Despite administration claims, it is simply not true that no one could have predicted the chaos that ensued after the fall of Saddam Hussein... What went wrong was not that no one could know or that no one spoke out. What went wrong is that the voices of Iraq experts, of the State Department almost in its entirety and, indeed, of important segments of the uniformed military were ignored. As much as the invasion of Iraq and the rout of Saddam Hussein and his army was a triumph of planning and implementation, the mess that is postwar Iraq is a failure of planning and implementation (pdf). See also, from June 24, 2003: A marred follow-up to a brilliant military campaign by Tim Carney. (Added to illustrate a very slow learning curve indeed.)
posted by y2karl on Nov 1, 2003 - 107 comments