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"...proved to be largely incorrect..."

A new official Army account of the invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq says that the plan was flawed. Specifically:

"There were overly optimistic assumptions about how well Iraqi civil and local institutions of government would continue to function after Saddam was gone; and there was overoptimistic sense of how unified the Iraqi people would be when they had an opportunity to choose a new government,"...

Really?

The report lays a great deal of blame on Tommy Franks, who apparently surprised many of his colleagues by insisting on cutting staff in Iraq almost immediately after the invasion. Of course, this isn't a surprise historically, given that Franks approved an inane "warplan" that assumed we'd be able to cut back to just a couple thousand troops in Iraq within a year and a half of a successful invasion.

He may have slept through those classes about our occupation of Japan. Perhaps he slept through Kosovo, as well.

You can request a speaking appearance by Tommy -- perhaps your local community group can invite him over to explain exactly why he thought a force the size of two good-sized mid-Texas high schools would be able to secure a country of twenty-seven million people split across multiple ethnic and religious groups.

al Jazeera article

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