies. The problem was that officials at the State Department and CIA thought the vision was badly flawed and impractical, so the Pentagon planners simply excluded their rivals from involvement.

Feith, Luti and their advisers wanted to put Ahmad Chalabi - the controversial Iraqi exile leader of a coalition of opposition groups - in power in Baghdad. The Pentagon planners were convinced that Iraqis would warmly welcome the American-led coalition and that Chalabi, who boasted of having a secret network inside and outside the regime, and his supporters would replace Saddam and impose order.

Feith, in a series of responses Friday to written questions, denied that the Pentagon wanted to put Chalabi in charge.

But Pentagon adviser Richard Perle, who at the time was the chairman of the Defense Policy Board - an influential group of outside advisers to the Pentagon - and is close to Feith and Luti, acknowledged in an interview that installing Chalabi was the plan.

Referring to the Chalabi scenario, Perle said: "The Department of Defense proposed a plan that would have resulted in a substantial number of Iraqis available to assist in the immediate postwar period." Had it been accepted, "we'd be in much better shape today," he said.

Perle said blame for any planning failures belonged to the State Department and other agencies that opposed the Chalabi route.

A senior administration official, who requested anonymity, said the Pentagon officials were enamored of Chalabi because he advocated normal diplomatic relations with Israel. They believed that would have "taken off the board" one of the only remaining major Arab threats to Israeli security.

Moreover, Chalabi was key to containing the influence of Iran's radical Islamic leaders in the region, because he would have provided bases in Iraq for U.S. troops. That would complete Iran's encirclement by American military forces around the Persian Gulf and U.S. friends in Russia and Central Asia, he said.

But the failure to consult more widely on what to do if the Chalabi scenario failed denied American planners the benefits of a vast reservoir of expertise gained from peacekeeping and reconstruction in shattered nations from Bosnia to East Timor.

As one example, the Pentagon planners ignored an eight-month-long effort led by the State Department to prepare for the day when Saddam's dictatorship was gone. The "Future of Iraq" project, which involved dozens of exiled Iraqi professionals and 17 U.S. agencies, including the Pentagon, prepared strategies for everything from drawing up a new Iraqi judicial code to restoring the unique ecosystem of Iraq's southern marshes, which Saddam's regime had drained.

Virtually none of the "Future of Iraq" project's work was used once Saddam fell.

The first U.S. administrator in Iraq, retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, wanted the Future of Iraq project director, Tom Warrick, to join his staff in Baghdad. Warrick had begun packing his bags, but Pentagon civilians vetoed his appointment, said one current and one former official.

Meanwhile, postwar planning documents from the State Department, CIA and elsewhere were "simply disappearing down the black hole" at the Pentagon, said a former U.S. official with long Middle East experience who recently returned from Iraq.....

Quote:

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/thefi...3/hagel_1.html

...The media have avoided any deeper analysis of the root of the Plame scandal. Libby played only one part in the outing. The White House hasn't been directly confronted for its role in orchestrating the campaign to expose Plame.

The corporate media has quickly morphed the "CIA Leak" coverage away from the awkward details raised in the trial that implicate higher-ups. The standard for proving criminal conduct is high, and Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation showed the limits of prosecuting leaks. Still, many ethical barriers were crossed in the revealing of Valerie Plame's secret identity.

It wasn't by coincidence that the flow of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) tall tales and fanciful Al-Qaeda connections made its way into the media; they'd been directed there by the war's crafters and the people in the media to whom they routinely fed information. A group including Scooter Libby worked to promote the war as part of the White House Iraq Group. Reporter Judith Miller exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq on the front pages of The New York Times. The same reporter would go on to serve jail time in order to keep Fitzgerald and the grand jury from finding out the identity of the source who outed Plame to her.

The corporate media continue to talk about presidential candidacies for an election 18 months away. They're tired of celebrity doting, but will certainly return to issues other than how and why Plame was outed or, more importantly, by whom.

The media ignore the difference between "faulty intelligence" and outright lies which were planted to serve a narrow political agenda: to wage war on Iraq and obtain a second term in the White House.

What's in a title?

The corporate media have put the Plame story in a box, sealed it, and let it join the steady flow down the black hole. The story of Libby's conviction is barely 24 hours old before it's sandwiched by coverage of a huge lottery payout to a New Jersey resident and ActiveOn commercials.

Sometimes the media dance gets to be too much. I stopped watching CNN's coverage when the scrolling text described Plame as a "CIA analyst" in a gross distortion of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife's job description. Plame, in fact, directed a unit that was actively fighting the proliferation of WMD. Her unit worked through the front company of Brewster Jennings & Associates.

Plame's unit had rejected neocon darling Ahmed Chalabi, then head of the Iraqi National Congress and a convicted embezzler, who provided a stream of lies, or "faulty intelligence" as the media likes to put it. The media (through some of the same channels used to expose Plame) fanned pieces of information fed to the White House through Chalabi.

Plame's counterproliferation unit had discredited Chalabi as an intelligence asset. The State Department, which had assigned a team to do post-invasion planning on Iraq, similarly learned to ignore Chalabi.

Meanwhile, the neocons in the Pentagon and White House eagerly swallowed Chalabi's claims. Chalabi had said that the Americans would be welcomed with open arms [1]. The State Department and CIA disregarded Chalabi's assertions based on the grounds the source was biased.

The Pentagon, however, welcomed Chalabi's cheery predictions. Neocon advocates for war were eager for any intelligence that built a case against Hussein for WMD. It had been funding Chalabi's exile group, the Iraq National Congress [2]. His identity cloaked, quoted as an anonymous defector, Chalabi helped make the case for war, which scored political points with the neocon agenda within the administration.

The Pentagon, headed by Donald Rumsfeld, had become highly politicized. The intelligence-gathering responsibilities had shifted from traditional intelligence rivals at the CIA and State and closer to the defense secretary and Pentagon.

To the war-hungry neocons, the CIA was seen as weak, underestimating the threat and thus undermining the imperative for preemption. It's no wonder the CIA lost favor, as its higher standards had made it unable to appease the administration's demand for friendly intelligence. Intelligence that failed to make a "slam-dunk" case for war with Iraq simply wasn't acceptable. More rational voices were drowned by the shrill calls of the chickenhawks for war.

The enabling strategies came from a national security apparatus masterminded by Dick Cheney. After 9/11, the military and executive were closer than ever before; tentacles of the executive burrowed deep within the military decision-making apparatus and command structure, constricting the flow of information.

Under Bush, the chain of command underpinning the intelligence gathering process has been politicized and shifted from the CIA and State to the Pentagon. Dissent from subordinate intelligence gathering organs was suppressed alongside any nonconforming intelligence from rival agencies.

Still, the neocons were not content to rely on the Pentagon for its intelligence to promote the Iraq War. Neocons assigned two primary objectives for the Office of Special Plans (OSP), a shadowy, pro-war contingent of mostly Republican consultants operating within the Pentagon. The OSP was tasked with gathering news and information that referred to WMD in Iraq, or implicated the country in terrorism. It's been accused of cherry-picking intelligence that supported the war. [3]

The vice president, with Libby in tow, held meetings at Langley, where Cheney's been accused of arm-twisting the CIA.

Plame's name reportedly came up in the course of those meetings. Cheney appears unable to have been able to entirely shut down intelligence that contravened the case for war. Instead, by intimidating the CIA, he'd been able to staunch the flow of countervailing information, which included reports like Wilson's, which undermined the credibility of the lies ("false intelligence") that the White House Iraq Group peddled.

The intelligence that Plame's unit gathered eventually collided with spin churned out by neocon operatives at the Office of Special Plans, which had been assigned to build the case for war by the White House Iraq Group (WHIG).

Were Plame's unit not brought down, they threatened to contradict the findings of the OSP and implicate the administration for planting false intelligence. Thus Plame -- and more importantly her husband -- presented a political threat to the administration, especially once Wilson's op-ed in The New York Times, "What I Didn't Find in Africa," affirmed the former ambassador's intent to make the issue public. (Wilson has allegedly sought redress through private channels and was rebuffed.)

At some point the White House mandate shifted to an effort to contain criticism of its case for war. Key to its defense was the idea that "false intelligence" had made its way into the decision-making tree. In fact, we now know the intelligence was known to have been unsubstantiated, from sources like Chalabi and "Curveball," a defector with no credibility [2].

The packaging of the case for war required making taking shortcuts that could, in turn, become problems for the administration if the liberties it had taken with the intelligence gathering process were revealed. Wilson dared to attack the case for war, an important political objective for the White House. The only issue is how far the White House went to stem criticism of the intelligence it has used to make its case for war.

More to it?

Perhaps there's more to the "CIA Leak" than discrediting Joe Wilson. There's certainly far more to the scandal than the guilty verdict for a mid-level operative in the White House's core cadre.

Plame's group is rumored to have prevented a real life clandestine deal that may have brought live WMD to Iraq from Turkey. The White House would have been eager to discover WMD after the invasion. With an election a year away, the political consequences of an unraveling of false intelligence could have been costly. In this respect, Joe Wilson presented a clear and present danger to the administration's re-election.

If there had been an effort to smuggle WMD into Iraq -- and the motive was certainly there -- it may have been interdicted through Plame's counterproliferation group. A scheme to smuggle WMD into Iraq would backfire if it were exposed, causing tremendous damage.

Maybe Wilson's report on Niger's yellowcake was a Trojan Horse planted by the CIA as payback to the White House. Based on Wilson's report, the CIA must have known at the time that Iraq had not acquired yellowcake uranium from Niger, and that its oversight responsibility had been subverted or been intentionally ignored.

The CIA may have even gone so far as to keep Cheney in the dark on Wilson's findings. This might explain why Cheney was so eager to hear that Wilson had gone on a junket, not a real trip to verify claims that Iraq had bought yellowcake in Niger.

The CIA is responsible for overseeing the accuracy of content in the president's State of the Union Address, so the inclusion of the 16 words broke established protocol. The leadership at CIA had known about Wilson's report and the lack of a Niger connection. The infamous 16 words were added subsequently. By not intervening in the 16 words--something Tenet was clearly pressured to do -- the CIA let the administration birth a clear falsehood, one which Wilson would dutifully expose.

An abridgement of the CIA's role in confirming the validity of intelligence circumvented the normal system of check and balances on the State of the Union. If Bush's claims were inaccurate, the system for confirming them had been mismanaged, demonstrating, at a minimum, gross negligence or quite possibly a conspiracy to produce and spread fake intelligence.

Eager to make its case, the White House had been suppressing any intelligence that was contradictory to that manufactured by the OSP and spread by the WHIG, which included many of the same people who are suspected of leaking Plame's identity to reporters: Cheney, Libby, Armitage, and Rove.

Wilson's report on Niger uranium was only one flash point where truth and the administration's positions failed to meet. Jailed on a contempt charge for refusing to disclose the source who told her about Plame, reporter Judith Miller wrote numerous articles based on questionable intelligence. One of her primary sources may have been Libby; if not why had she tried so hard to keep Libby's role out of Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald's reach?

Many questions remain unanswered concerning the White House's role in building the case for war, the shortcuts it took, and perhaps even the outright lies it told to get its war in Iraq.

Plame exposure

Plame's outing sent the message that the administration was willing to go to extreme lengths, even betrayal, to protect the intelligence on which it had made its case for war.

Plame's secret identity was pumped into the symbiotic relationship between the press and the White House, where secret channels turn secrets into gossip. Libby, Armitage, Rove, and other White House operatives were able to spread information about Plame. By leaking simultaneously, through multiple reporters, all but Libby have managed to avoid any legal consequences, which is no great challenge considering the difficulty of prosecuting leaks.

It's worth remembering that Libby has faced no charges related directly to revealing Plame's identity, and he may even be pardoned despite his recent conviction.

The media were quick to discuss the probability of a pardon. The coverage I saw raised no debate on the fairness of Libby walking free, or the injustice done Plame, her livelihood, or our national security, instead, time was given over to discussion of whether one participant in her outing would escape punishment through a late-term Bush pardon, such as Clinton's pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich.

Under the notion of a "unitary executive," the powers of the executive are unlimited. One example of this exercise of absolute power is the use of signing statements by the president. President Bush claims that he is able to take any action, on whatever grounds necessary, in order to protect the American people from terrorism.

The exercise of absolute power -- called in its many forms tyranny -- tends to lead most tyrants to magnify their own authority to mammoth proportions. The sense of superiority leads to overestimating the power of the regime. In time, aggression is constrained by geopolitical and military limitations, like those faced by the US in the bogus "War on Terror."

