File this under the 'it does a fat lot of good telling us now' category:
Pre-war planning for the Iraq occupation was woefully inadequate. This according to the liberal media outlet... oh wait. It's actually according to the Army's official historian of the Iraq campaign.
"There was no Phase IV plan" for occupying Iraq after the combat phase, writes Maj. Isaiah Wilson III, who served as an official historian of the campaign and later as a war planner in Iraq. While a variety of government offices had considered the possible situations that would follow a U.S. victory, Wilson writes, no one produced an actual document laying out a strategy to consolidate the victory after major combat operations ended, as reported by The Washington Post.
"While there may have been 'plans' at the national level, and even within various agencies within the war zone, none of these 'plans' operationalized the problem beyond regime collapse" -- that is, laid out how U.S. forces would be moved and structured, Wilson writes in an essay that has been delivered at several academic conferences but not published. "There was no adequate operational plan for stability operations and support operations."
On the other hand: criticizing Iraq occupation planning as inadequate presumes that it could've been done well given different decisions. In reality, the premise of the war was so fundamentally flawed and pre-war diplomacy treated with such contempt by a White House notoriously hostile to 'nation building' that different decisions might only have made the occupation go slightly less badly, not well.
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