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Originally posted by Nim the Fanciful:
Jay, number 5, 7 and 10 on that list are so vague and obscure I'm not sure they count as actual "mistakes", just circumstances.
I agree with the point you're making, I'm just not sure they are so useful in an argument, they are more POVs than actual fact.

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I will grant that 7 could be combined with 5, but then the list would only have 9. In our David Letterman world, we can't have that can we?

But they are all points of view aren't they? Isn't that after all the essential nature of pointing out what you think are the mistakes of others?

At any rate, I am, of course, inclined to disagree with you.

Let's look at these.

5) I think the fifth mistake was that we underestimated the task....

Here's what General Zinni said - the link is above:

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And I think those of us that knew that region, former commanders in chief, I guess we can't use that term anymore - part of transformation is to change the lexicon - but former combatant commanders of U.S. Central Command, beginning with Gen. Schwarzkopf, have said you don't understand what you're getting into. You are not going to go through Edelman's "cakewalk;" you are not going to go through Chalabi's dancing in the streets to receive you. You are about to go into a problem that you don't know the dimensions and the depth of, and are going to cause you a great deal of pain, time, expenditure of resources and casualties down the road.

I can't understand why there was an underestimation when you look at a country that has never known democracy, that has been in the condition it's been in, that has the natural fault lines that it has, and the issues it has. And to look at the task of reconstructing this country, not only reconstructing it, but the idea of creating Jeffersonian democracy almost overnight, is almost ridiculous, in concept, in the kind of time and effort that was given as an estimate as to what it would take.

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How many troops did Zinni�s plan call for? "We were much in line with Gen. Shinseki's view," says Zinni. "We were talking about, you know, 300,000, in that neighborhood."

What difference would it have made if 300,000 troops had been sent in, instead of 180,000?

"I think it's critical in the aftermath, if you're gonna go to resolve a conflict through the use of force, and then to rebuild the country," says Zinni.

"The first requirement is to freeze the situation, is to gain control of the security. To patrol the streets. To prevent the looting. To prevent the 'revenge' killings that might occur. To prevent bands or gangs or militias that might not have your best interests at heart from growing or developing."

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I didn't hear anything that told me that they had the scope of planning for the political reconstruction, the economic reconstruction, social reconstruction, the development of building of infrastructure for that country. And I think that lack of planning, that idea that you can do this by the seat of the pants, reconstruct a country, to make decisions on the fly, to beam in on the side that has to that political, economic, social other parts, just a handful of people at the last minute to be able to do it was patently ridiculous.

In my time at CENTCOM, we actually looked at a plan for reconstruction, and actually developed one at CENTCOM because I though that we, the military, would get stuck with it. In my mind, we needed formidable teams at every provincial level. 18 teams. The size of the CPA was about the size we felt we needed for one province, let alone the entire country of Baghad [sic] (Iraq), to do those other parts.

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WASHINGTON -- A small group of top civilians in the Defense Department who dominated planning for postwar Iraq failed to prepare for the setbacks that have erupted over the past two months.

The officials, led by the No. 3 person in the department, did not develop postwar plans because they believed that Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops and that Washington could install a favored Iraqi exile figure as the country's leader.

The Pentagon civilians ignored CIA and State Department experts who disputed them and resisted White House pressure to back off from their pick to run Iraq. When their scenario collapsed amid increasing disorder, they had no backup plan.

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One senior defense official said that the failure of Pentagon civilians to set specific objectives -- short-, medium- and long-term -- for Iraq's post-Hussein stabilization and reconstruction even left U.S. military commanders uncertain about how many and what kind of troops would be needed after the war.

In contrast, years before World War II ended, U.S. planners plotted detailed plans for how to administer postwar Germany and Japan.

Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel, Detriot Free Press

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In the spring of 2002, as support for a war to oust Saddam Hussein took root within the Bush administration, the State Department began to gather information and draw up its own set of plans for postwar Iraq under the leadership of Thomas Warrick, a longtime State Department official who was then special adviser to the department's Office of Northern Gulf Affairs. This effort involved a great number of Iraqi exiles from across the political spectrum, from monarchists to communists and including the Iraqi National Congress.

Warrick's Future of Iraq Project, as it was called, was an effort to consider almost every question likely to confront a post-Hussein Iraq: the rebuilding of infrastructure, the shape Iraqi democracy might take, the carrying out of transitional justice and the spurring of economic development. Warrick called on the talents of many of the best Middle Eastern specialists at State and at the C.I.A. He divided his team into working groups, each of which took on one aspect of the reconstruction.

