Plan? What plan?

Two things prompt this essay: First, last night in his speech, the Whopper™ said this: "Our commanders had estimated that a troop level below 115,000 would be sufficient at this point in the conflict. Given the recent increase in violence, we will maintain our troop level at the current 138,000 as long as necessary."

For a while I had stopped calling him the Whopper™, but if he's going to keep lying, he's got to expect it to come back. I'll explain in a minute.

The second thing is a comment thread over at Rosemary's (she's the Iron Blogger Republican) where I mentioned that it seemed like there was no real plan for Iraq. I stand by that assertion, though the conservatives frequenting her place seem to doubt me.

Anyway, here's my second attempt at blogging about the war in the last few weeks, though it is not now nor has it ever been a primary focus of mine. Sigh.

So why is the Whopper™'s statement a lie? And what are they saying at Rosemary's that relates? I tossed off a statement over there that the Whopper™ was finally getting around, in his speech last night, to laying out his strategy for Iraq--thirteen months late. The rejoinder? "It is naive to believe there wasn't a plan."

I'm not being naive, and I don't think it's unreasonable to expect some concrete statement on the part of our Commander in Chief about what the hell it is, exactly, that we've been doing and what's coming next. We're supposed to be handing over authority to someone, somehow, in five weeks, and we'll even leave ourselves, despite the Whopper™'s commitment to stay, if they ask us to.

But I do not think it is naivete to suggest that the planning for this occupation, what little there was, was not only spotty but absolutely misguided.

Anyone remember Eric Shinseki? Maybe you remember him as General Shinseki. He is the former member of the Joint Chiefs of staff who, back in February 2003, explained to Congress that we would need 300,000 troops to occupy Iraq:

Iraq is "a piece of geography that's fairly significant," Gen. Eric K. Shinseki said at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee. And he said any postwar occupying force would have to be big enough to maintain safety in a country with "ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems."

In response to questioning by Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the committee, Shinseki said he couldn't give specific numbers of the size of an occupation force but would rely on the recommendations of commanders in the region.

"How about a range?" said Levin.

"I would say that what's been mobilized to this point, something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers," the general said. "Assistance from friends and allies would be helpful."

That's right: When the Whopper™ says our commanders expected to have 115,000 troops to occupy Iraq, he's lying.

Unless Shinseki doesn't count. See, Shinseki was, er, relieved of command after he dared imply that Rummy's and Perle's and Wolfowitz's and Feith's estimates of half his number were wrong. Army Secretary Thomas White got the boot for the same reason. We should probably have had more troops for the beginning--and even now--but the administration's insistence that it knew what it was doing with so few troops has made it hard for commanders to ask for what they need.

And it wasn't just two squeaky wheels, either. Try this on for size:

Four years ago, those who devised an Iraq war game called "Desert Crossing" concluded that a large force would be needed to subdue the country. "We were concerned about the ability to get in there right away, to flood the towns and villages," says retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, who was commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and the surrounding region when he supervised "Desert Crossing." "We knew the initial problem would be security."

The 1999 exercise recommended a force of 400,000 troops to invade and stabilize Iraq. But at the insistence of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, ground forces in the March invasion were held to less than half that: about 130,000 U.S. combat troops and some 30,000 British troops.

In other words, LIAR! (Read that whole story--it's really depressing how our lack of troops is but one reason why the occupation is sucking.)

Over at Rosemary's, I joked that there was a plan (familiar to those of you who know the Underpants Gnomes:

1. Utterly destroy an enemy we vastly outnumber
2. ?????????
3. Leave a stable, democratic Iraq on June 30

Was there really a step two? It depends on who you ask. There was a good sense last summer that, according to the damning headline here, the "Pentagon had no plans for post-war Iraq." "The officials didn't develop any real postwar plans because they believed that Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops with open arms and Washington could install a favored Iraqi exile leader [the now-disfavored Chalabi] as the country's leader," says the story.

Last fall, word was that there was no planning for the occupation because, well, we wouldn't want to presume.

Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, when asked about the subject in Nov. 5 hearings before the House Armed Services Committee, replied as follows: "We did not want to be planning for a postwar in Iraq before we were sure we were going to war in Iraq. We did not want to have planning for the postwar make the war inevitable."

So was there no planning? Well, it sounds like a handful of undersecretaries of things had made some plans, including keep US troops in country forever and a day, but they sound like pie in the sky, now:

Neither Mr Feith nor Mr Grossman would put a cost on the occupation.

The US, they made clear, is depending on Iraq's oil revenue to fund the administration of Iraq and its reconstruction. [. . .]

General Franks, Mr Grossman said, would be relying on the current technocrats in Baghdad to keep running crucial services such as health, education, water and electricity supplies. The US is hoping these people, who are from the Sunni minority that has ruled Iraq for decades under Saddam, will not abandon their posts. The concern is that if they fear retribution they may flee to Jordan or Syria.

Mr Grossman also made it clear that the exiled Iraqi opposition leaders now in northern Iraq would not be installed by the US military government and would probably be forced to take a back seat in the immediate aftermath of the war.

Did you catch that? Among other things, before the invasion the administration was telling us that there were no plans to install Chalabi. Afterwards, they admit that was the plan all along: Flowers, Chalabi, Handover.

At any rate, it's been clear for a long time that if there were a step two, it was inadequate, based on bad intelligence (mostly from Chalabi and his INC), and more faith-based than reality based. That's why things really do not seem so accomplished a year after that stupid aircraft carrier stunt:

[T]he reconstruction period in Iraq has been much more difficult than the White House predicted in the wake of last year's initial push into the country. The ease of the initial military thrust may have been deceptive. To trap the US with a draining insurgency might have been the old regime's strategy all along. In any case, the US underestimated the devastation, both physical and mental, that Mr. Hussein would leave in his wake.

"More could have been done in the pre-war planning for postwar operations," said retired Army Gen. John Keane, who was vice chief of staff of the Army until last fall, in a recent congressional appearance.

General Keane said that he had not predicted how passive Iraq's people would be after 35 years of political repression, and how that would make them skeptical of all authority and wary of the Americans' insistence that they were liberators.

That sentiment is echoed by Mario Mancuso, a former Special Operations commander who spent close to a year in Iraq, including five months around Najaf. "I found a brutalized, traumatized, and paranoid people by and large," he says.

The US knew Iraqis as a whole were educated and industrious - the Germans of the Middle East, in an old Western stereotype. What they hadn't counted on was how much they had been beaten down, and how they would have to try and coax locals out of a battened-down survival mode. "We likely overstated how much they could help us," says Mancuso.

General Zinni is all over this now, with his new book a-coming:

Zinni says he blames the Pentagon for what happened. “I blame the civilian leadership of the Pentagon directly. Because if they were given the responsibility, and if this was their war, and by everything that I understand, they promoted it and pushed it - certain elements in there certainly - even to the point of creating their own intelligence to match their needs, then they should bear the responsibility,” he says.

“But regardless of whose responsibility I think it is, somebody has screwed up. And at this level and at this stage, it should be evident to everybody that they've screwed up. And whose heads are rolling on this? That's what bothers me most.”

Adds Zinni: “If you charge me with the responsibility of taking this nation to war, if you charge me with implementing that policy with creating the strategy which convinces me to go to war, and I fail you, then I ought to go.”

Who specifically is he talking about?

“Well, it starts with at the top. If you're the secretary of defense and you're responsible for that. If you're responsible for that planning and that execution on the ground. If you've assumed responsibility for the other elements, non-military, non-security, political, economic, social and everything else, then you bear responsibility,” says Zinni. “Certainly those in your ranks that foisted this strategy on us that is flawed. Certainly they ought to be gone and replaced.”

But no one's getting fired, except scapegoats on the ground in Iraq--Jay Garner, for example. Or, just this week, General Sanchez. None of the people who systematically ignore the recommendations of people who know what they're talking about. More likely it's the people who know--like Shinseki, White, and others--who get fired instead.

So was there a plan? Yeah, I guess. If you can call it that.

[UPDATE: For more on the speech last night, including more outright lies, see Mustang Bobby.]