The result of the Libby trial fails to demonstrate that any legal limits have been established in the Bush presidency's presumption of preeminent authority. The White House hasn't been held accountable for its role in revealing the identity of a covert agent, which is illegal under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 (50 U.S.C. 421 et seq.)

It will come down to Congress to hold the White House accountable. A full inquiry into the Plame leak scandal must be arranged promptly. To weaken Republican aspirations for the presidency in 2008, Democrats have plenty of political ammunition. The Plame betrayal presents one more bullet, alongside the prominent failures in Katrina and Iraq.

If our political systems still functions, Congress must confront the White House for its fabricated justifications for war.

Footnotes:

<b>1. "Post-war planning non-existent" By Warren P. Strobel and John Walcott; Knight Ridder Newspapers; Oct.17, 2004; " . . . 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."</b>

2. Excerpt, NBC News' Meet the Press, May 16, 2004
Russert: You mentioned Mr. Ahmad Chalabi. He was the person responsible for the agent Curveball, that I talked about with Secretary Powell, who gave discredited information. Mr. Chalabi is still on the payroll of the United States government for three . . .
Biden: Almost 400 a month.
Russert: Four hundred thousand dollars . . .
Biden: A month."

3. "The New Pentagon Papers" by Karen Kwiatkowski; Salon.com March 3, 2004

Other Sources:

"The spies who pushed for war" by Julian Borger

"What Valerie Plame Really Did at the CIA" David Corn

"Plame Games Expose WMD 'Intelligence Failure' Scam" by Ahmed Amr

"Wolfowitz Committee Told White House to Hype Dubious Uranium Claims" by Jason Leopold

Postwar Planning: "Pentagon Civilians' Lack of Planning Contributed to Chaos in Iraq" by Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0712-05.htm

"Selective Intelligence" by Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker May 6, 2003; "The Special Plans Office developed a close working relationship with the I.N.C., and this strengthened its position in disputes with the C.I.A. and gave the Pentagon's pro-war leadership added leverage in its constant disputes with the State Department. Special Plans also became a conduit for intelligence reports from the I.N.C. to officials in the White House."
John B. Peebles writes for his blog, jbpeebles.blogspot.com/, where he follows global, political and economic issues.

Posted by: che | March 12, 2007 12:04 PM

Quote:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story...752591,00.html
Rebel groups reject CIA overtures down on the farm

Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday July 10, 2002
The Guardian

Deep in the bowels of the US state department, not far from the cafeteria, there is a small office identified only by a handwritten sign on the door reading: The Future of Iraq Project.

Such is the ramshackle reality lying beneath the Bush administration's pronouncements on regime change in Baghdad. There is little doubt that the Pentagon is devising invasion plans in deadly earnest, but the parallel effort to build a political alternative has been half-hearted to say the least. In fact it is in retreat on several fronts.

The secret side of this "unconventional war" has not been going any more convincingly. Recent administration leaks have confirmed that there was a presidential directive to the CIA in February, ordering the agency to topple Saddam Hussein, with extreme prejudice if neces sary. But here again, the reality seems to be falling far short of the hype.

Already stretched and humiliated in the hunt for al-Qaida, CIA agents have been approaching would-be allies among the Iraqi opposition who have little reason to trust them, having been let down by Washington twice before.

Morale is so poor in the CIA that, in recent testimony to Congress, its director, George Tenet, admitted the agency had no more than a 15% prospect of carrying out its presidential order.

The CIA was taught a sobering lesson on its lowly standing among Iraqi rebel groups on its own home ground in April.

The agency runs a boot camp near Williamsburg in Virginia for its paramilitary units, which played an important role in Afghanistan. It is officially called Camp Perry, but inside the CIA it known simply as The Farm. Alongside the training camp it has a "black" area which serves as a venue for the secret side of US diplomacy. Foreign leaders, rebels or agents can be flown in without the complications of visas and customs, for meetings that officially never happen.

In late April, The Farm was the site of delicate talks with Kurdish leaders, aimed at persuading them to cooperate in the effort to topple President Saddam. The guests of honour were Masoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), and Jalal Talabani, leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) - the only opposition with significant troop numbers and territory under their control.

The KDP and PUK confirm the meeting took place but officially insist it took place in Germany. Privately Kurdish opposition officials confirm they flew to Virginia.

A US intelligence source also told the Guardian that the encounter took place at The Farm and that the US was represented by CIA officials and General Wayne Downing, the president's military adviser on counter-terrorism and the author of a 1998 plan to unseat Saddam relying heavily on local opposition and US air power.

"The idea was to see what the Kurds would be prepared to do in a war on Baghdad," the US source said.

Specifically, the Kurds were asked to agree to the establishment of CIA stations at their headquarters in Irbil and Suleimaniyah, but they demurred. According to one account, Mr Barzani and Mr Talabani asked for more money than the CIA was prepared to offer.

However, according to a Kurdish source, the meeting failed for a more fundamental reason: lack of trust. The Kurds had been encouraged to rise up against Saddam twice, in 1991 and 1995, and both times Washington had abandoned them to the Iraqi army. In 1995, the CIA pulled the plug on the insurrection 48 hours before it was due to begin.

"We wanted to know if that was going to happen again. If Saddam struck at us, would we be protected?" the Kurdish opposition activist said.

At one point, the Kurds reportedly asked whether the US officials at The Farm really represented the entire administration, and so Ryan Crocker, a state department official who had visited Kurdistan a few months earlier, was hastily called in from Washington. No senior Pentagon officials attended.

It was hardly a convincing demonstration of US resolve, and the American representatives were unable to provide the assurances the Kurds were seeking.

Denounced

Last week, Mr Barzani denounced the secret war, telling the Guardian: "We cannot stop the US [from taking covert action], but we would like there to be transparency and clarity, and for there to be no covers or curtains to hide behind."

The White House announced Gen Downing's resignation after less than a year as counter-terrorism adviser. But a spokesman denied that his departure had anything to do with the fact that he lost his battle to persuade the administration to support a guerrilla campaign by Iraqi rebel groups against Baghdad.

Meanwhile, the understaffed and underfunded Future of Iraq Project has been spending more effort struggling with other government departments than plotting Saddam's downfall. Two US-sponsored meetings aimed at bringing members of the Iraqi opposition together have been put off indefinitely. One was to have been a seminar in Washington for Iraqi ex-officers in exile. It was to have taken place under the auspices of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), with the backing of the Pentagon and members of Congress who view the INC, a London-based umbrella organisation, as the rightful vanguard of the opposition.

However, the state department, convinced that the INC is corrupt and unreliable, dragged its feet on issuing visas to the Iraqi generals in Europe, who were themselves sceptical about the role of the INC and its leading figure, Ahmed Chalabi. Ultimately Congress grew impatient and suspended the funding.

The state department has simultaneously been trying to organise another Iraqi opposition conference in Europe, to talk about life after Saddam. Mr Chalabi lobbied against the meeting among his friends at the defence department and in Congress, and the conference has consequently been put on hold.

The state department has also cut off funds to the INC's intelligence gathering effort, which smuggled defectors and information about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction out of Iraq.

The shambles of the political struggle might suggest that the Bush administration is not serious about getting rid of the Iraqi dictator. But Many analysts believe that the lack of effort invested in building political alliances simply reflects the fact that the Bush administration does not attach much importance to them.

"My theory is that the US government is going to want to do this on its own, on the basis that if you work with the Kurds and the Shi'ites you're going to end up with three Iraqs rather than one," said John Pike, who runs a Washington security thinktank, GlobalSecurity.org.

In a forthcoming paper for the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Anthony Cordesman, a strategic analyst, argues: "The US has shown in the past that it can execute military operations without any clear plan for conflict termination and nation building.

"The American military culture seems to feel its responsibility ends with strategy and grand strategy is the province of politicians and God."

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...nguage=printer
After the War
Reconstruction Planners Worry, Wait and Reevaluate

By Susan B. Glasser and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, April 2, 2003; Page A01

....... But with military commanders warning of a longer and more difficult war, Garner's team also has been reevaluating its strategy. Plans to send a large number of U.S. civilians into Iraq are being postponed, given concerns about security even in areas of southern Iraq nominally under U.S. control.

"We all thought we were going to be in there by now," said one official familiar with the Garner group's work. "Instead of throwing things together in a week, we've had a lot more time to think about it."

The additional time has fueled additional worries. Instead of being welcomed as a liberation force, some in the group fear, a U.S.-led transitional government will be greeted with deep suspicion, perhaps even resistance. The group is devoting meetings to discussion of "what is going to happen when the hostilities end," according to the official.

In Washington, meanwhile, disagreement over control of the program surfaced as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld vetoed the State Department's selection of eight current and former diplomats to join Garner's team. Some officials here complain that the Pentagon is seeking to dominate every aspect of Iraq's postwar reconstruction.

Garner's mandate is to provide humanitarian assistance, reconstruct damaged infrastructure and set the country on the road to a representative self-government before authority is fully handed over to Iraqis. Not since the period after World War II has the United States embarked on such an ambitious transformation project -- seizing control of a large country to refashion its political system and rebuild its economy.

Garner constantly lectures his staff, several officials said, on the limited nature of their mission, telling them they must be prepared to "work their way out of a job" within 90 days. On his first visit to the southern Iraqi port of Umm Qasr today, Garner made that point publicly.

"We're here to do the job of liberating them, of providing them with a form of government that represents the freely elected will of the people. We'll do it as fast as we can, and once we've done it, we'll turn everything over to them. We'll begin turning things over right away, and we'll make this a better place for everybody," he said.

But some officials doubt that three months is a realistic period in which to put the country on its feet. "This is a very short-term project -- 90 days. Basically we can get people back to work, we can get kids back to school, we can make some high-profile infrastructure fixes," said one official. "What comes after that 90 days, we don't know."

Many of the most difficult policy issues that would face this government-in-waiting are unresolved. The group is discussing how much power the interim Iraqi government would have compared with U.S. overseers, how to root out apparatchiks from Hussein's ruling Baath Party while keeping government functioning, and how to drastically restructure and reduce the size of the Iraqi army while providing for future national security.

Some of those involved in the discussions say they believe the United States would retain power over important government functions even after the formation of an Iraqi authority. Others privately concede the task could stretch on for many more months.

"Some of us came out here thinking it would be a three- or four-month operation," one member of Garner's team said. "Now it's clear that we're going to be here, and eventually in Baghdad, for a lot longer than we expected."

One participant in a recent planning session questioned whether the group fully recognizes the complexity and chaos that officials are likely to encounter in a postwar Iraq.

"The presentation was full of charts and reporting lines and discussions about whether there should be a dotted line or a straight line," he said. "It was like a Boston Consulting Group presentation to IBM. It was so different than what the situation really is in Iraq. That is going to be a big, big shock to them."

Garner's team is made up almost exclusively of Americans, many of them former or current officials. Aides come from the Pentagon, the State Department and other departments and agencies, including Treasury, Justice, the Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Army Corps of Engineers. The only non-Americans are a handful of British and Australian diplomats, and a small group of Iraqi exiles. The United Nations is expected to "play some part in the equation," an official said, but U.S. officials have made clear it will be a subordinate role.

Three officials have been named to administer areas of Iraq: Bruce Moore, a retired general, in the north; Barbara Bodine, the former U.S. ambassador to Yemen who served in Baghdad in the 1980s, for the central region, including Baghdad; and Buck Walters, another retired general, in the south. Three other Garner deputies are in charge of broad areas -- humanitarian assistance coordinated by George Ward, a former U.S. Marine and ambassador to Namibia; reconstruction by Lewis Lucke, a veteran of USAID; and civil administration by Michael Mobbs, a Reagan-era arms negotiator and Pentagon legal adviser.

Differences between the Pentagon and State Department over the team's composition have affected officials who were on their way to the region. It is not known whether the dispute will further slow the group's work.

Here at the beach, Garner's transitional government-in-waiting has begun to shape that agenda with military precision -- day-by-day timetables for restarting key government functions, checklists for taking over ministries. The official mantra is secrecy. "It'll get rolled out when it gets rolled out," one official said.

Yet the process of reinventing Iraq is also happening in plain view of the press corps gathered at the same hotel. As scenes of destruction in Iraq blare on television sets, Garner's postwar planners tote Filofaxes along with their military-issue gas masks. British Gurkhas, tapped to provide security for the team, walked across the sand one recent morning in civilian clothes. Each morning at 7:30, the military officers in the group gather near a swimming pool to get their marching orders for the day.

