Better Now than Perfect

The criticisms about our failure to plan for the postwar Iraq situaition have always seemed less about correcting past mistakes for the benefit of future wars than plain attacks designed to undermine a war the attackers oppose--no matter how well planned the post-war might have been. (And I do remember oh so clearly the complaints from the anti-war side before the war when stories of post-war ideas were floated. Horrors! they said, such planning assumes we will go to war and war is a last resort! Bad boys for planning!)

This story of complaints at least has a more credible source, a military historian:

"There was no Phase IV plan" for occupying Iraq after the combat phase, writes Maj. Isaiah Wilson III, who served as an official historian of the campaign and later as a war planner in Iraq. While a variety of government offices had considered the possible situations that would follow a U.S. victory, Wilson writes, no one produced an actual document laying out a strategy to consolidate the victory after major combat operations ended.

Yet further down we get to this rebuttal:

Air Force Capt. Chris Karns, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, which as the U.S. military headquarters for the Middle East oversaw planning for the war in Iraq, said, "A formal Phase IV plan did exist." He said he could not explain how Wilson came to a different conclusion.

Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who as chief of the Central Command led the war planning in 2002 and 2003, states in his recent memoir, "American Soldier," that throughout the planning for the invasion of Iraq, Phase IV stability operations were discussed. Occupation problems "commanded hours and days of discussion and debate among CENTCOM planners and Washington officials," he adds. At another point, he states, "I was confident in the Phase IV plan."

Has the debate truly come down to whether or not the military had a professionally bound document with powerpoint presentation to go along with it?

We had ideas about what the post-combat Phase IV of the war would look like and how we would deal with it. Some were right. Some were wrong. We are adapting.

To me, rather than harping on how much better we could have planned had we delayed six months or a year (or how long should we give our people to come up with the perfect plan?), I'd rather ask what we gave Saddam by delaying the war for a year after the spring of 2002 after we'd had a chance to rest from the Afghan campaign.

We gave Saddam a year of extra time and I'd rather explore what we'd have faced had we invaded in the spring of 2002, or the fall of 2002:

1. Would the fedayeen thugs been imported in such numbers?
2. Would Saddam have been able to hide/destroy his WMD and programs?
3. Would Saddam have dispersed weapons throughout the country?
4. Would the world have been as mobilized against the liberation if they had less time?
5. Would Iran and Syria have been more or less inclined to aid the Baathists?
6. Would Islamists have had time to work up a pipeline of jihadis to Iraq?
7. Would Saddam have been able to arrange for the exit of ill-gotten Iraqi cash to fund the insurgency?
8. Would Saddam have planned his own escape?
9. Would the Europeans have been a little more sympathetic with 9-11 a more recent memory, as Mark Steyn has noted?

Truly, in a debate between going fast or going well-planned, I think the balance is in favor of going fast. We have the power and training to adapt better in battle than any conceivable enemy. When it comes to those who oppose a war, no amount of good planning will satisfy them. Only victory will keep them quiet--until the next war debate.