Army Buried Iraq Post-War Planning Study

Fearing the wrath of then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the White House, the Army buried a detailed unclassified study it had commissioned assessing why Iraq post-war planning had been such a disaster, the New York Times' Michael Gordon reports.

After 18 months of research, RAND submitted a report in the summer of 2005 called "Rebuilding Iraq." RAND researchers provided an unclassified version of the report along with a secret one, hoping that its publication would contribute to the public debate on how to prepare for future conflicts.

But the study's wide-ranging critique of the White House, the Defense Department and other government agencies was a concern for Army generals, and the Army has sought to keep the report under lock and key. ....

What happened? The Army got afraid of offending their political masters, Gordon reports:

A review of the lengthy report — a draft of which was obtained by The New York Times — shows that it identified problems with nearly every organization that had a role in planning the war. That assessment parallels the verdicts of numerous former officials and independent analysts.

The study chided President Bush — and by implication Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who served as national security adviser when the war was planned — as having failed to resolve differences among rival agencies. "Throughout the planning process, tensions between the Defense Department and the State Department were never mediated by the president or his staff," it said. ...

The report was submitted at a time when the Bush administration was trying to rebut building criticism of the war in Iraq by stressing the progress Mr. Bush said was being made. The approach culminated in his announcement in November 2005 of his "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq."

One serious problem the study described was the Bush administration's assumption that the reconstruction requirements would be minimal. There was also little incentive to challenge that assumption, the report said. ...

"A Pentagon official who is familiar with the episode offered a different interpretation: Army officials were concerned that the report would strain relations with a powerful defense secretary and become caught up in the political debate over the war," Gordon adds. ''The Army leaders who were involved did not want to take the chance of increasing the friction with Secretary Rumsfeld,' said the official, who asked not to be identified because he did not want to alienate senior military officials."