"Jesus Christ, John, this is a recipe for disaster"

It's another "Dereliction of Duty," McMaster's account of the failures in Vietnam.  The Army has come out with a history of the Iraq war.  Much of the factual material comes from the ranks, from each platoon serving in Iraq.  And it is a very damning document, according to Michael Gordon, once the paper's ardent flag-waver for the invasion, at the New York Times.

The story of the American occupation of Iraq has been the subject of numerous books, studies and memoirs. But now the Army has waded into the highly charged debate with its own nearly 700-page account: “On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign.”

The unclassified study, the second volume in a continuing history of the Iraq conflict, is as noteworthy for who prepared it as for what it says. In essence, the study is an attempt by the Army to tell the story of one of the most contentious periods in its history to military experts — and to itself.

... The “On Point” report carries the imprimatur of the Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth. The study is based on 200 interviews conducted by military historians and includes long quotations from active or recently retired officers.

Although the report is essentially a self-critical Army document, the period it focuses on comes just after Bush's "Mission Accomplished," illustrating just how unaccomplished the mission was and how incompetent the leadership had proven itself to be.

The report focuses on the 18 months after President Bush’s May 2003 announcement that major combat operations in Iraq were over. It was a period when the Army took on unanticipated occupation duties and was forced to develop new intelligence-gathering techniques, armor its Humvees, revise its tactics and, after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, review its detention practices.

A big problem, the study says, was the lack of detailed plans before the war for the postwar phase, a deficiency that reflected the general optimism in the White House and in the Pentagon, led by then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld,about Iraq’s future, and an assumption that civilian agencies would assume much of the burden.

“I can remember asking the question during our war gaming and the development of our plan, ‘O.K., we are in Baghdad, what next?’ No real good answers came forth,” Col. Thomas G. Torrance, the commander of the Third Infantry Division’s artillery, told Army historians.

Loyalty to their commander-in-chief stretched the military to its limit.  It was situation which went way beyond bad planning.  The accounts reveal a complete absence of a plan for anything beyond "shock and awe."

“It took us months, six or seven or eight months, to get some semblance of a headquarters together so Sanchez could at least begin to function effectively.”  General Keane told the historians that he raised his concerns at the time with Lt. Gen.  John P. Abizaid who had been picked to succeed General Franks as the head of Central Command.

“I said, ‘Jesus Christ, John, this is a recipe for disaster,’ ” General Keane told Army historians. “I was upset about it to say the least, but the decision had been made and it was a done deal.”

And then came the surge, effectively a do-over.  Maybe you can edit, rewrite, and hand in a failed paper at Andover and Yale, hoping for that "C".  But in Iraq, a do-over didn't change a thing.  The numb-headed ideology coupled with breezy carelessness that followed an illegal invasion was yet another "recipe for disaster" costing tens of thousands of lives, Iraqi and American.