Participants are developing plans for taking over Iraq's 23 government ministries, with a key U.S. adviser supervising work along with Iraqi exiles. Experts from Treasury are deciding how best to scrap the Iraqi currency -- featuring likenesses of Hussein -- and replace it, at least temporarily, with the U.S. dollar. At another hotel up the road, a group of Iraqi exiles working with Garner has formed the "indigenous media group" to reinvent Iraqi television, radio and newspapers.

Although Garner's team is assembling a list of Iraqi exiles with expertise in specific areas of governance -- finance, agriculture, health and so forth -- U.S. officials acknowledge that they have little idea of what they will find in each ministry.

"When they are reopened, who will show up for work?" one participant said. "How do we find the technocrats?"

Lack of on-the-ground knowledge is a key impediment for Garner's group. A handful of State Department officials involved in the process have had experience in Iraq, but none after 1990, when the United States severed diplomatic relations with Hussein's government.

The experiment may get its first test in southern Iraq, in areas near Kuwait already under U.S. and British control. Sources familiar with the discussions here said it is possible that Garner's group may move into southern Iraq even as the fight rages farther north.

British Maj. Gen. Albert Whitley, serving as a deputy to the U.S. commander of land forces in Iraq, said military planners envision a "gradual transfer" of responsibility to Garner for humanitarian assistance once they can "provide a secure environment" in which civilian aid groups can operate.

There is much more uncertainty about how to restart a functioning government without the all-pervasive Baath Party, and Whitley, who is in charge of postwar planning for the land forces here, made clear that many of those decisions would fall to the Garner team. For example, British forces are currently detaining dozens of local Baath Party officials and paramilitary forces with the expectation that they will be subject eventually to "some judicial process," Whitley said. "But who that judge and jury will be, I don't know," he added.

Quote:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/19/in...rint&position=
State Dept. Study Foresaw Trouble Now Plaguing Iraq
by Eric Schmitt and Joel Brinkley
Sunday, October 19, 2003

WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 — A yearlong State Department study predicted many of the problems that have plagued the American-led occupation of Iraq, according to internal State Department documents and interviews with administration and Congressional officials.

Beginning in April 2002, the State Department project assembled more than 200 Iraqi lawyers, engineers, business people and other experts into 17 working groups to study topics ranging from creating a new justice system to reorganizing the military to revamping the economy.

Their findings included a much more dire assessment of Iraq's dilapidated electrical and water systems than many Pentagon officials assumed. They warned of a society so brutalized by Saddam Hussein's rule that many Iraqis might react coolly to Americans' notion of quickly rebuilding civil society.

Several officials said that many of the findings in the $5 million study were ignored by Pentagon officials until recently, although the Pentagon said they took the findings into account. The work is now being relied on heavily as occupation forces struggle to impose stability in Iraq.

The working group studying transitional justice was eerily prescient in forecasting the widespread looting in the aftermath of the fall of Mr. Hussein's government, caused in part by thousands of criminals set free from prison, and it recommended force to prevent the chaos.

"The period immediately after regime change might offer these criminals the opportunity to engage in acts of killing, plunder and looting," the report warned, urging American officials to "organize military patrols by coalition forces in all major cities to prevent lawlessness, especially against vital utilities and key government facilities."

Despite the scope of the project, the military office initially charged with rebuilding Iraq did not learn of it until a major government drill for the postwar mission was held in Washington in late February, less than a month before the conflict began, said Ron Adams, the office's deputy director.

The man overseeing the planning, Tom Warrick, a State Department official, so impressed aides to Jay Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general heading the military's reconstruction office, that they recruited Mr. Warrick to join their team.

George Ward, an aide to General Garner, said the reconstruction office wanted to use Mr. Warrick's knowledge because "we had few experts on Iraq on the staff."

But top Pentagon officials blocked Mr. Warrick's appointment, and much of the project's work was shelved, State Department officials said. Mr. Warrick declined to be interviewed for this article.

The Defense Department, which had the lead role for planning postwar operations and reconstruction in Iraq, denied that it had shunned the State Department planning effort.

"It is flatly wrong to say this work was ignored," said the Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita. "It was good work. It was taken into account. It had some influence on people's thinking and it was a valuable contribution."

The broad outlines of the work, called the Future of Iraq Project, have been widely known, but new details emerged this week after the State Department sent Congress the project's 13 volumes of reports and supporting documents, which several House and Senate committees had requested weeks ago.

The documents are unclassified but labeled "official use only," and were not intended for public distribution, officials said. But Congressional officials from both parties allowed The New York Times to review the volumes, totaling more than 2,000 pages, revealing previously unknown details behind the planning.

Administration officials say there was postwar planning at several government agencies, but much of the work at any one agency was largely disconnected from that at others.

In the end, the American military and civilian officials who first entered Iraq prepared for several possible problems: numerous fires in the oil fields, a massive humanitarian crisis, widespread revenge attacks against former leaders of Mr. Hussein's government and threats from Iraq's neighbors. In fact, none of those problems occurred to any great degree.

Officials acknowledge that the United States was not well prepared for what did occur: chiefly widespread looting and related security threats, even though the State Department study predicted them.

Senior said the Pentagon squandered a chance to anticipate more of the postwar pitfalls by not fully incorporating the State Department information.

"Had we done more work and more of a commitment at the front end, there would be drastically different results now," said Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee.

Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Feb. 11, Marc Grossman, the under secretary of state for political affairs, said the working groups were "not to have an academic discussion but to consider thoughts and plans for what can be done immediately."

But some senior Pentagon officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that while some of the project's work was well done, much of it was superficial and too academic to be practical.

"It was mostly ignored," said one senior defense official. "State has good ideas and a feel for the political landscape, but they're bad at implementing anything. Defense, on the other hand, is excellent at logistical stuff, but has blinders when it comes to policy. We needed to blend these two together."

A review of the work shows a wide range of quality and industriousness. For example, the transitional justice working group, made up of Iraqi judges, law professors and legal experts, has met four times and drafted more than 600 pages of proposed reforms in the Iraqi criminal code, civil code, nationality laws and military procedure. Other working groups, however, met only once and produced slim reports or none at all.

"There was a wealth of information in the working group if someone had just collated and used it," said Nasreen Barwari, who served on the economy working group and is now the Iraqi minister of public works. "What they did seems to have been a one-sided opinion."

Many of the working groups offered long-term recommendations as well as short-term fixes to potential problems.

The group studying defense policy and institutions expected problems if the Iraqi Army was disbanded quickly — a step L. Paul Bremer III, the chief American civil administrator in Iraq, took. The working group recommended that jobs be found for demobilized troops to avoid having them turn against allied forces as some are believed to have done.

After special security organizations that ensured Mr. Hussein's grip on power were abolished, the working group recommended halving the 400,000-member military over time and reorganizing Iraqi special forces to become peacekeeping troops, as well as counterdrug and counterterrorism forces. Under the plan, military intelligence units would help American troops root out terrorists infiltrating postwar Iraq.

"The Iraqi armed forces and the army should be rebuilt according to the tenets and programs of democratic life," one working group member recommended.

The democratic principles working group wrestled with myriad complicated issues from reinvigorating a dormant political system to forming special tribunals for trying war criminals to laying out principles of a new Iraqi bill of rights.

It declared the thorny question of the relationship between that secular state and Islamic religion one "only the people of Iraq can decide," and avoided a recommendation on it.

Members of this working group were divided over whether to back a provisional government made up of Iraqi exiles or adopt the model that ultimately was adopted, the Iraqi Governing Council, made up of members from a broad range of ethnic and religious backgrounds. The group presented both options.

The transparency and anticorruption working group warned that "actions regarding anticorruption must start immediately; it cannot wait until the legal, legislative and executive systems are reformed."

The economy and infrastructure working group warned of the deep investments needed to repair Iraq's water, electrical and sewage systems. The free media working group noted the potential to use Iraq's television and radio capabilities to promote the goals of a post-Hussein Iraq, an aim many critics say the occupation has fumbled so far.

Encouraging Iraqis to emerge from three decades of dictatorship and embrace a vibrant civil society including labor unions, artist guilds and professional associations, could be more difficult than anticipated, the civil society capacity buildup working group cautioned: "The people's main concern has become basic survival and not building their civil society."

The groups' ideas may not have been fully incorporated before the war, but they are getting a closer look now. Many of the Iraqi ministers are graduates of the working groups, and have brought that experience with them. Since last spring, new arrivals to Mr. Bremer's staff in Baghdad have received a CD-ROM version of the State Department's 13-volume work. "It's our bible coming out here," said one senior official in Baghdad.

Willravel · 06-18-2007, 08:45 AM

GOOD GOD.

The_Jazz · 06-18-2007, 08:46 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by seretogis

Can anyone cite another historical war that was commenced in order to clean up Papa's mess from thirty years ago? Let's hope not.

The Crimean War (grandma's mess actually, but I assume that still works)
The War of Polish Succession (depends on the relation to Peter I)
A whole bunch of Russo/Turkish wars

I can go through any number of other European wars with a father/son ruling combination, but the Russian ones are so neat and tidy because the autocratic nature of the governments lends itself so nicely to making the point.

The idea that the sole reason for the invasion of Iraq was the son's need to measure up to the father, or anything of the sort, is laughable.

If indeed this venture proves to be as big a failure as it seems now, then I think it will prove to be a systemic failure, not an individual one. There's more than enough blame to go around here.

aceventura3 · 06-18-2007, 09:00 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

ace: let's not be ridiculous.
you know elmer fudd, yes?
what was his plan?
"i am hunting wabbits"
but at least in elmer fudd's case there were wabbits to be hunted.
they were built into the same cartoon.

Perhaps it boils down to how much detail you want. Assuming Elmer is a real hunter for a moment. He may tell his wife a non-hunter, that he is going hunting he gathers his stuff and leaves. If that was all, to a hunter, his plan to go hunting is no plan. But if Elmer actually talks to his hunter friends and gives the details of what he is hunting, what he going to use, times to be in certain locations, etc, etc., then they may or may not agree that he has a good plan, but he had a plan.

So I am not clear are you saying there was no plan or that the plan was not a good one?

Quote:

in this case, the empty notion of "terrorists" is substituted for anything like a coherent plan for the post-war situation in iraq. if you read the "strategy" outlined by the white house, and assume that the category "terrorist" does not refer to anything in particular, you can see that there is no there there.

but this is not really about white house pr: this is about the concerns of the blair government from very early on in this debacle that there was, in fact, no plan.

So, they say "in fact, no plan", let's think about that...I thought about it and at best it is not a statement one could take literally. Given the size of our army in Iraq, you have to have a plan, or else how do you feed your army?

Quote:

that there are statements which purport to be plans means little---that there are individual plans seems actually symptomatic of the problem itself--if you read this quote from the article above, which i assume you overlooked:

Did not overlook it. We won't really know about the details and real failing of the Bush plan until after the war and until after all the key players are out of office and retired. People who were not there really can't say much about the planning. All they know is what they were told.

Quote:

so it would follow, ace, that there probably are any number of individual plans but there is no plan.
this goes well beyond the unpredictability of war in general.

please do not waste your time posting defenses of the bush people that amount to nothing more than the usual relativizing nonsense ("well, everyone did x... so what the bush people have done is hunky dory.")

I decide how I spend my time.

I understand why you chose not to directly repond to the point in my first post here. Basically you have no response. To simply say there is no plan ( or there are plans, I am not clear on your position after reading that you think there were individual plans but also take the position there was no plan) and it goes beyond the unpredictability of war is not a real response.

roachboy · 06-18-2007, 09:17 AM

ace:
you haven't got a leg to stand on.

it seems that there are others in this community who are patient enough to indulge you in the particular style of conversation that you seem to prefer:
i am not one of those people.

like you, i choose how to spend my time.
this is one of those choices.

aceventura3 · 06-18-2007, 09:47 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

ace:
you haven't got a leg to stand on.

it seems that there are others in this community who are patient enough to indulge you in the particular style of conversation that you seem to prefer:
i am not one of those people.

like you, i choose how to spend my time.
this is one of those choices.

What is the point of this. You could have ignored me from the beginging. And now if you are going to ignore me why not do it, rather than telling me about it. I simply posted a link to the Bush plan and you folks change the subject and then go balistic. O.k., it is a free country.

Assuming Roachboy won't read this, I ask this question for my amusement (since I know Bush haters won't answer) or for anyone objectively interested in the OP.

