Doc Science wrote a post about Fred Kaplan, who wrote a book about David Petraeus. The book includes some things that we already know, but had damn well better not forget. Take for example what Isiah “Ike” Wilson learned.
His job in Mosul would be to help refine and execute the plan to stabilize Iraq. From his studies of military history at ever level, he knew that war plans by nature contained four phases. Phase I: Set the conditions. Phase II: Initial operations. Phase III: Decisive operations. Phase IV: Post-conflict stability operations. This was elementary. By the time President Bush made his May Day victory speech on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, the US military had accomplished Phases I through II, but Phase IV had yet to begin.
Looking over the cache of documents, Wilson realized–at first slowly, because he couldn’t quite believe this was possible–that there was no plan for Phase IV. He and Petraeus would have to devise one on their own. [p71]
I cannot get over the fantasy world that these people lived in. They really thought we could put a crown on Ahmad Chalabi and Chalabi would hand out oil contracts like candy. If you ran a shoe store like that, counting on the best caee scenario like nothing else could possibly happen, you would have an ex-shoe store. Too bad for us most neocons lucked out in the sperm lottery and never had to run a shoe store.
Corner Stone
I can not get over the fantasy world you are living in. These people got exactly what they wanted. Several hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars funneled to themselves and their sponsors.
You think they wanted to fundamentally change the nature of the power structure in the ME? That’s fine if you’re an idiot like George Friedman of StratFor.
This was a grift, start to finish. No bid contracts and self-selected crony czars. Give me a break.
None of them believed this. They all got hella rich, and even more powerfully connected.
amk
The best dubya ‘legacy’ moment – shoe thrower. Captures the gist of the whole criminal fuck-up in coupla seconds.
Ron Thompson
Shouldn’t the quote say they had achieved phases One through Three (I-III)?
Heliopause
For the sake of argument let’s say they they had a well-formed plan; how would this change the way you evaluate the Iraq war?
trollhattan
Paul Wolfowitz House Budget Committee testimony on Iraq (February 27, 2003)
Yeah, quite outlandish. These fellows, and ladies, should spend the rest of their vile lives tending to the graves of the Iraq war fatalities and supporting the families of the injured and affected.
And a pony, I shall have, also, too.
dmbeaster
I remember when Frontline ran their story on this in October, 2003. I hated the war, but the revelation of such a clown show for post-war planning was shocking. Even more so as a student of history and an awareness of the planning for the post-war for WWII. And those neocon fools liked to wax rosy about post-war Iraq based on WWII analogies, with zero awareness of how that actually came to pass.
David Koch
I’m all for bashing the neo-cons, but you’re giving a pass to their Blue-Dogs enablers like Hillary and Edwards who are equally guilty of the war crime of waging aggressive war.
El Cid
Hell, they got people talking seriously abuot “COIN” again, like it was some sort of skill set the U.S. had proven to possess. Fucking ludicrous.
I’m surprised they didn’t just pull out the full double-fuck-you bird flying and call it “Low Intensity Conflict” so we could all go happily Reaganing again, but with totally new justifications.
Heliopause
@efgoldman:
Hoo-kay, let me put it this way; if the war had been executed competently, period, how would this have altered your evaluation of it?
White Trash Liberal
http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/call/docs/09-27/09-27.pdf
This is a 2009 revision, but MAWS (Money As A Weapons System) was the Phase IV devised by Petraeus. Dubya wanted a strategy, and Petraeus asked for (and received, thanks in large part to a compliant MIC-beholden media) a blank check.
The surge was about throwing vast sums of money into a counter-insurgency environment. My job as a Marine NCO in Iraq was to carry cash, undersign, and pay for contracts and damage payments. In my little area of responsibility, turn in correct paperwork, and keep track of adjustments to the value of Iraqi dinar in order to keep a correct balance. I was responsible for over 15 million USD in payments… Some of which went to lovely things like a pork processing plant (?!) and a bridge that had already been destroyed five times.
That was the surge. An unfunded mandate to bribe the the region.
Steeplejack (phone)
This was a stunning revelation (maybe only for me) in Thomas Ricks’s Fiasco: that the U.S. military had no practical memory of Vietnam or counterinsurgency because it had been deliberately flushed down the memory hole. They had to scramble to literally rewrite the book.
JWL
Cornerstone beat me to it: “I cannot get over the fantasy world you are living in. These people got exactly what they wanted”.
Tim, you’re on the right track, and your heart is in the right place. But it seems to me that you- even you- have yet to grasp the depravity of the war criminals (and their enablers) who walk free among us.
The fuckers are American Fascists, and they are the enemy of decent people everywhere.
The Dangerman
Speaking of no plan, WTF is Florida doing losing to FGCU by double digits?
ETA; FGCU is Loyola Marymount. Florida should be UNLV and be putting this thing down. Unbelievable.
Keith
Apparently Rumsfeld assumed that stage IV was “profit”.
