“We learn from failure – not from success”
Some of the planning by Gen. Tommy Franks and other top military officials before the 2003 invasion of Iraq envisioned that as few as 5,000 U.S. troops would remain in Iraq by December 2006.
Slides obtained by the National Security Archive under the Freedom of Information Act contain a PowerPoint presentation of what planners projected to be a stable, pro-American and democratic Iraq after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
“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.”
You have to wonder if these guys ever studied the history of, say, the Crusades — or maybe 20th Century anti-colonial wars? They didn’t believe the hype aimed at Congress and the electorate — did they? Did they?
You have to wonder if these guys ever studied the history of…
Bwaaaa Haaaaaaaa haaaaaaaa (cough) haaaaaaaaaaaaaaa haaaaaaaaaaa. (cough cough)
If we really learn more from failure than from success, then the Chimperor is definitely the most learned President in history.
World War 2 era America was the last of the kick ass American generations. It was in the post-war period that Americans begin to buy into the lunatic consumerism that so permeates our society today, along with the iconization of church, government and the damned car. A man put in his thirty years at the local factory, a woman stayed home, and Beaver and the Fonz kept the people sedated.
The Great Disconnect soon separated the television zombies from both their supposed leaders and world events, so now we have juiced up goombahs for leaders tear assing around the planet, going to war, or thinking about going to war, with pretty well anybody they want to, and their military ass licking advisors serving whatever lame brained intel they can devise to keep the goombahs happy.
We do, in fact, live in strange and interesting times.
Only a few months after hostilities? That’s not what’s in the plan. They were planning on 5-6 years in different phases. The US is behind schedule, as according to their plan we should be months into the security cooperation phase. Looks like another case of reporters wanting to bash the President on Iraq and getting the facts completely wrong. Just like with that State of the Union, or Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame, etc.
“another case of reporters wanting to bash the President on Iraq,” that is called “viable news story” in the mainstream media.
I think what happened is that the top brass wrote a plan that fit with the bosses world view. if they had wrote a different plan, it probably would have been early retirement for them.
when this is all said and done, I hope people wrote case studies on this to show another fine example of bright people getting it wrong.
Wow, the anti-Bush threads aren’t pulling in the hits like they used to.
#7 – You’re probably right. Same thing is true of reporters, who mostly failed to look closely at the evidence. The only clear sight seemed to belong to long-term CIA analysts who were careful to hedge their conclusions. The Bushies took care of that quickly enough by politicizing the top layer, so honest assessment of intel became risky.
George W. Bush put best the type of zero-depth thinking that got the U.S. into its current mess:
“Joe, I don’t do nuance.”
–George w. Bush, 02/15/2004, to Sen. Joseph Biden, as quoted in Time
Finally the truth is coming out about when they actually started to plan the invasion of Iraq, which was in the Fall of 2001. Many people were aware of this despite the repeated denials of the Bush administration.
Also, the average counter-insurgency in the 20th century lasted 9 years. The Bush administration chose to ignore this and lots of other information in their reckless run-up to the invasion of Iraq. It’s their war and they deserve 100% of the blame for this disaster.
I think it’s a cultural disconnect. Everything I have read says that planners didn’t really understand Iraqi culture (or were intentionally mislead).
I hope we do our homework next time.
Its funny, that when I have made plans in the past, that Something would come up to MESS them up.
Raise in food prices.
Raise in the rent.
Raise in gas prices…and so forth.
Fo all the money that has been LOST/stolen in this war…we could have paid the fighters MORE money, and those teens may have seen this as a way to make some spare change and JOINED up.
ECA,
For the trillion dollars the Iraq war alone is gonna cost when its all said and done, we could have simply handed each and every person in Iraq $35,000 and asked them to be our friends and stop hating us.
I bet they would have voted to be the 51st state for that kind of cash.
Come to think of it… Lets just offer to give Iran and North Korea a trillion dollars each and ask their government to use the money to americanize the population.
I bet that would work better than war.
Pedro: maybe it’s Sun Cycles, or a galactic orbital wobble, or something. Whatever, it seems to be global.
#8. with bashing Bush about poor Iraq war planning, at this point, we’re just making the rubble bounce. Past idiocy is past, only relevant to point out that the people making this war cannot be trusted.
Pelosi in 2007!
13,
I think the war is Already past that point…$1T…In about the 2nd year..
If there was no other reason why this mentally retarded f..k in the white house shouldn’t be impeached, here is enough of a reason why he should.
ECA, you don’t know Pelosi that well, do you?
No, we need someone who isn’t in either party..they’re all a collection of egomaniacs and nutters. The two party system is broken.
We need to withdraw from Iraq. It’s big busines and corruption “old boy” stuff. It’s not about the country…it’s not about the WMD, it wasnt’ about Saddam. It’s about destruction and massive rebuilding contracts. It’s about wasting money. It’s about some personal agenda…and it’s about the misguided boomer generation doing the exact wrong thing, again.
They have always been about “me me me me me me me” since birth, and spoiled to the point of rotten. The boomers have wrecked everything they have touched with their greed and lack of morals. And, who was to blame, their parents…..the last “great” generation, as they’ve been called. But the WWII generation, born and some raised during the great depression, put all their faith in experts, the “modern way of raising kids” (thank you Dr. Spock, you idiot!) and forgot their roots, their culture, and common sense. They raised a bunch of kids who are now running the country, and huge corporations.
I am not sure the country will survive the boomers legacy.