What was the plan of the Allied forces after the invasion of Normandy? Was that mission successfully accomplished? How would you compare and contrast the invasion of Iraq to the invasion of Normandy in terms of planning after the invasions?

host · 06-18-2007, 10:48 AM

ace....if you want to be taken seriously...why don't you read the news reporting that roachboy and I have posted....my post details the State Dept. post Iraq invasion planning as early as in 2002...through it's rejection by "civilians in the pentagon"?

Then you might react to specific details in the news reporting....singling out passages or details that don't jive with earlier/later reports from the same....or other sources not influenced or owned by Fox/CNP/Bozell/Horowitz or the RNC.

We are all beholden to reporting from news or investigative journalists.... bolstered by quotes from whistleblowers and attributions of "officials who asked not to be named." Individual reporters.... like James Risen of the NY Times and Pincus of the WAPO build reputations for reliable reporting.

We learn from experience and by the playing out of reported incidents in "the fullness of time"....who reports reliably....and who shills...ala Judith Miller or John Solomon.

All of us only "know" what these journalists publish or televise....ace. When I read a post from you like the one I quote in this post.....with a "Bush had a plan" statement so conflicting with the reported record....with what we now know to be the highly probable account of the quashing by Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld of the actual expert PLAN....I have to agree with roachboy...about having better ways to spend time than going around and around here with you.

When you are willing to respond to opinons supported by the reported record....without relying almost solely on IBD editorials for your support....maybe you won't receive responses to your posts similar to roachboy's last one.....

dc_dux · 06-18-2007, 10:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

I simply posted a link to the Bush plan and you folks change the subject and then go balistic. O.k., it is a free country.

What was the plan of the Allied forces after the invasion of Normandy? Was that mission successfully accomplished? How would you compare and contrast the invasion of Iraq to the invasion of Normandy in terms of planning after the invasions?

I'll take a shot at it

ace....the "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" so-called "plan" that you linked to on the WH website was written in 2005 (not pre-invasion) in response to criticism that there was no plan... and is hardly a plan at all, but rather a glorified "statement of goals and objectives" ..written well after the fact.

From what I have read from numerous sources, there was no "phase IV" (after taking out Saddam) planning before the invasion.

Brigadier General Mark Scheid, chief of the Logistics War Plans Division after 9/11, and one of the people with primary responsibility for war planning...was interviewed last year and had this to say about pre-war planning for post Saddam Iraq:

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."

Scheid said the planners continued to try "to write what was called Phase 4," or the piece of the plan that included post-invasion operations like occupation.
Even if the troops didn't stay, "at least we have to plan for it," Scheid said.

"I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that," Scheid said. "We would not do planning for Phase 4 operations, which would require all those additional troops that people talk about today.

"He said we will not do that because the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war."

...."In his own mind he thought we could go in and fight and take out the regime and come out. But a lot of us planners were having a real hard time with it because we were also thinking we can't do this. Once you tear up a country you have to stay and rebuild it. It was very challenging."

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/arc..._09/009469.php

From the National Security Archive:

he U.S. Central Command's war plan for invading Iraq postulated in August 2002 that the U.S. would have only 5,000 troops left in Iraq as of December 2006, according to the Command's PowerPoint briefing slides, which were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and are posted on the Web today by the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org).

The PowerPoint slides, prepared by CentCom planners for Gen. Tommy Franks under code name POLO STEP, for briefings during 2002 for President Bush, the NSC, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, the JCS, and Franks' commanders, refer to the "Phase IV" post-hostilities period as "UNKNOWN" and "months" in duration, but assume that U.S. forces would be almost completely "re-deployed" out of Iraq within 45 months of the invasion (i.e. December 2006).

"Completely unrealistic assumptions about a post-Saddam Iraq permeate these war plans," said National Security Archive Executive Director Thomas Blanton. "First, they assumed that a provisional government would be in place by 'D-Day', then that the Iraqis would stay in their garrisons and be reliable partners, and finally that the post-hostilities phase would be a matter of mere 'months'. All of these were delusions."
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB214/index.htm

To be provided:

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."
...
At the Pentagon, the director of the Joint Staff, Army Gen. George Casey, repeatedly pressed Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of the Central Command, for a "Phase 4," or postwar, plan, the senior defense official said.

"Casey was screaming, 'Where is our Phase 4 plan?' " the official said. It never arrived.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/staff/war...ory/16325.html

aceventura3 · 06-18-2007, 07:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dc_dux

I'll take a shot at it

ace....the "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" so-called "plan" that you linked to on the WH website was written in 2005 (not pre-invasion) in response to criticism that there was no plan... and is hardly a plan at all, but rather a glorified "statement of goals and objectives" ..written well after the fact.

From what I have read from numerous sources, there was no "phase IV" (after taking out Saddam) planning before the invasion.

Brigadier General Mark Scheid, chief of the Logistics War Plans Division after 9/11, and one of the people with primary responsibility for war planning...was interviewed last year and had this to say about pre-war planning for post Saddam Iraq:

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."

Scheid said the planners continued to try "to write what was called Phase 4," or the piece of the plan that included post-invasion operations like occupation.
Even if the troops didn't stay, "at least we have to plan for it," Scheid said.

"I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that," Scheid said. "We would not do planning for Phase 4 operations, which would require all those additional troops that people talk about today.

"He said we will not do that because the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war."

...."In his own mind he thought we could go in and fight and take out the regime and come out. But a lot of us planners were having a real hard time with it because we were also thinking we can't do this. Once you tear up a country you have to stay and rebuild it. It was very challenging."

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/arc..._09/009469.php

From the National Security Archive:

he U.S. Central Command's war plan for invading Iraq postulated in August 2002 that the U.S. would have only 5,000 troops left in Iraq as of December 2006, according to the Command's PowerPoint briefing slides, which were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and are posted on the Web today by the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org).

The PowerPoint slides, prepared by CentCom planners for Gen. Tommy Franks under code name POLO STEP, for briefings during 2002 for President Bush, the NSC, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, the JCS, and Franks' commanders, refer to the "Phase IV" post-hostilities period as "UNKNOWN" and "months" in duration, but assume that U.S. forces would be almost completely "re-deployed" out of Iraq within 45 months of the invasion (i.e. December 2006).

"Completely unrealistic assumptions about a post-Saddam Iraq permeate these war plans," said National Security Archive Executive Director Thomas Blanton. "First, they assumed that a provisional government would be in place by 'D-Day', then that the Iraqis would stay in their garrisons and be reliable partners, and finally that the post-hostilities phase would be a matter of mere 'months'. All of these were delusions."
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB214/index.htm

To be provided:

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."
...
At the Pentagon, the director of the Joint Staff, Army Gen. George Casey, repeatedly pressed Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of the Central Command, for a "Phase 4," or postwar, plan, the senior defense official said.

"Casey was screaming, 'Where is our Phase 4 plan?' " the official said. It never arrived.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/staff/war...ory/16325.html

For the sake of arguement for the moment I will say that I agree there was no plan because the discussion won't get past that issue otherwise.

Given no "Phase 4 plan" I ask the question how does the current situation compare to past wars? I would simply suggest that sometimes in war you have to make decisions on the "fly". During war, you may be presented with an opportunity or challenge that you did not anticipate. I used Normandy as an example, what was our plan after that invasion? Basically it was - let's see which army can get to Berlin first.

Also, most reasonable people can understand that it would have been virtually impossible to have a plan for every possible condition we might face after taking Sadaam out of office. So again assuming there was no "phase 4 plan", does not mean things had to go as badly as they have gone in Iraq. In fact, initially things were not as bad as they are now. Ironically the best written and detailed plan could have lead to worse results. So the current situation may be more of an execution issue rather than a planning issue.

Lastly, like it is stated in your post not everyone in the Administration agreed with Powell and his - if you break it, you fix it philosophy. Invading and leaving is actually a plan. So again, it may not have been the plan you wanted or agreed with, but that is different than saying there was no plan.

dc_dux · 06-18-2007, 08:58 PM

ace...you have an absolute unique perspective on things that IMO borders on the absurd.

Even though there is no reasonable comparison to the D-Day invasion of France, of course there was a post Normandy occupation plan...a bit more detailed than "lets see which army gets to Berlin first" (wtf....do you really believe that?).

To start, "civil affairs" divisions of the Allied armies were dropped by parachute in the second wave of the assault at Normandy. These administrators—civil engineers, attorneys, investment bankers, military policemen, scientists and physicians, etc raced by jeep to town halls to take control of each village moments after it was liberated. They sealed roads, declared martial law, captured and guarded food supplies, etc. (just the highlights of the immediate occupation plans)

I was actually being a bit generous in describing the WH National Strategy for Victory in Iraq as a glorified "statement of goals and objectives" rather than a plan ..written well after the fact. It was in fact, a self-promoting PR piece with no specific actions identified to respond to any potential scenario other than "we will be greeted as liberators" and filled with bullshit platitudes that bore no resemblance to the truth (eg....page 5 - On the economic front... “Our restore, reform, build, strategy is achieving results.” On the political front... “Our Isolate, Engage, and Build strategy is working.” On the security front... “Our clear, hold, and build strategy is working.”)

I agree it is not possible to plan for every possible scenario. but there appears to have been no planning at all to prepare to respond any pre-war intel that did not conform with the WH pre-determined outcome...most particularly the intel identifying potential Baathist backlash, sectarian conflict and al Queda infiltration as well as the potential enormous problems in reconstructing the country's government and infrastructure.

THERE WAS NO PLAN (a plan requires actions steps as opposed to a more general strategy) and that was incompetence bordering on malfeasance on the part of DoD and ultimately the White House.

As ludicrous as the D-Day comparison, your suggestion that "the best written and detailed plan could have lead to worse results" is even more baseless.

You cant keep rewriting history without facts and you have no facts to support your contentions above.

You did it in the Gonzales discussion with your assertion that previous administrations likely broke the hiring laws for political gain, but it just wasnt "uncovered" ...and you are doing it again here.

Not that you probably care what I or others here think, but you lose more credibility each time you make up these wild scenarios to suit your agenda.

ratbastid · 06-19-2007, 04:45 AM

There was a really astounding story on the NPR show "This American Life" a few weeks back that addressed exactly this. The story asserted that across the board, the question of how to manage the occupation was brushed aside as somebody else's problem. Planners in both the White House and the Pentagon basically completely ignored the post "liberation" phase of the operation, because they couldn't adequately predict how it was going to go, and because it's the hard, glory-free part, and they were fixated on the invasion and capture of Saddam. They justified it by saying that the Red Cross or somebody would take care of that part.

There was a pre-invasion report done by a guy (I can't remember his name or rank now, sorry) that basically laid out EXACTLY what we're currently facing... and it was utterly ignored by all the planners. In fact, they took several actions that he specifically warned them not to do. Disbanding the Iraqi army, for instance.

So it's not just that there was no plan. It's that the effort to MAKE such a plan was deliberately and specifically resisted by those in charge.

aceventura3 · 06-19-2007, 07:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dc_dux

ace...you have an absolute unique perspective on things that IMO borders on the absurd.

Even though there is no reasonable comparison to the D-Day invasion of France, of course there was a post Normandy occupation plan...a bit more detailed than "lets see which army gets to Berlin first" (wtf....do you really believe that?).

When was the post occupation plan developed?

From your point of view my questions and comparison are absurd, I think I ask for more than just the anti-Bush talking points and many find that offensive. Whenever I ask for more, I get the "you are..." this or that line. This is what you folks sound like to me:

Anti-Bush person - Bush had no plan.
Me - I think Bush had a plan, here it is...
Anti-Bush person - You are out of touch with reality and you are a (fill-in the blank).
Me - What should the plan look like, in order for it to meet your standard?
Anti-bush person - My Goodness you are such an (fill-in the blank).
Me - What standard do you use to measure Bush's actions to past war-time Presidents?
Anti-Bush Person - You are totally off the subject and by the way you are such a (fill-in the blank).

I don't know if I am truly absurd, but I certainly have a unique ability to irritate anti-Bush folks in this forum. The nerve of me asking questions and challenging the talking points of anti-Bush folks.

Quote:

To start, "civil affairs" divisions of the Allied armies were dropped by parachute in the second wave of the assault at Normandy. These administrators—civil engineers, attorneys, investment bankers, military policemen, scientists and physicians, etc raced by jeep to town halls to take control of each village moments after it was liberated. They sealed roads, declared martial law, captured and guarded food supplies, etc. (just the highlights of the immediate occupation plans)

Again when was the planning for this done in relationship to the invasion? It seemed to me that we had people during WWII who could think on their feet and develop plans based on circumstances presented.

Also most of this was done after the military secured various locations. In Iraq intially parts of the country were secured, later this security broke down. Initially, there were plans in place that allowed for the formation of an Iraqi government and constitution, people voted and participated like never before. Intitally thing appeared to be on the right track, then there was a breakdown. So was there a plan? I say yes.

