Excerpt du Jour on the Iraq War

The fourth of 20 excerpts from "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq" by Thomas Ricks:

As war was about to begin, everything was ready except for one thing: a real war plan. The official view at the Pentagon is that solid planning was done. "The idea that the U.S. government had no plan for the aftermath of the war is false," [Undersecretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz insisted in July 2003. It was just, he said, that 'every plan requires adjustment once conflict begins."

But many other participants disagree, as -- increasingly -- do military historians who have examined the record. . . .

A Rand Corp. study written in 2005 after a review of the classified record noted in a matter-of-fact manner, "Post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction were addressed only very generally, largely because of the prevailing view that the task would not be difficult." . . .

When assumptions are wrong, everything built on them in undermined. Because the Pentagon assumed that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators and that an Iraqi government would be stood up quickly, it didn't plan seriously for less rosy scenarios. Because it so underestimated the task at hand, it didn't send a well-trained, coherent team of professionals, but rather an odd collection of youthful Republican campaign workers and other novices. Nor did it send enough people.

© 2006, Thomas E. Ricks. All rights reserved.