Unqualified Offerings

Reader Sven tips me to a gun that, if not smoking, smolders, an interview with Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid of the Army Transportation Corps, now heading into retirement. (I hope there’s a lump sum option and he’s already collected.) Excerpt:

Scheid said the planners continued to try “to write what was called Phase 4,” or the piece of the plan that included post-invasion operations like occupation.

Even if the troops didn’t stay, “at least we have to plan for it,” Scheid said.

“I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that,” Scheid said. “We would not do planning for Phase 4 operations, which would require all those additional troops that people talk about today.

“He said we will not do that because the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war.”

This echoes something I’ve said for, and I’m sorry to keep boring you, years now: The administration “failed to plan for the occupation” because, politically, the administration couldn’t let on that there was going to be an occupation. Kevin Drum flirts with the obvious before discarding it:

An alternative explanation, based on Rumsfeld’s admonition that “the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war,” is that Rumsfeld and Bush were planning to stay but simply lied about it in order to build support for the war. However, based on the rest of the interview with Scheid, as well as the other evidence that there was no plan to stay and rebuild in any serious way, that explanation seems unlikely. The bulk of the evidence continues to suggest that democracy and rebuilding were simply not on Bush’s radar.

Kevin is confusing “planning to stay” with “democracy and rebuilding” here. The alternative explanation is that Bush and Rumsfeld were “planning to stay” and believed that “democracy and rebuilding” would be easy.

There’s the further possibility – I think a likelihood – that no, they weren’t expecting the troops to “stay” very long: they expected to invade Syria almost immediately after conquering Iraq. Recall that the Pentagon began making very bellicose statements about supposed Syrian “meddling” in Iraq even before the invasion ended. There’s a decent chance that the White House expected Iraq to be calm enough that the troops could redeploy almost immediately to the west and be in Syria by Fall 2003. That’s the kind of task Rumsfeld would have loved to set for his transformed military. I think there’s a very good chance this was the idea. In this theory, the two things that kept the invasion of Syria from happening were the quick blossoming of the Sunni insurgency and Ayatollah Sistani’s blackball of the idea of handing Iraq over to Ahmed Chalabi’s LARP of a government-in-exile.

Scheid himself tells the interviewer that “In [Rumsfeld's] own mind he thought we could go in and fight and take out the regime and come out,” which raises the question how well Scheid knew Rumsfeld’s mind, as opposed to his theatrical declarations.