Lengthy But Excellent TIME Magazine Piece on Iraq Debacle

Here is a must-read piece from TIME describing in great detail exactly how Bush's Iraq invasion turned into the catastrophe we all know and hate (four more U.S. soldiers were killed there yesterday, by the way).

I found the stuff on General (and Medal of Freedom recipient) Tommy Franks to be particularly interesting. Franks showed both great political intelligence and great military idiocy during his time as commander of U.S. forces. He was smart, not in how he ran the show on the ground, but in how he avoided using the same common-sense approach that sunk General Shinseki's career:

It is no secret that General Tommy Franks didn't want to hang around Iraq very long. As Franks led the U.S. assault on Baghdad in April 2003, his goal--and that of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld--was to get to the capital as quickly as possible with a minimal number of troops. Franks succeeded brilliantly at that task. But military-intelligence officers contend that he did not seem interested in what would come next. "He never once asked us for a briefing about what happened once we got to Baghdad," says a former Army intelligence officer attached to the invasion force. "He said, 'It's not my job.' We figured all he wanted to do was get in, get out and write his book." (Franks, through a spokesman, declined to comment for this article.)

The rush to Baghdad, critics say, laid the groundwork for trouble to come. In one prewar briefing, for example, Lieut. General David McKiernan--who commanded the land component of the coalition forces--asked Franks what should be done if his troops found Iraqi arms caches on the way to Baghdad. "Just put a lock on 'em and go, Dave," Franks replied, according to a former U.S. Central Command (Centcom) officer. Of course, you couldn't simply put a lock on ammunition dumps that stretched for several square miles--dumps that would soon be stripped and provide a steady source of weaponry for the insurgency.

Franks was stuck with a Rumsfeld-inspired battle plan that he must have known would fail in the long haul. I assume this because I just can't imagine someone rising to the rank of four-star general without having some concept of what it would take to invade and successfully occupy a country the size of Iraq. Franks brilliantly executed Rumsfeld's idiotic plan, then brilliantly got himself the hell out of there.

Franks, however, did show his stupid side when he left junior officers in charge on the ground and moved his headquarters back to the United States:

On May 1, President George W. Bush announced, "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended," on the deck of an aircraft carrier, near a banner that read MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. Shortly thereafter, Franks moved his headquarters from Qatar back to Florida. He was followed there in June by McKiernan, whose Baghdad operation included several hundred intelligence officers who had been keeping track of the situation on the ground. "Allowing McKiernan to leave was the worst decision of the war," says one of his superiors. (The decision, he says, was Franks'.) "We replaced an operational force with a tactical force, which meant generals were replaced by colonels." Major General Ricardo Sanchez, a relatively junior commander and a recent arrival in Iraq, was put in charge. "After McKiernan left, we had fewer than 30 intelligence officers trying to figure who the enemy was," says a top-ranking military official who was in Iraq at the time. "We were starting from scratch, with practically no resources."

Anyway, it is a good article and definitely worth your time.