“Failure to plan is planning to fail” goes the aphorism, and I’m hearing a lot that the Bush administration doesn’t have a plan for Iraq. Well. I can remember sitting in on a review for a proposal where the manager told us, “we had a plan for [another program – name excised to protect the guilty], we executed the plan, the plan was [a four letter word for excrement – name excised to protect my sensibilities]. This time, we want to make sure we have a good plan, and that’s why we want you guys to review it for us.”

The administration had a plan, and still has a plan. The basic structure is so obvious that it apparently hides in plain sight for some people. The plan is to build a new Iraq – a new government, new police, and new armed forces. Because once we have those, we can pull out, although I think we should keep a major base so that we can continue to exert influence in the region. Realistically, the government only has to be reasonably representative, the police reasonably non-repressive, and the armed forces reasonably effective. Everything else is how to get there. All the physical rebuilding is just the means to the end of the political rebuilding.

There was a lot of contingency planning for various disasters — oil fields set on fire, mass migrations, mass starvation and the like — that didn’t occur. Whether mass looting was planned on, I don’t know. It could be that it wasn’t; it could be that it was hard to shift from war fighting to order keeping and the looting occured before the switch was complete; it could be that the plan for the looting was to simply let it happen. There is nothing that says the plan has to be the right one in hindsight to be a plan. There are reports that a lot of military supply dumps full of weapons have been left unguarded, and if true, that seems to be a huge failure and somehow you think it should have been and should be now in “the plan”. There were earlier reports that the nuclear site at Tuwaitha was left unguarded when in fact wasn’t. What I know of the military tells me that if anything, we had plans for everything. They might not have been any good, but we had them.

I think we can have a good discussion as to whether our efforts in Iraq are adequate, what can we be doing better, how has planning changed with time as the facts on the ground have modified it, has the State Department / Department of Defense rivalry been harmful or helpful, were the assumptions of the planning too optimistic, and whether the big plan is the right one or not, etc.; but the position that somehow the Bush administration didn’t have any plans at all for post-war Iraq is simply wrong, and in the words of Donald Rumsfeld, unhelpful.