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
They should never be anything more than public facility toilet bowl lickers as I imagine that’s pretty hard to fuck up and is the limit of their talents. Helping others, especially those whose suffering they caused? Why do you want them to suffer again?
Villago Delenda Est
There was no Phase IV plan because that jackass vonRumsfailed specifically prohibited anyone from putting one together.
One of the many, many reasons why vonRumsfailed needs to meet the same fate as Keitel and Jodl.
Scott S.
@Heliopause:
Hoo-kay, let me put it this way; if the war had been executed competently, period, how would this have altered your evaluation of it?
You may as well ask “If Godzilla were actually a bottle of Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr Pepper, how would this alter your evaluation of it?” :)
MeDrewNotYou
The bit that always got me was that they didn’t confiscate the Iraqi military’s weapons!!! I mean, what the fuck?! That’s the absolute first thing you would think to do regardless of how you think things will turn out. Even if you think they’ll greet us as liberators and there won’t be any violence, you take the damn weapons so they don’t get in the wrong hands!
Everything turned out fine? Well here are your weapons back, welcome to democracy. But if there’s even the tiniest chance of one single Iraqi who doesn’t like us, then its best to take the weapons first until we’ve got everything figured out.
The stupidity is just mind boggling. Even my sister, who’s never touched a gun and who knows nothing about military strategy, called me up after reading that and said, “What the hell were they thinking?”
Villago Delenda Est
@MeDrewNotYou:
They were too busy securing the Oil Ministry to worry about the weapons depots that provided the explosives for the IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) that resulted in of so many veterans needing new limbs back here in the states.
Brilliant, isn’t it? Well, at least Halliburton made a shitload of money off this. Mission Accomplished!
Mandalay
@Corner Stone:
Correct. The actual outcome of the Iraq debacle was pretty irrelevant, as shown by the lack of importance that Rumsfeld, Petraeus, Bremer et al attached to ending the affair. The fuckers got what they wanted, and would have done regardless of any specific outcome.
Mandalay
I’m no military strategist, but that stinks of bullshit.
The idea that regardless of your war – Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq, Serbia, Vietnam, etc… – those are always the four phases of your war plan just does not seem plausible or sensible to me.
Anytime someone is tapping the tips of their fingers one by one describing what you have to do in sequential order to win the big game, or the election, or the woman, or the war, or whatever, is always full of shit.
We are obsessed with sequencing, oversimplifying and categorizing everything. Life ain’t that tidy.
Mandalay
@efgoldman:
Cheney’s Haliburton shares say otherwise.
MeDrewNotYou
@Villago Delenda Est: You would think that securing all those weapons would be a big help in securing the stuff that’s really important, IE oil.
But I think you nailed it at 17: Rumsfeld and others in charge forbade any planning beyond ‘Shock and Awe.’ I still have trouble fully grasping how full of incompetence and hubris they were. It’s like imagining 4 spatial dimensions. You know it exists and occasionally you sort of grasp it, but most of the time your brain just can’t process and understand it.
Besides the crime that was the war itself, besides the war crimes committed during the war, what they did to US troops by not taking the most basic precautions* earns them a spot in the deepest part of Hell. I forgot about how Iraq filled me with rage, so I’m going to play Skyrim for a while before I have a stroke.
*- Remember folks holding bake sales to purchase body armor for the troops? WTF? We can’t even start an illegal war without fucking it up. Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, at least they knew how to invade a country right.
White Trash Liberal
@Mandalay:
These aren’t the four phases of a plan. These are the four phases you anticipate and plan for in order to be victorious. These phases occur, in various permutations, regardless of the armed conflict. They are categories that you fill with tactics and strategy.
You should have stopped at “I’m no military strategist”
Roger Moore
@White Trash Liberal:
That’s totally unfair. It also involved finishing the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad.
Mandalay
@White Trash Liberal:
Yes they are according to the quote above:
I want what you’re smoking.
maya
So I take it there is a plan for the post-conflict stability operations of North Korea after we topple Kim Jong-un.
Corner Stone
@White Trash Liberal:
Maybe you should consider as part of your plan shutting the fuck up.
low-tech cyclist
At any rate, it made the news in February 2003 that there was no plan for the postwar, whether you call it Phase IV or call it babaloo.
This was because Doug Feith and Marc Grossman testified on the postwar plan before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Feb. 11, 2003, and it was clear that they had nothing.
However, our courtier media treated it like a one-day story rather than the deal-breaker it should have been, and two days later, they were back to doing their usual cheerleading for the upcoming war. Fuckers.
protected static
@maya: Yes. It involves an amount of money being drained from the South Korean and Chinese economies that make the re-unification of Germany look like an overly-indulgent dot-com company picnic.
Bryan Rasmussen
pretty sure the inclusion of “the plan to stabilize” in that excerpt is a type.
