Iraq report cites poor planning

By Charles Aldinger, Reuters, 9/4/2003

WASHINGTON -- A "brutally honest" report prepared for the Joint Chiefs of Staff blames postwar unrest in Iraq on hurried, inadequate planning before the invasion, defense officials said yesterday.

The classified report on lessons learned in the war says US commanders were so busy preparing to defeat Iraq's military and directing the fight that they had too little time to properly prepare for "Phase IV" peace, according to the officials.

It also criticizes planning for efforts to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The threat from such chemical and biological weapons was cited by President Bush and the Pentagon as a major reason for the invasion. No such weapons have yet been found.

"It is a brutally honest report," said one of the officials, who asked not to be identified. "It shows that the military is self-critical -- not just satisfied with 93 percent effectiveness in combat."

The assessment, first reported in the Washington Times, has not yet been approved by Air Force General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

With US troops being killed daily in guerrilla attacks in Iraq and suffering more casualties in the postwar period than in the drive to capture Baghdad, the Bush administration has come under sharp criticism from members of Congress over strategy in the unsettled country.

The Times published excerpts from the report -- which gave high marks for joint war fighting capabilities among US military services and the ability to bomb "time-sensitive" targets -- that were confirmed to Reuters by defense officials familiar with it.

The newspaper quoted the report as saying, "Phase IV objectives were identified, but the scope of the effort required to continually refine operational plans for defeat of [the] Iraqi military limited the focus on Phase IV," the reconstruction of Iraq.

"Late formation of Department of Defense [Phase IV] organizations limited time available for the development of detailed plans and pre-deployment coordination," it added.

The report, compiled from interviews with senior officers such as now-retired Army General Tommy Franks, who headed the war effort, does not blame specific individuals.

But it contends that planning for the hunt for weapons of mass destruction was inadequate, especially because the military was not trained for such efforts.

"Weapons of mass destruction elimination and exploitation planning efforts did not occur early enough in the process to allow CentCom (the US Central Command headed by Franks) to effectively execute the mission," the Times quoted the report.

The newspaper said the report, prepared last month, showed that Bush approved the overall war strategy for Iraq in August 2002, eight months before the first bomb was dropped and six months before he asked the UN Security Council for a war mandate that he did not receive.

Senior Bush administration officials, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, have conceded in recent weeks that the administration failed to anticipate the guerrilla war against US troops in Iraq.

The United States currently has about 140,000 troops in Iraq and the deployment has left the US military stretched to fulfill missions around the world.

The Congressional Budget Office warned in a report this week that the demands of troop rotations around the world could leave the Defense Department without fresh Army units for Iraq next year unless tours of duty stretch beyond a year.