Bush conquered a country with no plan for what to do next

A Knight Ridder review of the policies and decisions leading up to the Iraq war finds that the administration

invaded Iraq without a comprehensive plan in place to secure and rebuild the country…. “We didn’t go in with a plan. We went in with a theory,” said a veteran State Department officer who was directly involved in Iraq policy.

Right. Now say after me: “All people have the same basic desires, to see their children grow, to have some comforts, not to have a knock on the door in the middle of the night, and so all people are like us Americans, and are deserving of and ready for democracy, which is a universal value, and if you doubt this you are a condescending bigot, so we simply have to make democracy available to people, and presto, they will have democracy!” Repeat 30 times before going to sleep every night for the next four weeks.

The Knight Ridder story continues: “[S]ome senior Pentagon officials had thought they could bring most American soldiers home from Iraq by September 2003.” You see, the administration thought that Iraq would become a democratic country overnight, and that there would be no Iraqi resistance to this.

However, according to Richard Lowry’s cover article in the October 25, 2004 National Review , “What Went Wrong?”, it wasn’t so much a lack of planning or a rejection of planning (as has been charged by James Fallows and frequently echoed here by me) as a lack of accurate intelligence. For example, the administration had incorrectly thought that the Iraqi police forces would be able to provide order; they didn’t know that Iraq’s essential-services infrastructure (electricity, water, sewage) was in such bad shape; they had expected some looting but didn’t anticipate anything like the extreme looting that took place.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 19, 2004 01:04 AM | Send