More stuff you should be reading instead of this l…. this lou…. this lovely blog…

(Whew. Change is hard.)

• I would have been prepared to believe that maybe our post-war planning was slipshod or rushed, but nonexistent!? From Warren Strobel and John Walcott, two top-notch reporters for Knight-Ridder Newspapers, we learn the following:

WASHINGTON – In March 2003, days before the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, American war planners and intelligence officials met at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina to review the Bush administration’s plans to oust Saddam Hussein and implant democracy in Iraq.

Near the end of his presentation, an Army lieutenant colonel who was giving a briefing showed a slide describing the Pentagon’s plans for rebuilding Iraq after the war, known in the planners’ parlance as Phase 4-C. He was uncomfortable with his material – and for good reason.

The slide said: “To Be Provided.”

A Knight Ridder review of the administration’s Iraq policy and decisions has found that it invaded Iraq without a comprehensive plan in place to secure and rebuild the country. The administration also failed to provide some 100,000 additional U.S. troops that American military commanders originally wanted to help restore order and reconstruct a country shattered by war, a brutal dictatorship and economic sanctions.

[—-snip—-]

The U.S. intelligence community had been divided about the state of Saddam’s weapons programs, but there was little disagreement among experts throughout the government that winning the peace in Iraq could be much harder than winning a war.

“The possibility of the United States winning the war and losing the peace in Iraq is real and serious,” warned an Army War College report that was completed in February 2003, a month before the invasion. Without an “overwhelming” effort to prepare for the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the report warned: “The United States may find itself in a radically different world over the next few years, a world in which the threat of Saddam Hussein seems like a pale shadow of new problems of America’s own making.”

A half-dozen intelligence reports also warned that American troops could face significant postwar resistance. This foot-high stack of material was distributed at White House meetings of Bush’s top foreign policy advisers, but there’s no evidence that anyone ever acted on it.

“It was disseminated. And ignored,” said a former senior intelligence official.

[—-snip—-]

Gen. John Keane, the vice chief of the Army staff during the war, said some defense officials believed the exiles’ promises. “We did not see it (the insurgency) coming. And we were not properly prepared and organized to deal with it . . . . Many of us got seduced by the Iraqi exiles in terms of what the outcome would be,” Keane told a House committee in July.

Rumsfeld’s office “was utterly, arrogantly, ignorantly and negligently unprepared” for the aftermath of the war, said Larry Diamond, who was a political adviser in Baghdad from January to March of this year.

Read the whole piece here. My friend Johnny Walker Red over at Right On Red reassures me that we can still win in Iraq, and I don’t doubt it. I have faith in our military, but the civilian leadership’s appalling lack of preparation for an attack of this magnitude is shocking and utterly demoralizing. (via Atrios)

• Matthew Yglesias notes the creeping Putinization of America.
• From the unspeakably brilliant Michael Bérubé, we discover two new literary works of note: a science fiction account of “a Messianic madman [who] takes over the United States in a disputed election” (NYTimes) and an alternative history in which George W. Bush wins the presidency (It’s All One Thing). Most frightening (and oft-quoted) quote from the science fiction piece:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend—but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

• I don’t think the assault on our constitutional liberties is over—not by a long shot—but I continue to see signs that all hope is not lost. A panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals restricted officials in Columbus, Georgia—in absence of a specific threat—from setting up metal detectors at a planned protest. (via Boing Boing) The court decision read in part:

“We cannot simply suspend or restrict civil liberties until the War of Terror is over, because the War on Terror is unlikely ever to be truly over,” Judge Gerald Tjoflat wrote for the three-member court. “September 11, 2001, already a day of immeasurable tragedy, cannot be the day liberty perished in this country.”

• In reflecting on the New York Times’ endorsement of Kerry for President, Athenae captures the sentiment perfectly. We might have sailed great oceans with the emotion and sentiment of 9/11 at our backs. Instead, we stayed in port and manned the guns. (First Draft)
• Also at First Draft, Holden notes that, no, our president did not supply the troops with everything they needed.
• Is this my country? Is this who we are… unrepentant torturers? (NYT, reg req’d)
• Fred at A VC gets his back up when Frank Baranko says “Almost nobody reads blogs.” And with good reason. After all, 8 million nobodies can’t be nobody.
• Adam Felber goes all Jon Stewart on the media’s collective ass.

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Sunday, October 17th, 2004 @ 10:46 pm Nothings
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