Quote:

I was actually being a bit generous in describing the WH National Strategy for Victory in Iraq as a glorified "statement of goals and objectives" rather than a plan ..written well after the fact. It was in fact, a self-promoting PR piece with no specific actions identified to respond to any potential scenario other than "we will be greeted as liberators" and filled with bullshit platitudes that bore no resemblance to the truth (eg....page 5 - On the economic front... “Our restore, reform, build, strategy is achieving results.” On the political front... “Our Isolate, Engage, and Build strategy is working.” On the security front... “Our clear, hold, and build strategy is working.”)

You clearly state what you considered not a plan, so I ask what should a plan from the White House look like for the occupation after the invasion? How much detail? How much certainty should there have been, given the level of uncertainty in the country? Should the White House plan included times and dates for military potty breaks?

Quote:

I agree it is not possible to plan for every possible scenario. but there appears to have been no planning at all to prepare to respond any pre-war intel that did not conform with the WH pre-determined outcome...most particularly the intel identifying potential Baathist backlash, sectarian conflict and al Queda infiltration as well as the potential enormous problems in reconstructing the country's government and infrastructure.

You use the word "appears". I suggested that we may not know the full extent of any planning or lack of planning until the key players are out of office and the war is over. Is that absurd? Why would my saying that make anti-Bush people go balistic?

Quote:

THERE WAS NO PLAN (a plan requires actions steps as opposed to a more general strategy) and that was incompetence bordering on malfeasance on the part of DoD and ultimately the White House.

On one hand we have a general who says there was no phase 4 plan, and that they intended to leave. and of course now we have many Americans saying we should leave, and that perhaps we should have known an occupation was not going to work.

On another hand we again have a general saying there was no phase 4 plan, and it seems at some point we could do that to infinity. We had a phase 4 plan but no phase 5 plan...etc...etc...etc.

On another hand we have a general (remember my bias for loyalty) who is making negative public statements against the head of the military at a time of war. My intial reaction to something like that will always be negative and one of distrust. My tendency will be to totally dismiss what he says, but in this thread I didn't.

Perhaps those points are absurd also, and if true I will wear the label with honor.

Quote:

As ludicrous as the D-Day comparison,

Now, the of making a historical comparision to a current event is "ludicrous", or are you saying I am "ludicrous"? Isn't more efficient just to show or explain why the comparison is "ludicrous"?

Quote:

your suggestion that "the best written and detailed plan could have lead to worse results" is even more baseless.

There is a basis. Perhaps you don't understand it. I will simply say there are people in the world who do a lot of planning and little of getting things done, and there are people who do a lot of getting things done and little planning. Which are you?

Quote:

You cant keep rewriting history without facts and you have no facts to support your contentions above.

What contention(s) do you want support for?

Quote:

You did it in the Gonzales discussion with your assertion that previous administrations likely broke the hiring laws for political gain, but it just wasnt "uncovered" ...and you are doing it again here.

My, my, the nerve of me to suggest such a thing.

Quote:

Not that you probably care what I or others here think, but you lose more credibility each time you make up these wild scenarios to suit your agenda.

I made up a wild scenario? I wasn't the one who introduced Emer Fudd into the discussion.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ratbastid

There was a really astounding story on the NPR show "This American Life" a few weeks back that addressed exactly this. The story asserted that across the board, the question of how to manage the occupation was brushed aside as somebody else's problem. Planners in both the White House and the Pentagon basically completely ignored the post "liberation" phase of the operation, because they couldn't adequately predict how it was going to go, and because it's the hard, glory-free part, and they were fixated on the invasion and capture of Saddam. They justified it by saying that the Red Cross or somebody would take care of that part.

There was a pre-invasion report done by a guy (I can't remember his name or rank now, sorry) that basically laid out EXACTLY what we're currently facing... and it was utterly ignored by all the planners. In fact, they took several actions that he specifically warned them not to do. Disbanding the Iraqi army, for instance.

So it's not just that there was no plan. It's that the effort to MAKE such a plan was deliberately and specifically resisted by those in charge.

In DC's post #23, he includes quotes from General Scheid were the General states the Rumsfeld had no intention of occupying Iraq. At some point that changed, but if that was the original plan, how can you now say that the intel about how difficult an occupation would be was ignored? It seems Rumsfeld agreed and stated that the American people would not tolerate a long drawn out war based on an occupation. Remember Rumsfeld, the guy everyone wanted out as soon as possible. Perhaps he was the voice of reason. Perhaps a better question is - why did they change the original plan?

roachboy · 06-23-2007, 08:17 AM

here's an interesting look at the iraq debacle.
ther argument is clear enough: what do you make of it?

Quote:

Partition may be the only solution

On Thursday the Guardian's Ghaith Abdul Ahad won the prestigious James Cameron award for foreign reporting. On Wednesday Rajiv Chandrasekaran won the Samuel Johnson prize for his chronicle of life in the Green Zone. Here the two reporters discuss how the conflict has unfolded - and what the future holds for Iraq. Listen to a podcast of the discussion.

Saturday June 23, 2007
The Guardian

Ghaith Last time I saw you was, when, 2004? Baghdad was burning as usual.

Rajiv Comparatively speaking, Ghaith, those were the good old days. We could sit around a table, enjoy a cold drink and at least while away a few hours of the evening chatting, perhaps even with a bit of optimism about the future.

Ghaith So what do you think? Why did this happen in the last three years?

Rajiv I see a lot of the roots back in decisions made in 2003. I wouldn't blame the US for the civil war in Iraq, but I certainly think an awful lot of decisions made by Ambassador Bremer, the first American viceroy to Iraq, have helped to fuel the instability we see today. The commonly discussed ones: de-Ba'athification; the dissolving of the army. But it goes beyond that. It was an American effort at social engineering in Iraq. And there was a simplicity to it. It was almost binary: Sunnis equal bad guys; Shia equal oppressed. We must empower the Shia, we must marginalise the Sunnis.

Ghaith In Baghdad, in 2003 or 2004, it was kind of impossible to say that's a Sunni or that's a Shia neighbourhood.

Rajiv Or even that's a Sunni or that's a Shia person. Nobody identified themselves as that. You'd ask any man on the street "Who are you?" They would say first, "I'm an Iraqi"; then he'd say his tribe; and finally, maybe on the third or fourth try, they might identify themselves as Sunni or Shia. Now ...

Ghaith Now we can draw a sectarian map of Baghdad right down to tiny alleyways and streets and houses. Everything has changed. As an Iraqi I go anywhere (not only in Iraq, but also in the Middle East), the first thing people ask me is: "Are you a Sunni or a Shia?"

Rajiv So the sectarian genie is out of the bottle. In Iraq there was historical tension between Sunnis and Shias, but also a great deal of accommodation, right? More Sunni/Shia inter-marriages than any other Arab/Muslim country.

Ghaith Now, an average Iraqi is still in this sort of delusion, and will tell you: "Oh, the Sunnis and the Shias; we've no problem, only militias on the street." But I think the problem we have now on the ground is a civil war. Call it whatever you want, it is a civil war.

Rajiv We're going to see thousands and thousands more Iraqis killed. Fundamentally these internecine conflicts don't end until both sides' view of their strength is commensurate with their actual strength. [It]'ll never come to any negotiated peaceful settlement until both sides see it in their interest to compromise. And we're not there yet.

Ghaith On the ground level, at the mid-level of the commanders, [the war] is huge business. I was talking to Sunni insurgents and Shia militiamen, and they told me: "The kidnapping process, you do it in the name of Allah, and religion, and cleansing your town from the Sunni extremists, or Shia militias, or whatever you want to call it. But at the end of the day, every person you kidnap is to get money out of him." They already call it the "spoils of war". It's a booming business. $50,000 a week for a mid-level commander who is kidnapping people inside the city.

This is what I really want to know. The Americans. What's the American psyche? How do they see it in DC?

Rajiv Both sides in Washington are thoroughly disconnected. I think they both fundamentally misunderstand. The view in the White House is, if you send more troops to Iraq and you take more forceful action against the terrorists and the insurgents ... you'll be able to improve security. And that will then lead the political elites to come together and forge national and political compromise. And once they forge these grand compromises, ordinary Iraqis will put a degree of trust in their government; as a result, violence will attenuate, Iraq will become more stable, you'll have a strong central government.

At the same time, what Democrats say on Capitol Hill is: "We must give a clear timetable. We must tell al-Maliki we will pull out our troops within six months if you don't do X, Y and Z; if you don't pass this legislation; if you don't bring in more personnel into the military and the security forces." Well, when you put a gun to somebody's head like that, I think they will do just the opposite of what you want. Maliki won't bring in more Sunnis into his cabinet. He'll bring in his Shia cronies. He'll circle the wagons, as they would say out west.

Ghaith Exactly. Everyone knows that at some point the Americans will have to leave, and the Shia will try to take over.

Rajiv Iraq's leadership right now, they are all ensconced in the Green Zone. They are in many ways just as disconnected from the real Iraq as Bremer and Co were back then.

Ghaith You see these media operations by Maliki - flying in a helicopter to a street in Baghdad and having a photo-opportunity meeting, just like Saddam used to, surrounded by hundreds of soldiers - half of them foreign mercenaries. The level of disconnect between the political leadership in the parliament, in the Green Zone, and the people is so obvious ... When there was an attack inside parliament killing a few MPs, people shrugged their shoulders. They couldn't care less about those MPs.

Rajiv Let's put something controversial on the table, and let's debate. I see the situation as polarised ... perhaps the only reasonable approach, going forward, is to think about a degree of partition and accept the inevitability of the way things are headed.

Ghaith Sorry, I'm interrupting you before you finish your idea, but I just can't see it happening. If it stopped the violence, I'd say let's have it tomorrow.

Rajiv But people are already voting with their feet. They're dividing themselves on their own, people are moving from one community to another, one neighbourhood to another in Baghdad. In some cases they're leaving Iraq outright. This is the direction things are headed. It's not going to be a nice, easy, clean line. I don't mean to suggest India and Pakistan was anything like a clean, easy line - that you'd have one single border. You may well have various cantons. Or even within Baghdad, this neighbourhood's Sunni; this neighbourhood's Shia. But you'd essentially start to create various zones where one group predominates and has a degree of control, and (this is what I think) give the Sunnis a sense of at least controlling some elements of their own destiny, as opposed to feeling like they have no voice in the national government. Look, if things are left unchecked, the proxy war already taking place there will just get worse.

Ghaith The problem with this argument is it has no precedent in Iraq's history.

Rajiv The Iraqis don't want this. But I think that's because each side thinks it ultimately will emerge victorious. Give this conflict some more time, and I wonder to what degree people will embrace this [zoning] as a way to end the fighting. Right now they are not there yet. But what do you think?

Ghaith I see a de facto split in the country, I see a de facto cantonisation between Sunnis and Shia. To enshrine this in some form of process will be messy, it'll be bloody. The main issue is for the Americans to recognise they don't have an Iraqi partner. The first thing is to rebuild national consensus; this government will never do this. Second is, someone should tell the Sunnis and the Shia they'll never be able to defeat the other. What's happening is this race to taking as much land as possible before the Americans leave. Because everyone knows they'll leave, and then the real civil war will start.

Rajiv I don't think that anybody can tell each side they can't defeat each other. They'll have to come to that conclusion on their own. Unfortunately, I think it's going to take many, many more months, if not years, and it will continue to be bloody and dark and chaotic.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2109546,00.html

DJ Happy · 06-24-2007, 02:38 AM

Wow, Donald Rumsfeld seems totally unaware that there was any plan, Tony Blair says that Bush had no plan, Bush admits as much himself and says that Britain doesn't need to send troops and can "help out in some other way," but aceventura3 knows there was a plan and will fight everyone who says otherwise.

No wonder this fool keeps getting himself elected.

aceventura3 · 06-25-2007, 07:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DJ Happy

Wow, Donald Rumsfeld seems totally unaware that there was any plan, Tony Blair says that Bush had no plan, Bush admits as much himself and says that Britain doesn't need to send troops and can "help out in some other way," but aceventura3 knows there was a plan and will fight everyone who says otherwise.

No wonder this fool keeps getting himself elected.

O.k. if you reasonably (any third party can be the judge of if it is reasonable) address this point I will never comment on "the plan" or lack of "the plan" again on this forum since I am so, so unreasonable and out of touch with reality on this issue.

