“OK, we’re in Baghdad, what next?”
Before the invasion, an Army commander asked that question and never got an answer, according to a new 700-page study by the Army itself based on 200 interviews by military historians with active or recently retired officers on what went wrong in Iraq after the man in a flight jacket stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier to declare victory.
In what amounts to the non-Rumsfeld story of the disaster, we finally get first-hand accounts of the making of a quagmire, and it is not a pretty picture.
“The Army, as the service primarily responsible for ground operations, should have insisted on better Phase IV [postwar] planning and preparations through its voice on the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” the study notes. “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 Bush Administration, the Pentagon and its Iraq commander, Gen. Tommy Franks were plentifully supplied with wishes but short of methods to realize them.