David Corn

The latest non-news news about Iraq comes from a nearly 700-page Army study that notes that the Army--including General Tommy Franks--did not prepare adequately for the post-invasion phase in Iraq. The bottom-line quote: "The military means employed [in Iraq] 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." But this failure does not belong only to Franks and the Army. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld did not prepare effectively for what would come after the invasion; he was too concerned with demonstrating his new whiz-bang ideas about a smaller and lighter military and getting out quickly. And George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice were also negligent. In our book, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, Michael Isikoff and I reported that in one meeting with Franks, Bush asked what would happen after the invasion and Franks replied that in each Iraqi town and village a U.S. military officer would be appointed as "lord-mayor" and each would have the responsibility of maintaining civic order and administering basic services. Bush and the White House did not follow up with Franks to determine if such a scheme made sense and would be workable. All in all, Bush and his top aides displayed reckless disregard for what would come after the invasion. That negligence alone should have gotten Bush diselected in 2004, but it did not. In addition to the Army study, I'd like to see an internal White House report--I'd settle for a congressional investigation--on how Bush and his crew planned (that is, did not plan) for the post-invasion period.

Which brings me to 10 Downing Street. I only recently came across the below excerpt from Jonathan Steele's Defeat: Why They Lost Iraq, which describes a prewar session that British Prime Minister Tony Blair held with outside-government experts who offered their views on what might occur in Iraq following an invasion:

On November 19 2002, four months before the invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair made a rare attempt to seek out expert views beyond the circle of his official advisers. Six distinguished academics were invited to Downing Street: three specialists on Iraq, and three on international security. George Joffe, an Arabist from Cambridge University, and Charles Tripp and Toby Dodge, who had both written books on Iraq's history, made opening statements of about five minutes each. They decided not to alienate the prime minister by discussing whether an invasion was sensible or necessary, but only what its consequences might be.

"We all pretty much said the same thing," Joffe recalls. "Iraq is a very complicated country, there are tremendous intercommunal resentments, and don't imagine you'll be welcomed." He remembers how Blair reacted. "He looked at me and said, 'But the man's uniquely evil, isn't he?' I was a bit nonplussed. It didn't seem to be very relevant." Recovering, Joffe went on to argue that Saddam was constrained by various factors, to which Blair merely repeated his first point: "He can make choices, can't he?" As Joffe puts it, "He meant he can choose to be good or evil, I suppose."

Joffe got the impression of "someone with a very shallow mind, who's not interested in issues other than the personalities of the top people, no interest in social forces, political trends, etc".

Dodge also struggled to convince Blair of the obstacles that would face anyone who occupied Iraq. "Much of the rhetoric from Washington appeared to depict Saddam's regime as something separate from Iraqi society," he remembers. "All you had to do was remove him and the 60 bad men around him. What we wanted to get across was that over 35 years the regime had embedded itself into Iraqi society, broken it down and totally transformed it. We would be going into a vacuum, where there were no allies to be found, except possibly for the Kurds."

The experts didn't seem to make much of an impression. Blair "wasn't focused," Tripp recalls. "I felt he wanted us to reinforce his gut instinct that Saddam was a monster. It was a weird mixture of total cynicism and moral fervour."

I suppose we can give Blair credit for attending such a meeting, even if he wasn't able to absorb the information presented to him by people who knew Iraq far better than he did. Bush, as far as we know, never held a similar session. Nevertheless, both Blair and Bush rushed into Iraq without seeking to understand the nation, its society, its history, its culture, and its people and without bothering to draft a serious post-invasion to-do list. This ain't news. But it's a fact that ought to be noted incessantly.