Let's face it - critical thinking skills are not the strong suit of those who have been or are in the Bush administration. Surprisingly there were many in the press who either through being cowed, complicit, or conned couldn't think clearly from the beginning of the Labor Day weekend 2002 marketing blitz of WHIG until things started to predictably go south in Iraq. Of course, there were journalists and every day people all over the world who spoke up to prevent this disaster before it happened. Obviously, Dick Cheney's "so" attitude was as operative then as it is now.

Actually, things went pretty well according to plan. If Bush-Cheney's plan was to set up their cronies with long-term contracts and maintain maximum profits for oil companies, they performed as expected.
Trashing the US Constitution and reducing the ability of successive administrations to do anything constructive (due to lack of money) was just gravy.

Of course, saying there was no plan is easier for the Serious Wingnuts than to discuss the real plan--staffing the Provisional Coalition with ideological hacks on the basis of their Koolaid smiles and absolute fealty to Der Kommander in Chief.

There was one thing that the US did accomplish with it's invasion of Iraq. This is a continuation of the British and French policy to fragment the Arab speaking nations into smaller and smaller units. The nations of North Africa, Egypt, the Levant are the rest of the Arab peninsula are part of a single heritage and speak a common language -- they certainly are more culturally unified than say Europe. This fragmentation process has made it easier for the West to control these people and to control oil. Israel has also incorporated this principle in her policies. Today we see this process at work in two places -- efforts in the west to support secession movements in Sudan and, of course, the breakup of Iraq into three states.

The price was too high, but there were architects of this war that had this in mind when we invaded.

phelicity:
I agree, its hard not to feel that there must be some method to the madness. This is an idea that has been kicking around for awhile. "Its NOT the incomptence, stupid." Josh here at TPM has talked about the neocons' strategy of "spreading the chaos outward" as early as 2003. And there is Naomi Klein's recent book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

Ah shucks, Andy, I think you are exactly right...

It is much easer to play off a bumbling, Barey Fife, incompetence then to justify the resulting unstable, chaos we find Iraq in today as expected or even desired.

How do you steel from an orderly society?

Incompetence is the easy out.

A Claude Raines Moment?

Those who claim "astonishment" at the so-called "incompetence" of the Bush Administration war planners are dissembling.

Bush wanted to be a "war president." Nothing wrong with that; most Presidents do. Iraq was the best choice -- the most educated, technologically sophisticated, non-sectarian society in the Middle East whose middle class could, as soon as the Baath party was off its neck, run the country rationally, get the services up and running with a little help from the U.S. of A. and the United Nations, and pay for it all with oil revenues.

Now, if the above wasn't true, then, Iraq was a Lebanon waiting to happen and would require huge numbers of troops to stabilize it after the invasion. But since the U.S. didn't have the necessary troops, that line of thinking couldn't be pursued, because then, you couldn't have the war you wanted.

Ergo; no reason to plan for an eventuality which, if admitted upfront as a reasonable possibility, would deny you the possibility of going to the war you desired -- a simple Catch-22: Yossarian: "Whoo . . . That's some catch, that Catch-22." Doc Daneeka: "It's the best there is."

Who cares? Some one needs to send a memo to all these idiotic pundits and let them know that the administration's incompetence isn't what made this a bad war. It was, is, and will ever remain a war waged with no justification and no purpose. If the administration were more competent it would only be less bad.

i cannot believe that the complete lack of planning that happened when they took baghdad was deliberate.

they just didn't think about it because it posed to many complicated questions of just what are real objectives would be.

so in that sense, it may have been planned, but never discussed in polite company that they wanted to create a cluster fuck.

but they didn't want a cluster fuck which is why i chalk it up to a collossal blunder on their part to plan for a key step in their plan to auction off iraq and install some top down authority to make it happen.

the chaos that followed baghdad doesn't advance that goal as much as say immediately establishing top down control over the situation, which of course may not have been possible given the woefully inadequate number of troops.

perhaps an alliance with the iraqi army could have been successful in imposing order pending a political resolution.

who knows, but collossal arrogance and extreme incompetence are the hallmarks of this administration, occams razor says it was a fuck up, like all their other fuckups.

Ellen: Your explanation...

