Message to all of those rightwing net warriors who demanded over the years that I accept that THERE WAS A PLAN and the Rumsfeld/neocon warhawks are not a bunch of criminal incompetents: you were completely fucking wrong. Give up.
Let’s hear from patchouli-soaked hippies at the Army War College:
“The transition to a new campaign was not well thought out, planned for, and prepared for before it began,” write Wright and Reese, historians at the Army’s Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. “Additionally, the assumptions about the nature of post-Saddam Iraq on which the transition was planned proved to be largely incorrect.”
The results of those errors, they add, were that U.S. forces and their allies lacked an operational and strategic plan for success in Iraq, as well as the resources to carry out a plan.
The capsule summary is not entirely accurate in that Rumsfeld certainly did have a plan. He and the neocons planned to install a friendly strongman and leave. To guage just how stupid the war planners were, a useful question is who. Unless we had in mind a Saddam cousin or Muqtada Sadr, who wasn’t on our radar at the time, the only credible option would be a friendly exile. Aside from Ahmad Chalabi, how many of those can you name?
It really was Chalabi or bust. We got bust.