In order to believe there was no plan, you would have to believe that Congress would commit billions of dollars in subsequent funding with no plan in place, in essence flushing the money and lives away. Is that what you believe and why would they do that?

host · 06-25-2007, 09:02 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

O.k. if you reasonably (any third party can be the judge of if it is reasonable) address this point I will never comment on "the plan" or lack of "the plan" again on this forum since I am so, so unreasonable and out of touch with reality on this issue.

In order to believe there was no plan, you would have to believe that Congress would commit billions of dollars in subsequent funding with no plan in place, in essence flushing the money and lives away. Is that what you believe and why would they do that?

....sigh.... the democrats tried to stop the plan to invade Iraq in the first place, then they tried to stop the supplemental funding for it....and they called the rationale for invading Iraq "a fraud" early, and often....but they didn't have the votes, and Bush had the "bully pulpit".....9/11.........9/11.......9/11.......9/11...

The Bush administration made sure that it would be a tough political fight...they still are....and they've actually reversed sentiment to an extent, with their bullshit propaganda....while the troops continue to die in Iraq:

(This is from just ten months ago

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...700189_pf.html
Half of U.S. Still Believes Iraq Had WMD

By CHARLES J. HANLEY
The Associated Press
Monday, August 7, 2006; 6:24 AM

-- Do you believe in Iraqi "WMD"? Did Saddam Hussein's government have weapons of mass destruction in 2003?

Half of America apparently still thinks so, a new poll finds, and experts see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, a rallying around a partisan flag, and a growing need for people, in their own minds, to justify the war in Iraq.

People tend to become "independent of reality" in these circumstances, says opinion analyst Steven Kull.

The reality in this case is that after a 16-month, $900-million-plus investigation, the U.S. weapons hunters known as the Iraq Survey Group declared that Iraq had dismantled its chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs in 1991 under U.N. oversight. That finding in 2004 reaffirmed the work of U.N. inspectors who in 2002-03 found no trace of banned arsenals in Iraq.

Despite this, <h3>a Harris Poll released July 21 found that a full 50 percent of U.S. respondents _ up from 36 percent last year _ said they believe Iraq did have the forbidden arms when U.S. troops invaded in March 2003, an attack whose stated purpose was elimination of supposed WMD.</h3> Other polls also have found an enduring American faith in the WMD story.

"I'm flabbergasted," said Michael Massing, a media critic whose writings dissected the largely unquestioning U.S. news reporting on the Bush administration's shaky WMD claims in 2002-03.

"This finding just has to cause despair among those of us who hope for an informed public able to draw reasonable conclusions based on evidence," Massing said.

Timing may explain some of the poll result. Two weeks before the survey, <b>two Republican lawmakers, Pennsylvania's Sen. Rick Santorum and Michigan's Rep. Peter Hoekstra, released an intelligence report in Washington saying 500 chemical munitions had been collected in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.

"I think the Harris Poll was measuring people's surprise at hearing this after being told for so long there were no WMD in the country," said Hoekstra spokesman Jamal Ware.</b>

But the Pentagon and outside experts stressed that these abandoned shells, many found in ones and twos, were 15 years old or more, their chemical contents were degraded, and they were unusable as artillery ordnance. Since the 1990s, such "orphan" munitions, from among 160,000 made by Iraq and destroyed, have turned up on old battlefields and elsewhere in Iraq, ex-inspectors say. In other words, this was no surprise.

"These are not stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction," said Scott Ritter, the ex-Marine who was a U.N. inspector in the 1990s. "They weren't deliberately withheld from inspectors by the Iraqis."

<b>Conservative commentator Deroy Murdock, who trumpeted Hoekstra's announcement in his syndicated column, complained in an interview that the press "didn't give the story the play it deserved."</b> But in some quarters it was headlined.

"Our top story tonight, the nation abuzz today ..." was how Fox News led its report on the old, stray shells. Talk-radio hosts and their callers seized on it. Feedback to blogs grew intense. "Americans are waking up from a distorted reality," read one posting.

Other claims about supposed WMD had preceded this, especially speculation since 2003 that Iraq had secretly shipped WMD abroad. A former Iraqi general's book _ at best uncorroborated hearsay _ claimed "56 flights" by jetliners had borne such material to Syria.

But Kull, Massing and others see an influence on opinion that's more sustained than the odd headline.

"I think the Santorum-Hoekstra thing is the latest 'factoid,' but the basic dynamic is the insistent repetition by the Bush administration of the original argument," said John Prados, author of the 2004 book "Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War."

<b>Administration statements still describe Saddam's Iraq as a threat. Despite the official findings, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has allowed only that "perhaps" WMD weren't in Iraq. And Bush himself, since 2003, has repeatedly insisted on one plainly false point: that Saddam rebuffed the U.N. inspectors in 2002, that "he wouldn't let them in," as he said in 2003, and "he chose to deny inspectors," as he said this March.</b>

The facts are that Iraq _ after a four-year hiatus in cooperating with inspections _ acceded to the U.N. Security Council's demand and allowed scores of experts to conduct more than 700 inspections of potential weapons sites from Nov. 27, 2002, to March 16, 2003. The inspectors said they could wrap up their work within months. Instead, the U.S. invasion aborted that work.

<h3>As recently as May 27, Bush told West Point graduates, "When the United Nations Security Council gave him one final chance to disclose and disarm, or face serious consequences, he refused to take that final opportunity."

"Which isn't true," observed Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a scholar of presidential rhetoric at the University of Pennsylvania.</h3> But "it doesn't surprise me when presidents reconstruct reality to make their policies defensible." This president may even have convinced himself it's true, she said.

Americans have heard it. A poll by Kull's WorldPublicOpinion.org <b>found that seven in 10 Americans perceive the administration as still saying Iraq had a WMD program. Combine that rhetoric with simplistic headlines about WMD "finds," and people "assume the issue is still in play," Kull said.

"For some it almost becomes independent of reality and becomes very partisan." The WMD believers are heavily Republican, polls show.</b>

Beyond partisanship, however, people may also feel a need to believe in WMD, the analysts say.

"As perception grows of worsening conditions in Iraq, it may be that Americans are just hoping for more of a solid basis for being in Iraq to begin with," said the Harris Poll's David Krane.

Charles Duelfer, the lead U.S. inspector who announced the negative WMD findings two years ago, has watched uncertainly as TV sound bites, bloggers and politicians try to chip away at "the best factual account," his group's densely detailed, 1,000-page final report.

"It is easy to see what is accepted as truth rapidly morph from one representation to another," he said in an e-mail. "It would be a shame if one effect of the power of the Internet was to undermine any commonly agreed set of facts."

The creative "morphing" goes on.

As Israeli troops and Hezbollah guerrillas battled in Lebanon <b>on July 21, a Fox News segment suggested, with no evidence, yet another destination for the supposed doomsday arms.

"ARE SADDAM HUSSEIN'S WMDS NOW IN HEZBOLLAH'S HANDS?"</b> asked the headline, lingering for long minutes on TV screens in a million American homes.

<b>The problem for democratic congressional leaders....they did resist, they did object, they did vote against the 2002 resolution and against the supplemental Iraq war funding appropriations....is that the Bush administration, with the cooperation of many partisan supporters and the sincere, gullible folks with misplaced patriotic sentiments and irrational fears that the partisans "played"....is that a common sense driven, "will of the majority", has still not coalesced around the five years old, consistent democratic opposition to all of the deception, wasted lives, wasted money.....</b>

Quote:

http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/09/18/kennedy.iraq/
Kennedy's 'Texas' remark stirs GOP reaction
<h3>Thursday, September 18, 2003</h3>

WASHINGTON (CNN) --Sen. Ted Kennedy's comment Thursday to The Associated Press that the Iraq war was "made up in Texas" provoked no White House response but did stir a Republican official.

In the AP interview, Kennedy questioned how much of a threat Saddam Hussein had posed in the U.S. fight against terrorism.

<b>"There was no imminent threat. This was made up in Texas, announced in January to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically. This whole thing was a fraud," the Massachusetts Democrat told the AP.</b>

He said Bush officials employed "distortion, misrepresentation, a selection of intelligence" to justify the war.

As for the administration's current policy in Iraq, Kennedy called it "adrift."

He said Bush officials had failed to account for $1.5 billion of the $4 billion the war costs each month, citing a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office.

"My belief is this money is being shuffled all around to these political leaders in all parts of the world, bribing them to send in troops," he told the AP.

<h3>Kennedy was one of 23 senators who opposed the resolution last year authorizing Bush to go to war in Iraq.

"The senator's comments reflect the tired old soft-on-defense attitude of the Democratic Party," the Republican official told CNN, speaking on condition of anonymity.</h3>

"And the American people are thankful for a strong and decisive leader in President Bush who isn't afraid to make tough decisions."

According to a Kennedy aide, the senator in the AP interview was trying to point out there are "real questions" about the administration's intent in the war.

"The point is the administration has to be more accountable with the American public about the cost of the war," the aide told CNN.

"The fact is there are real questions about the administration's intent with this war, what their plan is for our troops and how the money is being spent."

The White House on Wednesday sent its $87 billion budget request to Congress for military operations and reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan next year.

While no Democrats or Republicans have said they would oppose it, many said they want specifics on the president's plans for reconstruction.

Some Democrats, citing the $525 billion budget deficit, say they may push for a repeal of some tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans to help pay for the Iraq mission.

Kennedy said in the AP interview the administration should be required to account to Congress on how the money is spent.

<b>"We want to support our troops because they didn't make the decision to go there ... but I don't think it should be open-ended. We ought to have a benchmark where the administration has to come back and give us a report," he said.

Earlier this year, Democrats tried and failed to pass an amendment that would have postponed most of the tax cuts and budget increases until Bush officials produced cost estimates of the Iraq war.</b>

Kennedy told the AP he also was worried the war in Iraq had drawn America's attention away from possible threats from al Qaeda, problems in Afghanistan and North Korea's nuclear program.

"I think all of those pose a threat to the security of the people of Massachusetts much more than the threat from Iraq. Terror has been put on the sidelines for the last 12 months," Kennedy said.

Quote:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/...in574422.shtml
Bush: Kennedy Remark 'Uncivil'
President Denies U.S. Bribing Foreign Nations
WASHINGTON, Sept. 22, 2003

<b>(AP) President Bush described as “uncivil” Sen. Edward Kennedy's critical remarks of the administration's policies in Iraq.</b>

Kennedy said last week the case for going to war against Iraq was a fraud “made up in Texas” to give Republicans a political boost. The longtime senator also alleged that the money for the war is being used to bribe foreign leaders to send troops.

In an interview with Fox News, Mr. Bush said that while he respected Kennedy, the senator “should not have said we were trying to bribe foreign nations.”

“I don't mind people trying to pick apart my policies, and that's fine and that's fair game,” Mr. Bush said in the interview that will air Monday night. <b>“But, you know, I don't think we're serving our nation well by allowing the discourse to become so uncivil that people say — use words that they shouldn't be using.”

Kennedy's comments, part of the drumbeat of criticism Mr. Bush has received lately from Democrats, were described as a “new low” by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.</b>

Kennedy dismissed DeLay's comments, saying that once again GOP leaders are avoiding questions about Mr. Bush's policies “by attacking the patriotism of those who question them.”

Kennedy, D-Mass., elaborated on his comments in an interview on CNN, saying the administration is announcing an $8.5 billion loan to Turkey, and that country will then provide military assistance in Iraq.

“It didn't have to be this way,” he said. “We wouldn't have to be providing these billions of dollars to these countries to ... coerce them or bribe them to send their troops in, if we'd done it the right way, if we'd gone to the United Nations, if we had built an international constituency.”

Here is the speech on the senate floor by the senior democratic senator, against the first supplemental appropriations request to fund the Iraq war:

Quote:

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1018-01.htm
The Emperor Has No Clothes
by US Senator Robert Byrd
Senate Floor Remarks
October 17, 2003

......We were told that major combat was over but 101 [as of October 17] Americans have died in combat since that proclamation from the deck of an aircraft carrier by our very own Emperor in his new clothes.

Our emperor says that we are not occupiers, yet we show no inclination to relinquish the country of Iraq to its people.

Those who have dared to expose the nakedness of the Administration's policies in Iraq have been subjected to scorn. Those who have noticed the elephant in the room -- that is, the fact that this war was based on falsehoods – have had our patriotism questioned. Those who have spoken aloud the thought shared by hundreds of thousands of military families across this country, that our troops should return quickly and safely from the dangers half a world away, have been accused of cowardice. We have then seen the untruths, the dissembling, the fabrication, the misleading inferences surrounding this rush to war in Iraq wrapped quickly in the flag.