David L. Phillips, an American conflict-prevention specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and a former adviser to the State Department, served on the project's "democratic principles" group. In his view of the project, "Iraqis did a lot of important work together looking at the future." But however useful the work itself was, Phillips says, the very process of holding the discussions was even more valuable. "It involved Iraqis coming together, in many cases for the first time, to discuss and try to forge a common vision of Iraq's future," Phillips says.

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The Future of Iraq Project did draw up detailed reports, which were eventually released to Congress last month and made available to reporters for The New York Times. The 13 volumes, according to The Times, warned that "the period immediately after regime change might offer . . . criminals the opportunity to engage in acts of killing, plunder and looting."

But the Defense Department, which came to oversee postwar planning, would pay little heed to the work of the Future of Iraq Project. Gen. Jay Garner, the retired Army officer who was later given the job of leading the reconstruction of Iraq, says he was instructed by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to ignore the Future of Iraq Project.

Garner has said that he asked for Warrick to be added to his staff and that he was turned down by his superiors. Judith Yaphe, a former C.I.A. analyst and a leading expert on Iraqi history, says that Warrick was "blacklisted" by the Pentagon. "He did not support their vision," she told me.

And what was this vision?

Yaphe's answer is unhesitant: "Ahmad Chalabi." But it went further than that: "The Pentagon didn't want to touch anything connected to the Department of State."

None of the senior American officials involved in the Future of Iraq Project were taken on board by the Pentagon's planners. And this loss was considerable. "The Office of Special Plans discarded all of the Future of Iraq Project's planning," David Phillips says. "I don't know why."

To say all this is not to claim that the Future of Iraq Project alone would have prevented the postwar situation from deteriorating as it did. Robert Perito, a former State Department official who is one of the world's leading experts on postconflict police work, says of the Future of Iraq Project: "It was a good idea. It brought the exiles together, a lot of smart people, and its reports were very impressive. But the project never got to the point where things were in place that could be implemented."

Nonetheless, Istrabadi points out that "we in the Future of Iraq Project predicted widespread looting. You didn't have to have a degree from a Boston university to figure that one out. Look at what happened in L.A. after the police failed to act quickly after the Rodney King verdict. It was entirely predictable that in the absence of any authority in Baghdad that you'd have chaos and lawlessness."

According to one participant, Iraqi exiles on the project specifically warned of the dangers of policing postwar Iraq: "Adnan Pachaci's first question to U.S. officials was, How would they maintain law and order after the war was over? They told him not to worry, that things would get back to normal very soon."

Linked to at the Truthout website because you would have to pay to read the original at the New York Times website. Via The Left Coaster.

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De-Baathifying down to a point where you've alienated the Sunnis, where you have stopped having qualified people down in the ranks, people who don't have blood on their hands, but know how to make the trains run on time. Business men who I ran into in the region out there in the region, who wanted to re-start their business, get jobs. They were told by the CPA "You can't do business because you were a Baathist!" They said to me, I had to say I was a Baathist. You don't do business in Iraq under Saddam if you're not a Baathist. Imagine throwing the Communists out of Russia at the end of the war.

Disbanding the Army, this is one I'll never understand because when I arrived at CENTCOM as the commander, there was an on-going program started by my predecessors to run a psychological operations campaign against the regular Army. Every time we struck Iraq, we dropped leaflets on regular Army formations and garrisons saying "If you don't fight when the time comes, we'll take care of you." We sent messages to them to this affect through people in the region. When I did interviews on Al Jazeera TV and other Arab networks, I would always mention the poor Iraqi soldiers of the regular Army - victims of Saddam. We had always intended if they didn't fight, we'd get rid of the leadership, we'd keep them in tact, we'd provide for some of their training, and we would have the basis for a ready-made force to pick up some of the security requirements. But they were disbanded. And on and on and on, we've had this series of mistakes. Lack of a dialogue or identification of the leadership in the Sunni and the Shia areas. The inability to connect with the leadership down there. Somebody like Sistani who doesn't even talk to Jerry Bremer - I don't think they've ever had a conversation, he refuses to see him. We have now found ourselves in a position to date for these series of mistakes and many, many more, where we are. Which I think is clearly evident.

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