It Must Be Awesome By Now

Remember how the anti-war side condemned the Bush administration for not having a plan for the post-war phase of Iraq? I sure do. They did it a lot. With bitter contempt for their stupidity.

That charge wasn't true, mind you. We surely made some mistakes (and we did win in the end, remember), but we had a plan. The main problem was that our assumptions failed. Baathists unable to resist in the major combat operations actually did mount an insurgency; Syria and Iran essentially invaded Iraq with al Qaeda and Sadrists and we let them get away with it; and Iraq needed far more rebuilding than we anticipated--our care in not breaking stuff in the invasion was swamped by what was already broken before we crossed the border.

When we launched the Libya War over four months ago, I didn't assume we had such a perfect plan for post-war Libya. Since the administration assumed it would be all wrapped up in a fortnight, who had time for the perfect post-war plan? Or any plan at all, really. Right?

But now, after over four months of waging war kinetic actions, Obama administration officials must have prepared just the most super stupendous, awesome, nuanced post-war plan to end all post-war plans, right? Footnotes. Charts. Lines of authority. Plans to reform the Khaddafi military rather than "disband" it. The whole ball of wax. We'll look at it in stunned wide-eyed awe and say, "Holy crap, these guys are big-brained geniuses. We're not worthy!"

I mean, unless all that Bush era complaining about the Iraq War was just politics, and the same rules apply to the Obama administration in a war of choice, post-civil war Libya is going to be freaking awesome under the new guys in charge.