How We Fight (Cowboys ‘n’ Indians Edition)
Posted on | September 9, 2006
If it seems as though we invaded Iraq without a plan for post-war occupation, it’s only because that’s exactly what happened. In an interview this week, retiring Army Tranportation Corps commander Mark Scheid offers a damning inside look at the SecDef’s reckless “planning”:
Months before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forbade military strategists from developing plans for securing a post-war Iraq, the retiring commander of the Army Transportation Corps said Thursday.
In fact…Rumsfeld said “he would fire the next person” who talked about the need for a post-war plan.
Rumsfeld did replace Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff in 2003, after Shinseki told Congress that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to secure post-war Iraq.
General Scheid’s tale reemphasizes the Administration’s eagerness to take on Iraq:
On Sept. 11, 2001, he said, “life just went to hell.”
That day, Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of Central Command, told his planners, including Scheid, to “get ready to go to war.”
A day or two later, Rumsfeld was “telling us we were going to war in Afghanistan and to start building the war plan. We were going to go fast.
“Then, just as we were barely into Afghanistan … Rumsfeld came and told us to get ready for Iraq.”
Reminder for revisionist historians: victory, currently defined as leaving a self-sustaining democratic government in place in Iraq, wasn’t discussed during the sleight-of-hand used to justify our invasion. To the Bush Administration, our armed forces and civilian populations elsewhere are toys in a brutal, bloody and expensive game of let’s-pretend.
Put it together with yesterday’s post, and whaddya got?
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