Chaos Overran Iraq Plan in ’06, Bush Team Says

[applegrove]

Chaos Overran Iraq Plan in ’06, Bush Team Says
By DAVID E. SANGER, MICHAEL R. GORDON and JOHN F. BURNS
Published: January 2, 2007
The New York Times
WASHINGTON, Dec. 31 — President Bush began 2006 assuring the country that he had a “strategy for victory in Iraq.” He ended the year closeted with his war cabinet on his ranch trying to devise a new strategy, because the existing one had collapsed.

SWIRLING VIOLENCE As bombings in Baghdad rose over the spring and summer, General Casey focused on military successes.
The original plan, championed by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top commander in Baghdad, and backed by Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, called for turning over responsibility for security to the Iraqis, shrinking the number of American bases and beginning the gradual withdrawal of American troops. But the plan collided with Iraq’s ferocious unraveling, which took most of Mr. Bush’s war council by surprise.

In interviews in Washington and Baghdad, senior officials said the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department had also failed to take seriously warnings, including some from its own ambassador in Baghdad, that sectarian violence could rip the country apart and turn Mr. Bush’s promise to “clear, hold and build” Iraqi neighborhoods and towns into an empty slogan.

This left the president and his advisers constantly lagging a step or two behind events on the ground.

..........SNIP"

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/washington/02war.html?th&emc=th

[applegrove]

1. D'ya think?

[tanyev]

2. It looked to me like chaos overran the "plan" as early as April 2003.

[applegrove]

3. Absolutely. But like Rummy said...the Sunnis didn't do battle in the invasion

so he didn't get a chance to kill of many of them. Because Turkey didn't let him in through the north.

[MidwestTransplant]

4. If they didn't have a plan to deal with chaos, they never really had a

plan at all, just a goal.

[Xipe Totec]

5. What is this, a Get Smart episode?

Maxwell Smart defeated by Chaos. :eyes:

The greatest TV show ever! OK then, the funniest comedy of all time? Would you believe the most enduring 30 minutes of stupidity in history?

[applegrove]

6. I've never heard anyone make allusion to Maxwell Smart and these

guys in the WH. Apt. Except Smart was a good guy and wanted to stop Kaos. Not build it.

[Demeter]

7. REALITY Overran Iraq War; the Policy Was Chaos All Along!

There's no putting lipstick on this little piggy, it was a total fuckup from Day 1, and it's all Dubya's, Cheney's Rumsfeld's, and Powell's, and Condi is an accessory to the crime.