Now, if the above wasn't true, then, Iraq was a Lebanon waiting to happen and would require huge numbers of troops to stabilize it after the invasion. But since the U.S. didn't have the necessary troops, that line of thinking couldn't be pursued, because then, you couldn't have the war you wanted.

Ergo; no reason to plan for an eventuality which, if admitted upfront as a reasonable possibility, would deny you the possibility of going to the war you desired -- a simple Catch-22.

... tracks with my explanation.

Andrew: You might be interested in my post from several years ago, The Retreat from Empiricism and Ron Suskind's Scoop.

In Without a Doubt (subtitled “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush”) Suskind was not talking about an age old conflict between realists and idealists, the sort of story line that can be re-cycled for every administration. It wasn’t the ideologues against the pragmatists, either. He was telling us that reality-based policy-making—and the mechanisms for it—had gotten dumped. A different pattern had appeared under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The normal checks and balances had been overcome, so that executive power could flow more freely. Reduced deliberation, oversight, fact-finding, and field reporting were different elements of an emerging political style. Suskind, I felt, got to the essence of it with his phrase, the “retreat from empiricism.”

Also, I got this note from Christopher Lydon, former NY Times reporter, and radio host in Boston:

We are encouraged not to remember that in fact any number of smart, certified grown-ups in the international-relations field -- at Harvard, MIT, Northwestern, Ohio State and UCLA, among others -- told us precisely the trouble that Bush and Co. were taking us into well before the invasion of Iraq. I note especially an ad in the New York Times of September 26, 2002, in which 33 scholars warned, for example: "Even if we win easily, we have no plausible exit strategy. Iraq is a deeply divided society that the United States would have to occupy and police for many years to create a viable state." The signers paid for the ad themselves because the Times declined to run their views as an Op-Ed.

One would love to think that these are the few brave voices that the Times and others would be seeking out anew -- instead of recycling the crocodile tears of the many happy warriors still trying to justify their catastrophic misjudgments.

In a series of Open Source podcasts under the heading "They Got It Right," I have interviewed a number of these foresighted folk. The honor roll includes Robert J. Art of Brandeis, Michael Desch of the University of Texas, Barry Posen and Steve Van Evera of MIT, Peter Liberman of Queens College and Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland. See also my conversation with Kanan Makiya, who got it stunningly wrong.

It remains one of the confounding features of policy-making and punditry that for the most part only those who were wrong from the start on Iraq -- and are still wrong about fundamentals -- are held up as qualified to comment expertly

I don't see much empirical method being displayed in this thread.

The number of boots on the ground - and the ethnicity of those boots - was planned and implemented ... up to May 2003.

Fateful Choice on Iraq Army Bypassed Debate

"Starting in June 2002 we conducted targeted psychological operations using pamphlet drops, broadcasts and all sort of means to get the message to the regular army troops that they should surrender or desert and that if they did we would bring them back as part of a new Iraq without Saddam," said Colonel Agoglia, who serves as the director of the Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute of the Army.

Once the war got under way and many members of the Iraqi Army began to desert their posts, a different vision on how to proceed began to emerge at the Defense Department.Frontline interview with Lt. Gen. Jay Garner

Well, our initial plan when we were in Washington, and initially in Kuwait, was that this war went in much like the first Gulf War, where you have thousands of POWs, maybe hundreds of thousands. ... The army was about 400,000, so from that, we would bring between 150,000 and 250,000 back. We wanted to keep them in their unit structures, because they had already had a command-and-control system. They had vehicles, what was left. They knew how to take orders, and they had the basic skill sets to do the things you need to do in early reconstruction of a country. So they were a labor force, and they provide a certain amount of security, like guard static locations -- guard buildings, guard ammo dumps or displaced ammunition, that type of thing. ...

By the 15th of May, we had a large number of Iraqi army located that were ready to come back, and the Treasury guys were ready to pay them. When the order came out to disband, [it] shocked me, because I didn't know we were going to do that. All along I thought we were bringing back the Iraqi army. ... Why we didn't do that, I don't know.I'll also add that the 33 scholars that "got it right" wrote in their NYT ad that "Iraq has military options - chemical and biological weapons, urban combat - that might pose significant costs on the invading forces and neighboring states." Why did they, independent scholars of international security affairs, think Iraq had chemical and biological weapons?

Sorry. I meant to write Rick Atkinson instead of Rosen in my previous comment.