Batocchio
As I wrote over at ObWi, the State Department had a reconstruction plan that Rumsfeld and Cheney rejected, because they hated Colin Powell and really the entire the State Department. As for Phase IV, Rumsfeld actually threatened to fire anyone who talked about post-war occupation and reconstruction. (It’s a neat trick, invading a country and then saying whatever happens next just isn’t your problem. Hey, stuff happens.)
Tonybrown74
I was against the war from the get-go. But I will admit to being relieved that the initial invasion went well.
And then, I was well reminded of the fuck up yet to come when it was reported (unless I am mis-remembering this) that a pallet of cash was stolen from the tarmac of the Baghdad Airport.
Someone actually thought it wise to ship a pallet of cash to Iraq. I just couldn’t wrap my head around the insanity of that decision. I still can’t.
zoot
the only thing that should be keeping bush and his hoard of war criminals out of prison for life at this point is the moral decision of how ethical is it to put imbeciles in prisons, as opposed to permanent psychiatric care.
pluege
“if the war had been executed competently”
if you think for a moment what is war – the premeditated mass murder and mass destruction of a group of people and their existence; then think about what it means to be competent in executing that, then you realize that one has to be both criminally insane and viciously immoral to hold such notions.
Svensker
The war mongers are the ultimate modern fascists. They don’t believe in anything except brute force. What they want will happen because they’re bigger and have the biggest guns. It’s why they don’t like science (except engineering and doctoring) and why they hate the humanities — those things have to do with understanding the world we live in. They don’t want to understand it — indeed, don’t think they NEED to understand it. They think they just have to dominate it.
It’s what they meant by the “create our own reality” thing — they truly believe that. Money and strength, backed up by propaganda, will get you everything you need.
Villago Delenda Est
@pluege:
Aye.
Recall that the predicate crime that set up all the crimes against humanity of WWII was plotting and launching aggressive war.
This is the ultimate crime, and it’s one that our pack of war criminals are profoundly guilty of. It sets up all the atrocities that followed.
There is no justification for aggressive war. None. The Germans in 1939 went to the trouble of faking an “attack” on Germany itself as a tissue thin justification for their preventive war on Poland The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor as a preventive measure. You’ll recall how well that went over in the United States.
Tonal Crow
Apropos Ahmed Chalabi, a knowledgeable anonymous source has given me the following transcript of two calls involving Chalabi, a high-ranking Iranian intelligence agent, and none other than Osama Bin Laden:
12/13/2000:
Hakim Ibn [Censored] (Iranian intelligence): Hey Ahmed!
Ahmed Chalabi: Hakim! Allah be praised!
HI: Yeah. Now Ahmed, you know we’ve been good friends. You know I’d do anything for you: put you up, keep the pig-dog Fedayeen off, get you the best dates, the best….
AC: You want something.
HI: You’re a smart man, Ahmed. That’s why I like you. Now you have another good friend, and he’s going to be the Supreme Leader of the Great Satan, no?
AC: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
HI: Now Ahmed, let’s not get testy. You know him well. And you and he share something important. Important and personal.
AC: Hakim…
HI: It’s not like that. We’re not vengeful people, and me least of all. This is all for your good, Ahmed. Believe me. You’ve always strived for greatness, Ahmed, and I think your time has come.
AC: No…
HI: Yes. It…hold on Ahmed, I got a message.
AC: Alright.
Osama bin Laden: Hakim! Praise be to Allah!
HI: And death to the Infidel!
OBL: Death!
HI: Death!
OBL: There’re some things we need.
HI: Anything, my friend.
OBL: The plans — the Fool’s in, so they’re on…
HI: You are the very lion of Islam, maybe the Mahdi himself!
OBL: …and we need what we discussed.
HI: It was on the way yesterday. Everything. And more. You just ask, Mahdi, and it’s yours.
OBL: Allah’s infinite mercy be blessed. I am at your service.
HI: Over, then.
OBL: Over.
HI: Ahmed! I’m back. Now, you’ve thought about it?
AC: You can’t mean…
HI: Yes, I can. It’s so neat, you see. You want it, we want it, the Fool wants it…
AC: You *do* mean it.
HI: …and there’s a little something, a little catalyst, shall we say, that clinches the whole thing. So you’ll help?
AC: Blessed be your children unto the seventh generation. Truly I repent my suspicion. Yes, I will help.
HI: So then, you’ll make the calls, but not just yet. You’ll work the Fool up into a lather, get him “hot to trot,” as you westernized people say. You’ll tell him what he wants to hear, and it’ll all be in motion. It’ll all be inevitable.
AC: When do I start?
HI: You’ll know when. The whole world will know. It will be unmistakable. But until then, work on your plans. Gather your informers, get their stories straight — especially about the, you know, gases and elements, and the contacts. And in not many months, you’ll go to work in earnest.
AC: I am overwhelmed.
HI: But you are strong, and you will get your reward, Ahmed. What you’ve always wanted.
AC: Blessed be Allah, my friend.
HI: Yeah.
Ben Franklin
Pat Tillman’s Ghost.