Truth - Al Franken [93]
Manning had no confidence that the answer would be found. “I think there is a real risk that the administration underestimates the difficulties. They may agree that failure isn’t an option, but this doesn’t mean that they will avoid it.”
By July, things had hardly improved. According to a memo preparing Blair for the July 23 meeting with C, Z, R, and a group of key advisers collectively known as “the Vowels,” “the U.S. Government’s military planning is proceeding apace,” but “little thought has been given to . . . the aftermath and how to shape it.”
In fact, unbeknownst to the British government, a great deal of thought had been given to the aftermath of an invasion. The trouble was that the people doing the thinking weren’t President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney, who were too busy fixing the intelligence and facts around the policy to read the briefing papers on postwar plans.
The myth that there was no planning for a postwar Iraq was accepted by nearly everyone in the year following the invasion. But it was conclusively debunked by James Fallows in his Atlantic Monthly cover article “Blind Into Baghdad,” which I believe to be the best article ever published.
As Fallows showed, no less than five separate major studies of how to handle the inevitable postwar challenges were conducted in the lead-up to the March 2003 invasion. Of the five, five were ignored by the administration. Though there is no way to know for certain, had a sixth study been conducted, it seems almost certain that it, too, would have been ignored.
These studies were conducted by organizations that one might expect to know a thing or two about war planning, such as the Army War College, the CIA, and the U.S. Department of State. Certain themes emerged, all of them consistent with common sense. The importance of “an initial and broad-based commitment to law and order,” for example. Prevent looting. Secure the nation’s borders to block foreign fighters from coming in. Get key services like electricity and clean water up as quickly as possible. Guard weapons caches. Handle the demobilization of the Iraqi Army with great care. That was a big one. As the State Department’s Future of Iraq Project noted in a model of understatement, “The decommissioning of hundreds of thousands of trained military personnel . . . could create social problems.”
Sure, that was a lot to do. But it was doable if we sent “something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers,” as Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki recommended in testimony to Congress.
If you’re curious why Iraq is in the crapper, it’s because every one of these eminently reasonable recommendations fell not on deaf ears, but on ears into which fingers had been deliberately inserted.
Why did the Bush administration insert its fingers into its ears? And was the humming absolutely necessary? It was. For two reasons. First, Chalabi. He had assured the Bushies that the postwar would be the easy part. He and his associates had explained that we would be greeted with sweets and flowers, leaving out the crucial modifier, “exploding.” After that, Chalabi would take over—and, presto chango, Iraq would be a U.S.-friendly Jeffersonian democracy, an Australia with oil. There would be no need to plow through page after page of boring electrical grids and sewerage maps. Ahmed Chalabi, who hadn’t been in Baghdad since 1956, would take care of all of that.
The second reason why the Bush administration ignored the postwar planning tells you everything you need to know about why they shouldn’t be running a small-town hardware store, much less the world’s only remaining superpower. Here it is:
George W. Bush and his inner circle do not believe in objective reality.
They do believe in objective moral truth, which they and a few enlightened others, like Bob Jones III and James Dobson, have