Was It BushCo Idiocy Or Simply Part Of The Plan?

Here is a great piece from TPM Muckraker (thanks for the link, JB). It's all about the study the RAND Corporation did for the U.S. Army to help figure out why the Iraq War was such a disaster. I found this excerpt from the RAND Report particularly interesting:

“Building public support for any pre-emptive or preventative war is inherently challenging, since by definition, action is being taken before the threat has fully manifested itself,” it said. “Any serious discussion of the costs and challenges of reconstruction might undermine efforts to build that support.”

In other words, the lack of post-invasion planning wasn't an oversight, but merely part of the plan. BushCo knew that any talk of post-war difficulty could adversely affect their chances of getting congressional (and public) support for the invasion.

I've said this before, but it bears repeating: from a PNAC perspective, the "Iraq Debacle" really did go according to plan. Indeed, even the parts that look totally idiotic in hindsight really weren't idiotic at all because the main goals of the Neo-Con Iraq policy was (1) for the U.S. to get a foothold in Iraq, and (2) to do it in such a way as to ensure that we'd have to maintain a presence there for decades. None of the small stuff (e.g., post-invasion planning, the need to prevent Iraq from turning into the Mother of All Terrorist Training grounds, etc.) mattered to Rumsfeld and the rest of the Neo-Cons. All that mattered was the big picture.

Hell, they undoubtedly like it that terrorists are in Iraq now, because they can use that fact to argue the need for a continued U.S. presence (and it allows people like Mitt Romney to argue that pulling out of Iraq would essentially be a declaration of defeat). It's all pretty ingenious.