Today, via Orin Kerr, comes a remarkable interview with Brigadier General Mark Scheid, chief of the Logistics War Plans Division after 9/11, and one of the people with primary responsibility for war planning. Shortly after the invasion of Afghanistan, he says, Donald Rumsfeld told his team to start planning for war in Iraq, but not to bother planning for a long stay:
"The secretary of defense continued to push on us ... that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we're going to take out the regime, and then we're going to leave," Scheid said. "We won't stay."
Scheid said the planners continued to try "to write what was called Phase 4," or the piece of the plan that included post-invasion operations like occupation.
Even if the troops didn't stay, "at least we have to plan for it," Scheid said.
"I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that," Scheid said. "We would not do planning for Phase 4 operations, which would require all those additional troops that people talk about today.
"He said we will not do that because the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war."
....
The guy who was actually in charge of logistics has now directly confirmed that Rumsfeld not only didn't intend to rebuild Iraq in any serious way, but threatened to fire anyone who wasted time on the idea. Needless to say, he wouldn't have done this unless it reflected the wishes of the president.
And this also means that all of Bush's talk about democracy was nothing but hot air. If you're serious about planting democracy after a war, you don't plan to simply topple a government and then leave.
So: the lack of postwar planning wasn't merely the result of incompetence. It was deliberate policy. There was never any intention of rebuilding Iraq and there was never any intention of wasting time on democracy promotion. That was merely a post hoc explanation after we failed to find the promised WMD. Either that or BG Scheid is lying.
Well of course it must be B. We all know that the deluge of disaffected policy operatives who have made their displeasure public are doing so solely out of partisan political motivation -- unlike the Rovians, whose every move is spun from the purest motives.
Warporn enthusiasts do their little dance around the maypole of moral acuity, and squaring that cost with supposedly benign objectives, when they talk about war at all. But they have the wrong end of the stick, naturally. Truly serious students of war, and the art thereof, know the cliché that amateurs talk tactics, but professionals talk logistics. Indeed, this was one of the very real concerns of the initial success of the Iraq invasion -- that the troops had gotten to Baghdad so quickly that the supply lines might then get stretched thin. And that could still happen; if the southern Shi'a coordinated with al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and, with Iranian help, started approaching it from a targeted systempunkt standpoint, we'd be in awful deep shit pretty quickly. You can't airlift every single thing into Baghdad in perpetuity. Fortunately they have not done this, but like everything else about this war and occupation, you could affix "yet" to just about every conceivable scenario at this point.
Anyway, the point is that sound logistics are key to having a proper plan in place, which has been borne out quite consistently by the results. These people had no plan, and it was clearly a tragic combination of willful blindness to facts, reckless arrogance, hostility to reasoned dissent, and a predisposition to lie to the American people to get the war they wanted. These things are beyond all serious dispute at this point.
And the most tragic aspect of this perhaps is that the war for which there actually was a just cause for retaliation and liberation has completely fallen by the wayside. As a result, Osama bin Laden at this point is merely an Emmanuel Goldstein figure trotted out at convenient pre-election times, and mostly forgotten the rest of the time.
On the videotape obtained by the CIA, bin Laden is seen confidently instructing his party how to dig holes in the ground to lie in undetected at night. A bomb dropped by a U.S. aircraft can be seen exploding in the distance. "We were there last night," bin Laden says without much concern in his voice. He was in or headed toward Pakistan, counterterrorism officials think.
That was December 2001. Only two months later, Bush decided to pull out most of the special operations troops and their CIA counterparts in the paramilitary division that were leading the hunt for bin Laden in Afghanistan to prepare for war in Iraq, said Flynt L. Leverett, then an expert on the Middle East at the National Security Council.
"I was appalled when I learned about it," said Leverett, who has become an outspoken critic of the administration's counterterrorism policy. "I don't know of anyone who thought it was a good idea. It's very likely that bin Laden would be dead or in American custody if we hadn't done that."
Several officers confirmed that the number of special operations troops was reduced in March 2002.
....
The Pakistani intelligence service, notoriously difficult to trust but also the service with the best access to al-Qaeda circles, is convinced bin Laden is alive because no one has ever intercepted or heard a message mourning his death. "Al-Qaeda will mourn his death and will retaliate in a big way. We are pretty sure Osama is alive," Pakistan's interior minister, Aftab Khan Sherpao, said in a recent interview with The Washington Post.
Pakistani intelligence officials also say they think bin Laden remains actively involved in al-Qaeda activities.
I think we should trust the ISI about as far as we can throw them, but at the same time, there's not much upside for them to lie about something like that. So he's still alive, still an asset for what money he still has, and the reputation he enjoys in the dark realm of radical fundamentalist Islam. Meanwhile Afghanistan continues to slowly return to its previous state of disintegration and violent chaos, while idiots like Bush and Rumsfeld continue to dither and plot a politically viable course for their counterproductive nonsense.
Put more simply -- anyone who still doesn't realize that they got sold a bill of goods with the remarkably inept Rummy as SecDef, this is what you got, folks:
Think about that as we commemorate 9/11. We keep hearing about how these are serious people taking serious measures to protect us in serious times. There is a very clear paper trail attesting to the opposite pattern.
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