The right to ask questions, debate, and dissent is under attack. The drums of war are beaten ever louder in an attempt to drown out those who speak of our predicament in stark terms.

Even in the Senate, our history and tradition of being the world's greatest deliberative body is being snubbed. <b>This huge spending bill has been rushed through this chamber in just one month. There were just three open hearings by the Senate Appropriations Committee on $87 billion, without a single outside witness called to challenge the Administration's line.

Ambassador Bremer went so far as to refuse to return to the Appropriations Committee to answer additional questions because, and I quote: "I don't have time. I'm completely booked, and I have to get back to Baghdad to my duties." </b>

Despite this callous stiff-arm of the Senate and its duties to ask questions in order to represent the American people, few dared to voice their opposition to rushing this bill through these halls of Congress. <h3>Perhaps they were intimidated by the false claims that our troops are in immediate need of more funds.</h3>

But the time has come for the sheep-like political correctness which has cowed members of this Senate to come to an end.

The Emperor has no clothes. This entire adventure in Iraq has been based on propaganda and manipulation. Eighty-seven billion dollars is too much to pay for the continuation of a war based on falsehoods.

Taking the nation to war based on misleading rhetoric and hyped intelligence is a travesty and a tragedy. It is the most cynical of all cynical acts. It is dangerous to manipulate the truth. It is dangerous because once having lied, it is difficult to ever be believed again. <b>Having misled the American people and stampeded them to war, this Administration must now attempt to sustain a policy predicated on falsehoods. The President asks for billions from those same citizens who know that they were misled about the need to go to war. </b>We misinformed and insulted our friends and allies and now this Administration is having more than a little trouble getting help from the international community. It is perilous to mislead.

The single-minded obsession of this Administration to now make sense of the chaos in Iraq, and the continuing propaganda which emanates from the White House painting Iraq as the geographical center of terrorism is distracting our attention from Afghanistan and the 60 other countries in the world where terrorists hide. It is sapping resources which could be used to make us safer from terrorists on our own shores. The body armor for our own citizens still has many, many chinks. Have we forgotten that the most horrific terror attacks in history occurred right here at home!! Yet, this Administration turns back money for homeland security, while the President pours billions into security for Iraq. I am powerless to understand or explain such a policy.

I have tried mightily to improve this bill. I twice tried to separate the reconstruction money in this bill, so that those dollars could be considered separately from the military spending. I offered an amendment to force the Administration to craft a plan to get other nations to assist the troops and formulate a plan to get the U.N. in, and the U.S. out, of Iraq. Twice I tried to rid the bill of expansive, flexible authorities that turn this $87 billion into a blank check. The American people should understand that we provide more foreign aid for Iraq in this bill, $20.3 billion, than we provide for the rest of the entire world! I attempted to remove from this bill billions in wasteful programs and divert those funds to better use. But, at every turn, my efforts were thwarted by the vapid argument that we must all support the requests of the Commander in Chief.

I cannot stand by and continue to watch our grandchildren become increasingly burdened by the billions that fly out of the Treasury for a war and a policy based largely on propaganda and prevarication. We are borrowing $87 billion to finance this adventure in Iraq. The President is asking this Senate to pay for this war with increased debt, a debt that will have to be paid by our children and by those same troops that are currently fighting this war. I cannot support outlandish tax cuts that plunge our country into potentially disastrous debt while our troops are fighting and dying in a war that the White House chose to begin.

I cannot support the continuation of a policy that unwisely ties down 150,000 American troops for the foreseeable future, with no end in sight.

I cannot support a President who refuses to authorize the reasonable change in course that would bring traditional allies to our side in Iraq.

I cannot support the politics of zeal and "might makes right" that created the new American arrogance and unilateralism which passes for foreign policy in this Administration.

I cannot support this foolish manifestation of the dangerous and destabilizing doctrine of preemption that changes the image of America into that of a reckless bully.

The emperor has no clothes. And our former allies around the world were the first to loudly observe it.

<h3>I shall vote against this bill because I cannot support a policy based on prevarication.</h3> I cannot support doling out 87 billion of our hard-earned tax dollars when I have so many doubts about the wisdom of its use. ........

aceventura3 · 06-25-2007, 09:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by host

....sigh.... the democrats tried to stop the plan to invade Iraq in the first place, then they tried to stop the supplemental funding for it....and they called the rationale for invading Iraq "a fraud" early, and often....but they didn't have the votes, and Bush had the "bully pulpit".....9/11.........9/11.......9/11.......9/11...

The Bush administration made sure that it would be a tough political fight...they still are....and they've actually reversed sentiment to an extent, with their bullshit propaganda....while the troops continue to die in Iraq:

(This is from just ten months ago

<b>The problem for democratic congressional leaders....they did resist, they did object, they did vote against the 2002 resolution and against the supplemental Iraq war funding appropriations....is that the Bush administration, with the cooperation of many partisan supporters and the sincere, gullible folks with misplaced patriotic sentiments and irrational fears that the partisans "played"....is that a common sense driven, "will of the majority", has still not coalesced around the five years old, consistent democratic opposition to all of the deception, wasted lives, wasted money.....</b>

Here is the speech on the senate floor by the senior democratic senator, against the first supplemental appropriations request to fund the Iraq war:

Can you give me a concise summation?

The members of Congress who voted for funding our military occupation of Iraq (or whatever you want to call it) did so realizing there... (was or was not a plan)... they did this because ...

seretogis · 06-26-2007, 06:12 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

The members of Congress who voted for funding our military occupation of Iraq (or whatever you want to call it) did so realizing there... (was or was not a plan)... they did this because ...

..they are spineless cowards whose principles mean less to them than their hold on their positions of power. Standing up to Bush could have meant that some segment of the population would be angry with them, and they need to try to please everyone in order to remain in office so that they can hand out goodies to their friends and enjoy the cream.

The Democrats continuing to fund the war in Iraq should show everyone that they are exactly like the Republicans -- career politicians who tout principles but don't actually intend to live by them.

This doesn't mean, however, that there was any sort of real plan going into Iraq. It simply means that both major political parties are equally alright with flushing billions of dollars and thousands of lives down the drain.

aceventura3 · 06-26-2007, 07:14 AM

I just want to make sure I have a clear understanding of the point being made in this thread:

Quote:

Bush had no post invasion plan for Iraq:

*although we had thousands of military and civilian personel in the country doing something.

*although the Iraqi people managed to develop a constitution, hold elections and install elected officials.

*athough the US has trained thousands of Iraqi security forces.

*athough reconstruction efforts have lead to the completion of hundreds of projects.

*athough Sadaam was captured, tried, convicted and executed.

*although the US military has lead sucessful operations against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

*although there is a new currency in Iraq, a stock exchange, and thousands of new businesses started.

*although Congress has authorized spending billions in post invasion funding for or military and occupation in Iraq.

*although Congress confirmed Gen. Patraus who testified about his support of the "new plan" invovling the surge.

*etc.

*etc.

*etc. (I am sure the pattern is clear)

Does that kinda sum it up? As agreed I will have nothing more to say on this issue.

ratbastid · 06-26-2007, 07:38 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

I just want to make sure I have a clear understanding of the point being made in this thread:

*although we had thousands of military and civilian personel in the country doing something.

*although the Iraqi people managed to develop a constitution, hold elections and install elected officials.

*athough the US has trained thousands of Iraqi security forces.

*athough reconstruction efforts have lead to the completion of hundreds of projects.

*athough Sadaam was captured, tried, convicted and executed.

*although the US military has lead sucessful operations against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

*although there is a new currency in Iraq, a stock exchange, and thousands of new businesses started.

*although Congress has authorized spending billions in post invasion funding for or military and occupation in Iraq.

*although Congress confirmed Gen. Patraus who testified about his support of the "new plan" invovling the surge.

*etc.

*etc.

*etc. (I am sure the pattern is clear)

Does that kinda sum it up? As agreed I will have nothing more to say on this issue.

Having some results get produced does not imply that there was a plan from the beginning. Most of those things were ad-hocked into place, and many haven't achieved the goals they were intended for.

There's NO way to paint Iraq as anything but a quagmire, so your time might be better spent not saying anything more on this issue.

dc_dux · 06-26-2007, 08:27 AM

Because we had no plan beyond taking out Saddam, our invasion and occupation:

* strengthened Iran as a regional power with one less buffer
* created a breeding ground for al Queda where it didnt exist and a cause for terrorist wannabees around the world
* unleashed sectarian violence so that Iraqis, both sunni and shiia are killing each other at a rate far greater than Saddam did
* caused the greatest refugee crisis in the region in 50 years, with as many as 2 million Iraqis displaced from their homes in the last 5 years
* created a childrens health crisis as a result of the destruction of basic water and sewer infrastruture, followed by incompetent mismanagement of reconstruction aided by a new set of corrupt Iraqi officials
* allowed much if Iraq's treasures to be looted
* etc
* etc

This kinda sums it up.....much of it predicted in the pre-war intel that Bush chose to ignore.

In a rueful reflection on what might have been, an Iraqi government insider details in 500 pages the U.S. occupation's "shocking" mismanagement of his country - a performance so bad, he writes, that by 2007 Iraqis had "turned their backs on their would-be liberators."

"The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order," Ali A. Allawi concludes in "The Occupation of Iraq," newly published by Yale University Press.

Allawi writes with authority as a member of that "new order," having served as Iraq's trade, defense and finance minister at various times since 2003. As a former academic, at Oxford University before the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, he also writes with unusual detachment.

The U.S.- and British-educated engineer and financier is the first senior Iraqi official to look back at book length on his country's four-year ordeal. It's an unsparing look at failures both American and Iraqi, an account in which the word "ignorance" crops up repeatedly.

First came the "monumental ignorance" of those in Washington pushing for war in 2002 without "the faintest idea" of Iraq's realities. "More perceptive people knew instinctively that the invasion of Iraq would open up the great fissures in Iraqi society," he writes.

What followed was the "rank amateurism and swaggering arrogance" of the occupation, under L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which took big steps with little consultation with Iraqis, steps Allawi and many others see as blunders:

* The Americans disbanded Iraq's army, which Allawi said could have helped quell a rising insurgency in 2003. Instead, hundreds of thousands of demobilized, angry men became a recruiting pool for the resistance.

* Purging tens of thousands of members of toppled President Saddam Hussein's Baath party - from government, school faculties and elsewhere - left Iraq short on experienced hands at a crucial time.

* An order consolidating decentralized bank accounts at the Finance Ministry bogged down operations of Iraq's many state-owned enterprises.

* The CPA's focus on private enterprise allowed the "commercial gangs" of Saddam's day to monopolize business.

* Its free-trade policy allowed looted Iraqi capital equipment to be spirited away across borders.

* The CPA perpetuated Saddam's fuel subsidies, selling gasoline at giveaway prices and draining the budget.

In his 2006 memoir of the occupation, Bremer wrote that senior U.S. generals wanted to recall elements of the old Iraqi army in 2003, but were rebuffed by the Bush administration. Bremer complained generally that his authority was undermined by Washington's "micromanagement."

Although Allawi, a cousin of Ayad Allawi, Iraq's prime minister in 2004, is a member of a secularist Shiite Muslim political grouping, his well-researched book betrays little partisanship.

On U.S. reconstruction failures - in electricity, health care and other areas documented by Washington's own auditors - Allawi writes that the Americans' "insipid retelling of 'success' stories" merely hid "the huge black hole that lay underneath."

For their part, U.S. officials have often largely blamed Iraq's explosive violence for the failures of reconstruction and poor governance.

The author has been instrumental since 2005 in publicizing extensive corruption within Iraq's "new order," including an $800-million Defense Ministry scandal. Under Saddam, he writes, the secret police kept would-be plunderers in check better than the U.S. occupiers have done.

As 2007 began, Allawi concludes, "America's only allies in Iraq were those who sought to manipulate the great power to their narrow advantage. It might have been otherwise."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/040907K.shtml

Plan9 · 06-26-2007, 08:40 AM

Concise summary?

We did a bad thing, Lenny.

hiredgun · 06-29-2007, 12:36 AM

I'm not entirely sure what to even do with this information. Furthermore, I'm astonished at the fact that a defense of the post-war planning is even happening here.

There have been entire books written on the ludicrous mishandling of the postwar planning. See: State of Denial; The Assassins' Gate; Imperial Life in the Emerald City.

What is the point of the apologia?

ratbastid · 06-29-2007, 05:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hiredgun

What is the point of the apologia?

