Mission Unaccomplished

"OK, we're in Baghdad, what next?"

Before the invasion, an Army commander asked that question and never got an answer, according to a new 700-page study by the Army itself based on 200 interviews by military historians with active or recently retired officers on what went wrong in Iraq after the man in a flight jacket stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier to declare victory.

In what amounts to the non-Rumsfeld story of the disaster, we finally get first-hand accounts of the making of a quagmire, and it is not a pretty picture.

“The Army, as the service primarily responsible for ground operations, should have insisted on better Phase IV [postwar] planning and preparations through its voice on the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” the study notes. “The military means employed were sufficient to destroy the Saddam regime; they were not sufficient to replace it with the type of nation-state the United States wished to see in its place."

The Bush Administration, the Pentagon and its Iraq commander, Gen. Tommy Franks were plentifully supplied with wishes but short of methods to realize them. Disregarding one proposal that called for 300,000 soldiers to secure postwar Iraq, they deployed half as many and were in a rush to reduce even that number during “an abbreviated period of stability operations."

“In line with the prewar planning and general euphoria at the rapid crumbling of the Saddam regime," the report says, "Franks continued to plan for a very limited role for U.S. ground forces in Iraq.”

Behind all this was the genius of Defense Secretary Don Rumseld who kept smugly assuring Americans that it would all be fine. "As you know," he told the troops, "you have to go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want."

Meanwhile, we now learn, the Army itself was finding out otherwise. Maybe when Rumsfeld gets around to publishing his memoirs, he'll tell them how they got it all wrong.

Whistle-Blowing MSM Dogs Don't Hear

Behind the media popcorn of Scott McClellan's revelations, relatively unnoticed is a new book by the former American commander in Iraq that should be red meat for historians.

This week's Time has an excerpt from "Wiser in Battle: A Soldier's Story" by Gen. Ricardo Sanchez that nails his Pentagon boss Don Rumsfeld, along with the rest of the Bush Administration, for "gross incompetence and dereliction of duty" at the start of the unfolding disaster.

This is no out-of-the-loop flunky's account of what happened, but the testimony of the man in the middle of it all, one of the generals whose advice Bush maintained he would follow but obviously did not.

The Central Command, Gen. Sanchez writes, had originally planned 12 to 18 months of active troop deployments but then "had completely walked away by simply stating that the war was over...

"That decision set up the United States for a failed first year in Iraq. There is no question about it. And I was supposed to believe that neither the Secretary of Defense nor anybody above him knew anything about it? Impossible! Rumsfeld knew about it. Everybody on the NSC knew about it, including Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, and Colin Powell. Vice President Cheney knew about it. And President Bush knew about it.

"There's not a doubt in my mind that they all embraced this decision to some degree. And if it had not been for the moral courage of Gen. John Abizaid to stand up to them all and reverse [Gen. Tommy] Franks's troop drawdown order, there's no telling how much more damage would have been done.

"In the meantime, hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were unnecessarily spent, and worse yet, too many of our most precious military resource, our American soldiers, were unnecessarily wounded, maimed, and killed as a result. In my mind, this action by the Bush administration amounts to gross incompetence and dereliction of duty."

Amid all the whistle-blowing in Washington these days, this particular one by Gen. Sanchez should be heard loud and clear, but so far the media dogs are not responding to its frequency.

"Dumbest Guy on the Planet" Explains It All

At a Neo-Con reunion last night, Don Rumsfeld's Three Stooges, who planned the war in Iraq, got together to blame the mess there on somebody else, L. Paul Bremer, who ran the occupation for the first two years.

Former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith told the faithful at the American Enterprise Institute that his plan was not "to be around for many, many months" but that Bremer overruled him, thereby putting the US in today's stalemate.

Feith, labeled by Gen. Tommy Franks as "the dumbest effing guy on the planet," was introduced by former colleague Richard Perle while Paul Wolfowitz, the former World Bank lover, sat up front and agreed that Feith was "pretty much on the mark."

After hearing about the talk, Bremer told a reporter that Feith's "argument isn't with me," that President Bush told him before leaving for Baghdad to "take our time setting up an interim administration."

In reviewing George Tenet's memoir for the Wall Street Journal, Feith accused the former CIA Director of making up stories about how we got into Iraq. With his own book due for publication is March, Feith is getting a head start on fabricating his own.