Another Affirmation That There Was No Plan For After the Invasion of Iraq

by Mary

In early 2003, even while George W Bush was pounding the war drums hard to justify his dropping bombs on Iraq, and despite the fact that most major media jumped on his jingoistic band wagon, there were a few reports that clued those who were still listening that this administration would totally botch the aftermath. Now, as it was then, I found it easy to believe that this was because the Bush administration just didn't care about the Iraqis except as political toys and for getting their hands on the Iraqi oil.

Now, over a year and a half after the invasion, Knight-Ridder reports that, yes indeed, there was no plan.

A Knight Ridder review of the administration's Iraq policy and decisions has found that it invaded Iraq without a comprehensive plan in place to secure and rebuild the country.

According to this report, the consequences of getting the aftermath wrong was known to be dire.

"The possibility of the United States winning the war and losing the peace in Iraq is real and serious," warned an Army War College report that was completed in February 2003, a month before the invasion. Without an "overwhelming" effort to prepare for the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the report warned: "The United States may find itself in a radically different world over the next few years, a world in which the threat of Saddam Hussein seems like a pale shadow of new problems of America's own making."

KR has once more done an excellent job of reporting on the state of the planning, but, of course, it is months after we've found ourselves in this debacle. Would it have been possible to realize this before the war? Was there information available before the war that could have prevented this outcome if only the media had told us and if only the administration was actually committed to trying to execute the Iraq war successfully?

Not long ago I resurrected a link from May of 2003, where Lt Colonel Sam Gardiner was being interviewed on NPR about how badly things were going in getting Iraq's infrastructure back up and running after the invasion.

Restoring Services to Iraq Remains a Challenge: NPR Interview with Retired Lt Col Sam Gardiner

Linda Wertheimer, Weekend Edition
May 10, 2003

Lt Col Sam Gardiner was an advisor to the Bush White House on preparing for the humanitarian issues after a successful compaign in Iraq.

Q: Could this kind of thing been anticipated?

A: Umm, let me be honest. I briefed some people in the administration before the war. One of the officials said to me (a very high official), "We've already had an hour with the President on the humanitarian system. We're done talking about that." You see, if we had been prepared to deal with the humanitarian crisis, it would have delayed the war and as I detected, nobody was interested in that.

Okay, so here is evidence that by May 10th, there was some real problems already about the rebuilding of Iraq and a question about whether perhaps the Bush administration might have been warned about this before the war.

Would it have been possible that the media might also have known this before the war? Golly gee, it would appear that they might have also gotten some news regarding this. On February 7, 2003, in one of Kos' Open Threads an article was posted that made it clear the Bush administration was badly prepared for the aftermath.

The Bush administration is woefully unprepared for a humanitarian catastrophe of an extent that almost certainly will befall the Iraqi population during and after an anticipated war, according to a former military officer who has informally advised the executive branch over the past month.

"If you're not ready for this, you're not ready to do the war," says retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner. "After about three days of reporting on the retreating Iraqi soldiers, the embedded press will begin to report on the children begging for water. And that's the second battle. . . . You have to be prepared for this one or you lose the war."

Gardiner -- a consultant on wargaming and recently a visiting professor in military strategy at the Air War College -- has garnered a generally positive reception from administration officials for his 58-slide briefing on potential humanitarian challenges facing the United States in Iraq. He has briefed key offices in the Pentagon, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and elsewhere, as well as nongovernmental relief organizations.

...He notes that the challenge is infinitely more complex in Iraq than Afghanistan because Iraq has a much more interdependent infrastructure for food, water, medicine, electricity and transportation, upon which the civil population relies.

Addressing the problem begins with military targeting that is careful to avoid unwanted consequences for the civilian population, says the retired officer. Much as the military plans for "parallel warfare" against a wide target set, Gardiner sees a need for a humanitarian strategy that plays out in parallel with attacks on Iraq.

After the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 1991, attacks on the electrical system caused outages that, in turn, shut down the water supply to a large number of civilians, causing unintended deaths in the population.

Seeking to avoid disruption to fragile components of Iraq's civil infrastructure and food distribution system in a possible new war, Gardiner advises excluding [a number of key infrastructure buildings/systems] from military targeting, led by U.S. Central Command....

We know that Bush only spent one hour on the aftermath before making his decisions about going to war. So where was the media who might have shone a bright enough light on the US's obligations in Iraq after an invasion that we could have prevented some of the worst consequences of Bush's bad decisions?

And tell me again why should we vote for this massively imcompetent bunch?