Richardxx said:

That confusion was a clear symptom of competing power groups within the administration.

Yes, the place was a free for all of competing U.S. agencies.

Learning about all the decisions that went into the change from Garner to Bremer would certainly advance understanding of the policy apparatus at that time. But that incident was part and parcel of a larger pattern where some things were being micromanaged by the administration while most of the resources responsible for carrying out tasks were completely uncoordinated.

There is something strangely defiant about the prosecution of this war. It is as if a certain group of people decided that all the emphasis placed by previous administrations upon getting all the elements of an operation to work toward a specific objective was a mistake.

How soon we forget:

The establishment of a strong US military presence in an Arab country with a government friendly to the USA as a counter to the surging Chinese economic power has always been the main focus of the neocon agenda in the Middle East. Oil, regime-change in Iraq (save as it served the higher purpose), democracy, etc., etc., etc...

...those all took a backseat to creating the Green Zone embassy and the military base(s) to protect it.

From THAT perspective, the Iraq War has been 100% successful and remarkably competently executed. Even Obama won't be willing to abandon our diplomatic presence (and the gigantic military presence that is associated with it) in Iraq, so "The New American Century" is assured.

I ran across a comment (below) that I posted in 2006. Since then I saw a 1992 videoclip of Cheney explaining religious factionalism and inevitable civil war as the reason for not continuing to Bagdad during the first Gulf War, so it's not that they didn't know. I just can't wrap my mind around it either way - no administration can be that ignorant or that incompetent, that careless with lives, or so heinous as to create such horrific suffering deliberately.

Nothing makes sense. If the US wanted Shiites in control (as an ally for Shiite Iran), why waste all those resources funding, arming and empowering Saddam Hussein to fight the Iran/Iraq War? If the US wanted Sunnis in control, why disband the Sunni army and dismiss Sunni civil servants?

Like everyone else who read the newspapers at the time, I read that Bush 41 didn't push on to Baghdad because strongman Saddam was needed to keep the Shiite majority in check and that civil war and insurgency would likely follow an invasion. When Bush 43 went in, that was THE big question: how to prevent that from happening. We talked about it over lunch at work - most of the people I talked to understood the basic issues.

I was truly dumbfounded to hear Bush 43 and his top guns claim that they didn't develop a plan to deal with that contingency because they were unaware of the Sunni/Shiite division within Islam. Were they lying? telling the truth? Which would be worse? Is it plausible that Bush 43 and Bush 41 never had a conversion about it?

These aren't serious people who are running our country. The janitors in my workplace take their jobs more seriously. Any group of a dozen or so honest, reasonably informed citizens could have made decisions that would have been better for the country and for the world.

Who do they hope wins out? Do they even care? Do they care about anything other than dividing up the spoils of war?

Posted by ergoquid November 24, 2006 4:52 PM

Go back and read Packer's entire article:Dreaming Of Democracy

It now seems that the State Department has won this fight. As Peter Galbraith suggested, half in jest, the Pentagon will get its war and State will get its postwar. In mid-February, administration officials finally announced plans for an American military government to run the country for at least two years, guaranteeing security and overseeing the reconstruction of Iraq and the election of an Iraqi government. Baath Party officials would be removed from the top levels of the bureaucracy, but those a notch down would be kept on to work with their American superiors....

The longer you try to look at Iraq on the morning after Saddam, the more you see the truth of what many people told me: getting rid of him will be the easy part. After that, the United States will find itself caught in a series of conundrums that will require supreme finesse: to liberate without appearing to dominate, to ensure order without overstaying, to secure its interests without trampling on Iraq's, to oversee democratization without picking winners, to push for reforms in the neighborhood without unleashing demons. It's hard to know whether to be more worried by the State Department's complacency or by the Pentagon civilians' zealotry....

... When [Bush] met with Makiya and two other Iraqis in January, I was told by someone not present, the exiles spent a good portion of the time explaining to the president that there are two kinds of Arabs in Iraq, Sunnis and Shiites. The very notion of an Iraqi opposition appeared to be new to him....As far as I know, Makiya has not confirmed this discussion about Arab differences during his January 2003 meeting with Bush. He has confirmed and discussed other published "quotes" of what he said in the meeting ("sweets and flowers").