The Army has been sitting on a report from the RAND Corporation that heaps scorn on just about everyone connected to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The report is now over two years old and has never been allowed to see the light of day.
The Army is acting like a schoolchild who has gotten a bad report card and attempts to keep it from the parents by hiding the report in a sock drawer.
The New York Times got hold of an earlier draft version of the report and covers the story on the front page today. Army Buried Study Faulting Iraq Planning, NY Times, 2/11/08
Among the more damning findings of the study, which was solicited by the Army to help them improve their actions "the next time", were:
A review of the lengthy report — a draft of which was obtained by The New York Times — shows that it identified problems with nearly every organization that had a role in planning the war.
The study chided President Bush — and by implication Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who served as national security adviser when the war was planned — as having failed to resolve differences among rival agencies. “Throughout the planning process, tensions between the Defense Department and the State Department were never mediated by the president or his staff,” it said.
Gen. Tommy R. Franks, whose Central Command oversaw the military operation in Iraq, had a “fundamental misunderstanding” of what the military needed to do to secure postwar Iraq, the study said.
The Times story quotes from the report about the selling of the war.
“Building public support for any pre-emptive or preventative war is inherently challenging, since by definition, action is being taken before the threat has fully manifested itself,” it said. “Any serious discussion of the costs and challenges of reconstruction might undermine efforts to build that support.”
Got that right. And that's the same reasoning behind the Army's deep-sixing of this report. The report was released in November 2005, just as Bush was trying to sell the public on his so-called surge plan. So the decision was made to keep yet more information from the American people. We're not to be involved in any serious discussion, especially life-or-death decisions such as the decision to send the country to war.
What, you thought we lived in a democracy or something? Sorry, the Bush mob has hidden democracy away in the sock drawer. Who knows what we'll find in there when they finally move out of their room.