Knee-jerk reactionism, I suspect. Anything negative about the administration triggers a whole slew of denials and justifications and "yeah-but"s and "it-was-Congress's-fault"s and "yeah-well-Clinton"s.

aceventura3 · 06-29-2007, 06:21 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hiredgun

I'm not entirely sure what to even do with this information. Furthermore, I'm astonished at the fact that a defense of the post-war planning is even happening here.

There have been entire books written on the ludicrous mishandling of the postwar planning. See: State of Denial; The Assassins' Gate; Imperial Life in the Emerald City.

What is the point of the apologia?

To me there is a big difference between saying a plan did not work compared to saying there was no plan. To believe there was no plan suggests you have to believe some very extreme things to be true in order to support that view.

Some seem to suggest, based on the fact that there was no plan, that the positive results in Iraq were simply a matter of chance. I guess that means if we sent 200,000 chimps to Iraq, they could have possibly gotten the same results as our military since they were sent there with no plan.

When I look at the Iraq timeline, I clearly see positive results followed by a turn for the worse. Our enemy adapted and changed tactics in order to increase the level of chaos. This war is not a video game where you can develop a plan and a strategy at the begining based on a programed opponent who always responds the same way. It is impossible to plan a war for every contingency. Yes, things in Iraq took a turn for the worse, but that does not mean there was no plan.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ratbastid

Knee-jerk reactionism, I suspect. Anything negative about the administration triggers a whole slew of denials and justifications and "yeah-but"s and "it-was-Congress's-fault"s and "yeah-well-Clinton"s.

Saying there was no plan is a talking point.

Democratic party leadership should be embarassed for voting to fund the war if there was no plan and that they did not ask to see it before allowing Bush to spend billions of dollars in Iraq. You call that point a knee-jerk reaction? If in fact there was no plan, wy didn't Congress play their role of checks and balances as outlined in the Constitution. To me there is nothing more serious, becuase it suggests that we could have a nut in the White House and Congress would not do anything. And you suggest that you don't see the importance of that?

06-17-2007, 03:10 PM	#5 (permalink)
Plan9 I Confess a Shiver	Bullshit! BULLSHIT-BULLSHIT-BULLSHIT! There WAS a plan. ... ... ... DOD needed to rotate MREs and T-rations. We had to start a war to consume them before they all expired. I had Chicken Chow Mein... three meals a day for a month! (true story) __________________ *Whatever you can carry.* "You should not drink... and bake."

06-18-2007, 09:17 AM	#20 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	ace: you haven't got a leg to stand on. it seems that there are others in this community who are patient enough to indulge you in the particular style of conversation that you seem to prefer: i am not one of those people. like you, i choose how to spend my time. this is one of those choices. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

06-18-2007, 08:58 PM	#25 (permalink)
dc_dux Location: Washington DC	ace...you have an absolute unique perspective on things that IMO borders on the absurd. Even though there is no reasonable comparison to the D-Day invasion of France, of course there was a post Normandy occupation plan...a bit more detailed than "lets see which army gets to Berlin first" (wtf....do you really believe that?). To start, "civil affairs" divisions of the Allied armies were dropped by parachute in the second wave of the assault at Normandy. These administrators—civil engineers, attorneys, investment bankers, military policemen, scientists and physicians, etc raced by jeep to town halls to take control of each village moments after it was liberated. They sealed roads, declared martial law, captured and guarded food supplies, etc. (just the highlights of the immediate occupation plans) I was actually being a bit generous in describing the WH National Strategy for Victory in Iraq as a glorified "statement of goals and objectives" rather than a plan ..written well after the fact. It was in fact, a self-promoting PR piece with no specific actions identified to respond to any potential scenario other than "we will be greeted as liberators" and filled with bullshit platitudes that bore no resemblance to the truth (eg....page 5 - On the economic front... “Our restore, reform, build, strategy is achieving results.” On the political front... “Our Isolate, Engage, and Build strategy is working.” On the security front... “Our clear, hold, and build strategy is working.”) I agree it is not possible to plan for every possible scenario. but there appears to have been no planning at all to prepare to respond any pre-war intel that did not conform with the WH pre-determined outcome...most particularly the intel identifying potential Baathist backlash, sectarian conflict and al Queda infiltration as well as the potential enormous problems in reconstructing the country's government and infrastructure. THERE WAS NO PLAN (a plan requires actions steps as opposed to a more general strategy) and that was incompetence bordering on malfeasance on the part of DoD and ultimately the White House. As ludicrous as the D-Day comparison, your suggestion that "the best written and detailed plan could have lead to worse results" is even more baseless. You cant keep rewriting history without facts and you have no facts to support your contentions above. You did it in the Gonzales discussion with your assertion that previous administrations likely broke the hiring laws for political gain, but it just wasnt "uncovered" ...and you are doing it again here. Not that you probably care what I or others here think, but you lose more credibility each time you make up these wild scenarios to suit your agenda. __________________ "The perfect is the enemy of the good." ~ Voltaire Last edited by dc_dux; 06-18-2007 at 09:34 PM..

06-26-2007, 08:27 AM	#36 (permalink)
dc_dux Location: Washington DC	Because we had no plan beyond taking out Saddam, our invasion and occupation: * strengthened Iran as a regional power with one less buffer * created a breeding ground for al Queda where it didnt exist and a cause for terrorist wannabees around the world * unleashed sectarian violence so that Iraqis, both sunni and shiia are killing each other at a rate far greater than Saddam did * caused the greatest refugee crisis in the region in 50 years, with as many as 2 million Iraqis displaced from their homes in the last 5 years * created a childrens health crisis as a result of the destruction of basic water and sewer infrastruture, followed by incompetent mismanagement of reconstruction aided by a new set of corrupt Iraqi officials * allowed much if Iraq's treasures to be looted * etc * etc This kinda sums it up.....much of it predicted in the pre-war intel that Bush chose to ignore. In a rueful reflection on what might have been, an Iraqi government insider details in 500 pages the U.S. occupation's "shocking" mismanagement of his country - a performance so bad, he writes, that by 2007 Iraqis had "turned their backs on their would-be liberators." "The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order," Ali A. Allawi concludes in "The Occupation of Iraq," newly published by Yale University Press. Allawi writes with authority as a member of that "new order," having served as Iraq's trade, defense and finance minister at various times since 2003. As a former academic, at Oxford University before the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, he also writes with unusual detachment. The U.S.- and British-educated engineer and financier is the first senior Iraqi official to look back at book length on his country's four-year ordeal. It's an unsparing look at failures both American and Iraqi, an account in which the word "ignorance" crops up repeatedly. First came the "monumental ignorance" of those in Washington pushing for war in 2002 without "the faintest idea" of Iraq's realities. "More perceptive people knew instinctively that the invasion of Iraq would open up the great fissures in Iraqi society," he writes. What followed was the "rank amateurism and swaggering arrogance" of the occupation, under L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which took big steps with little consultation with Iraqis, steps Allawi and many others see as blunders: * The Americans disbanded Iraq's army, which Allawi said could have helped quell a rising insurgency in 2003. Instead, hundreds of thousands of demobilized, angry men became a recruiting pool for the resistance. * Purging tens of thousands of members of toppled President Saddam Hussein's Baath party - from government, school faculties and elsewhere - left Iraq short on experienced hands at a crucial time. * An order consolidating decentralized bank accounts at the Finance Ministry bogged down operations of Iraq's many state-owned enterprises. * The CPA's focus on private enterprise allowed the "commercial gangs" of Saddam's day to monopolize business. * Its free-trade policy allowed looted Iraqi capital equipment to be spirited away across borders. * The CPA perpetuated Saddam's fuel subsidies, selling gasoline at giveaway prices and draining the budget. In his 2006 memoir of the occupation, Bremer wrote that senior U.S. generals wanted to recall elements of the old Iraqi army in 2003, but were rebuffed by the Bush administration. Bremer complained generally that his authority was undermined by Washington's "micromanagement." Although Allawi, a cousin of Ayad Allawi, Iraq's prime minister in 2004, is a member of a secularist Shiite Muslim political grouping, his well-researched book betrays little partisanship. On U.S. reconstruction failures - in electricity, health care and other areas documented by Washington's own auditors - Allawi writes that the Americans' "insipid retelling of 'success' stories" merely hid "the huge black hole that lay underneath." For their part, U.S. officials have often largely blamed Iraq's explosive violence for the failures of reconstruction and poor governance. The author has been instrumental since 2005 in publicizing extensive corruption within Iraq's "new order," including an $800-million Defense Ministry scandal. Under Saddam, he writes, the secret police kept would-be plunderers in check better than the U.S. occupiers have done. As 2007 began, Allawi concludes, "America's only allies in Iraq were those who sought to manipulate the great power to their narrow advantage. It might have been otherwise." http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/040907K.shtml __________________ "The perfect is the enemy of the good." ~ Voltaire Last edited by dc_dux; 06-26-2007 at 08:43 AM..

06-26-2007, 08:40 AM	#37 (permalink)
Plan9 I Confess a Shiver	Concise summary? We did a bad thing, Lenny. __________________ *Whatever you can carry.* "You should not drink... and bake."

06-17-2007, 10:43 AM	#3 (permalink)
trickyy ►	i know that one of the first things rumsfeld asked bremer after the war was "when are we leaving?" ... apparently he was not expecting to stay

06-17-2007, 08:50 PM	#8 (permalink)
Willravel ... a sort of licensed troubleshooter.	I don't see you mention Bush in your post. Just the Dems. You can see where this might be confusing.

06-18-2007, 08:45 AM	#17 (permalink)
Willravel ... a sort of licensed troubleshooter.	GOOD GOD.

06-18-2007, 10:48 AM	#22 (permalink)
host Banned	ace....if you want to be taken seriously...why don't you read the news reporting that roachboy and I have posted....my post details the State Dept. post Iraq invasion planning as early as in 2002...through it's rejection by "civilians in the pentagon"? Then you might react to specific details in the news reporting....singling out passages or details that don't jive with earlier/later reports from the same....or other sources not influenced or owned by Fox/CNP/Bozell/Horowitz or the RNC. We are all beholden to reporting from news or investigative journalists.... bolstered by quotes from whistleblowers and attributions of "officials who asked not to be named." Individual reporters.... like James Risen of the NY Times and Pincus of the WAPO build reputations for reliable reporting. We learn from experience and by the playing out of reported incidents in "the fullness of time"....who reports reliably....and who shills...ala Judith Miller or John Solomon. All of us only "know" what these journalists publish or televise....ace. When I read a post from you like the one I quote in this post.....with a "Bush had a plan" statement so conflicting with the reported record....with what we now know to be the highly probable account of the quashing by Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld of the actual expert PLAN....I have to agree with roachboy...about having better ways to spend time than going around and around here with you. When you are willing to respond to opinons supported by the reported record....without relying almost solely on IBD editorials for your support....maybe you won't receive responses to your posts similar to roachboy's last one.....

06-19-2007, 04:45 AM	#26 (permalink)
ratbastid Darth Papa Location: Yonder	There was a really astounding story on the NPR show "This American Life" a few weeks back that addressed exactly this. The story asserted that across the board, the question of how to manage the occupation was brushed aside as somebody else's problem. Planners in both the White House and the Pentagon basically completely ignored the post "liberation" phase of the operation, because they couldn't adequately predict how it was going to go, and because it's the hard, glory-free part, and they were fixated on the invasion and capture of Saddam. They justified it by saying that the Red Cross or somebody would take care of that part. There was a pre-invasion report done by a guy (I can't remember his name or rank now, sorry) that basically laid out EXACTLY what we're currently facing... and it was utterly ignored by all the planners. In fact, they took several actions that he specifically warned them not to do. Disbanding the Iraqi army, for instance. So it's not just that there was no plan. It's that the effort to MAKE such a plan was deliberately and specifically resisted by those in charge.

06-24-2007, 02:38 AM	#29 (permalink)
DJ Happy Psycho	Wow, Donald Rumsfeld seems totally unaware that there was any plan, Tony Blair says that Bush had no plan, Bush admits as much himself and says that Britain doesn't need to send troops and can "help out in some other way," but aceventura3 knows there was a plan and will fight everyone who says otherwise. No wonder this fool keeps getting himself elected.

06-29-2007, 12:36 AM	#38 (permalink)
hiredgun Addict	I'm not entirely sure what to even do with this information. Furthermore, I'm astonished at the fact that a defense of the post-war planning is even happening here. There have been entire books written on the ludicrous mishandling of the postwar planning. See: State of Denial; The Assassins' Gate; Imperial Life in the Emerald City. What is the point of the apologia?