Our fearless leader:
“Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out.”- March 2002, “sticking his head in the door of a White House meeting between National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and three senators who had been discussing strategies for dealing with Iraq through the United Nations.”
“Did you tell her I intend to kick his sorry motherfucking ass all over the Mideast?”-
May 2002, “told that reporter Helen Thomas was questioning the need to oust Saddam by force.”
Why didn’t the Pentagon have a plan for post-war Iraq? Because a decision was made by George W. Bush to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime before any rationale for doing so was established, and because they were afraid that any planning for a post-war occupation would undermine public support for an invasion. Listen to retiring commander of the Army Transportation Corps, Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid.
Planning was kept very hush-hush in those early days.
“There was only a handful of people, maybe five or six, that were involved with that plan because it had to be kept very, very quiet.”
There was already an offensive plan in place for Iraq, Scheid said. And in the beginning, the planners were just expanding on it.
“Whether we were going to execute it, we had no idea,” Scheid said.
Eventually other military agencies like the transportation and Army materiel commands had to get involved.
They couldn’t just “keep planning this in the dark,” Scheid said.
Planning continued to be a challenge.
“The secretary of defense continued to push on us that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we’re going to take out the regime, and then we’re going to leave,” Scheid said. “We won’t stay.”
Scheid said the planners continued to try “to write what was called Phase 4,” or the piece of the plan that included post-invasion operations like security, stability and reconstruction.
Even if the troops didn’t stay, “at least we have to plan for it,” Scheid said.
“I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that,” Scheid said. “We would not do planning for Phase 4 operations, which would require all those additional troops that people talk about today.
“He said we will not do that because the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war.”
I want to make something absolutely clear. We did not go into Iraq because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. And for proof of this I am going to cite none other than the chief cheerleader for war, former Undersecretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz.
“The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason.”
It would have been more accurate to say that it was a decision made that had a lot to do with the bureaucracy of the British government. Even though, in the end, it proved to be unneccesary, the Brits made attempting to get United Nations approval a condition of being our ally in the invasion.
During that summer [2002], Powell and Cheney engaged in some of their sharpest debates. Powell argued that the United States should take its case to the United Nations, which Cheney said was a waste of time. Woodward had described some of that conflict in “Bush at War.”
…At a meeting with the president at Camp David in early September, Blair backed Bush on Iraq but said he needed to show he had tried U.N. diplomacy. Bush agreed, and later referred to the Camp David session with Blair as “the cojones meeting,” using a colloquial Spanish term for courage.
So, here is what happened. Bush made a decision to topple Saddam’s regime. Then he told his national security team to make it happen. At that point, all kinds of things came into play, involving military planning, international law, securing allies, convincing the Congress and the American public of the necessity for war….etc.
And out of that debate…a debate of little interest to the Decider-in-Chief, came the decision to make the case for war on non-compliance with existing UN resolutions pertaining to inspections of WMD sites. If Saddam was not complying, then we could use the UN to give us legitimacy and a legal justification for raw aggression.
The key, though, was that Saddam could not be allowed to cave-in and comply. We’ve seen this before. In 1914, Austria issued an an ultimatum to Serbia that they did not expect to be accepted. Serbia accepted and Austria went to war anyway. The rest is, as they say, history.
Saddam did not want to openly admit that he had no WMD program, but he did let the UN inspectors back into his country. That was not part of the plan. The plan was to enact regime change and therefore it was necessary to express the opinion that the UN inspectors were incapable of ascertaining the truth or disarming Iraq.
Meanwhile, at home, the Congress was told that oil would pay for the reconctruction, that the Iraqis would greet us as liberators, that we would leave quickly, and that we needed less than 200,000 troops.
Cheney/Rumsfeld always intended to occupy Iraq indefinately. But they relied on the horror of 9/11 to galvanize the public will for war, while carefully hiding the true costs from Congress and the public. They stovepiped the intelligence into the system that could justify an invasion, they disallowed post-war planning in the Pentagon, and they ignored the State Department’s intelligence and their meticulous post-war planning.
They should be impeached.
