Condoleezza Rice Says She's `Proud' of Decision to Invade Iraq
``And I am proud of the decision of this administration to overthrow Saddam Hussein,'' said Rice, who was Bush's national security adviser at the time of the March 2003 invasion. As of yesterday, 4,107 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq and more than 30,000 were wounded. She said the Iraq war has been ``tougher than any of us really dreamed.''
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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aIefxPxr_Gw8&refer=worldwide
The Army released it assesment of the invasion and more importantly the Occupation last week and seems that the Bush administration was totally unprepared for what to do after the initial invasion.
Here's what you get when you have a "FAITH BASED" Commander in Chief:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/washington/29army.html?partner=rssnyt“The Army, as the service primarily responsible for ground operations, should have insisted on better Phase IV planning and preparations through its voice on the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” the study noted.
“The military means employed 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.”
The report focuses on the 18 months after President Bush’s May 2003 announcement that major combat operations in Iraq were over.
It was a period when the Army took on unanticipated occupation duties A big problem, the study says, was the lack of detailed plans before the war for the postwar phase, a deficiency that reflected the general optimism in the White House and in the Pentagon, led by then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, about Iraq’s future, and an assumption that civilian agencies would assume much of the burden. “I can remember asking the question during our war gaming and the development of our plan, ‘O.K., we are in Baghdad, what next?’ No real good answers came forth,” Col. Thomas G. Torrance, the commander of the Third Infantry Division’s artillery, told Army historians
A fundamental assumption that hobbled the military’s planning was that Iraq’s ministries and institutions would continue to function after Mr. Hussein’s government was toppled.
L. Paul Bremer III, who replaced Jay Garner, the retired lieutenant general, as the chief civilian administrator in Iraq, issued decrees to disband the Iraqi Army and ban thousands of former Baath Party members from working for the government,
orders that the study asserts caught American field commanders “off guard” and, in their view, “created a pool of disaffected and unemployed Sunni Arabs” that the insurgency could draw on. Some of General Franks’s moves also appeared divorced from the growing problems in Iraq.
Before the fall of Baghdad, Col. Kevin Benson, a planner at the land war command, developed a plan that called for using about 300,000 soldiers to secure postwar Iraq, about twice as many as were deployed.[/b]
But that was not what General Franks and the Bush administration had in mind. In an April 16 visit to Baghdad,
“In line with the prewar planning and general euphoria at the rapid crumbling of the Saddam regime, Franks continued to plan for a very limited role for U.S. ground forces in Iraq,” the report says. The next month, General Franks directed General McKiernan, then the senior officer in Baghdad, to leave Iraq, along with the staff of his land war command, which had helped plan the invasion and had overseen the push to Baghdad. A new headquarters would be established to command the military forces in Iraq and was to be led by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez. He had led the First Armored Division into Iraq before being promoted and picked to succeed General Wallace as the head of the Army’s V Corps, which was to serve as the nucleus of the newly established command.
When Gen. Jack Keane, the vice chief of staff of the Army, learned of the move, he was upset. General Keane had helped General McKiernan assemble his headquarters, which had long been focused on Iraq and had more high-ranking officers than V Corps, which had been deployed from Europe. General Keane assumed that General McKiernan’s headquarters would oversee what was fast becoming a troubled occupation.
“I think we did not put the best experienced headquarters that we had in charge of that operation,” General Keane said in an interview with Army historians.
“It took us months, six or seven or eight months, to get some semblance of a headquarters together so Sanchez could at least begin to function effectively.” General Keane told the historians that he raised his concerns at the time with Lt. Gen. John P. Abizaid, who had been picked to succeed General Franks as the head of Central Command.
“I said, ‘Jesus Christ, John, this is a recipe for disaster,’ ” General Keane told Army historians. “I was upset about it to say the least, but the decision had been made and it was a done deal.”
