Wrote William F. Buckley in his column of yesterday:

One can’t doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed.

And via the CSM we find excerpts from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR)‘s report that discusses the almost nonexistent planning for post-invasion Iraq.

The CSM overview points to an AP story in WaPo that notes that what should have been basic issues were not addressed:

Thanks to inadequate planning, the report said, early occupation officials lacked enough reconstruction staffers who knew what they were doing.

[...]

“Pre-war reconstruction planning assumed that Iraq’s bureaucracy would go back to work when the fighting stopped,” it said. “When it became clear that the Iraqi bureaucracy was in widespread disarray,” occupation authorities “had to find coalition personnel to perform these tasks.”

“The U.S. government workforce planning for Iraq’s reconstruction suffered from a poorly structured, ad-hoc personnel management processes,” the report said, calling hiring practices “haphazard.”

If this policy was going to work, there needed to be serious planning about what to do once the invasion was successful. At the time, I assumed that such planning had been done–it seemed an obvious and vital part of the process, and as such I thought that trained professionals at the highest levels of government would think about such things–it appears my assumptions were incorrect and my confidence in some of the key actors misplaced.

I have thought for some time now that the looting that was allowed in Baghdad severely hampered governing the country, now it is clear that the problem was even worse: the war planners seemed not to understand that getting rid of Saddam and the Baath party elites was going to cause substantial disruption to an already poorly run state.

Instead, we let that poorly run state apparatus be take apart in chaotic looting, and then did not have a plan to deal with either the bureaucracy or the infrastructural problems.

I used to think that the administration’s unwillingness to talk about a long-term commitment to Iraq was born out of political exigency, but now it would seem that they really did think that we could go in, topple Saddam, hang around for a little while, and then leave–as if the whole thing was only a military operation. Back to the CSM piece, quoting a WaTi article:

The report also quotes a senior Pentagon official as saying that “the US government was not systemically structured to execute overseas reconstruction and stabilization programs.” And pre-invasion planning was “naturally focused on military requirements.”

All well and good, but wasn’t it blatantly obvious from the beginning that conquering Iraq wasn’t the hard part, that building a viable democratic (even quasi-democratic) state was the hard part? It is one think to assume that people want to be free and self-governing, it is another to just come off the dictator and then hope that everything else comes together. Granted: we didn’t just get Saddam and leave, but how much better could the last three years have been had we actually planned for the post-war situation?