Bad Planning

With all due respect to General Franks and his tremendous career, some of his explanations and excuses are a bit hard to swallow:

According to the General in command, the U.S. went to war in Iraq without expectation of the violent insurgency that followed or a clear understanding of the psychology of the Iraqi people.

"We had a hope the Iraqis would rise up and become part of the solution," said former Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the U.S. military's Central Command until his retirement last August. "We just didn't know (about the insurgency)."

Interviewed Monday in connection with the publication of his memoir, "American Soldier," Franks also said he had expected large numbers of foreign troops to join the U.S. in its Iraq effort. Franks attributes the stresses on American forces in Iraq now, in part, to the failure of that to happen.

Now I think the former is clearly true. Those who planned the war did not understand the Iraqi people or the possibility of the insurgency. But I think General Franks exemplifies understatement later in the piece, when he suggests that there may have been some "willful assumptions with respect to that."

And on the latter point, about international troops, I have to confess I just do not understand. It makes it sound like he was just crossing his fingers, hoping international support would come to save an otherwise undermanned mission. At what point did he "expect" international support? Before we went to the UN? Before we invaded? After major combat operations had ended? His later clarifications don't help either:

As he noted in his book, Franks initially projected that troop strength in Iraq might have to rise to 250,000 for the U.S. to meet all of its objectives, but it never got higher than 150,000.

"The wild card in this was the expectation for much greater international involvement," he said in the interview. "I never cared whether the international community came by way of NATO or the United Nations or directly. ... We started the operation believing that nations would provide us with an awful lot of support."

What? We started operations without any significant military committments from anyone but the British, downright hostility from several other major allies, and international support was just supposed to... happen? This makes it sound like the administration was playing chicken with the international community, assuming that once the war seemed inevitable everyone would rally to our side. Needless to say, that did not and has not happened.

And then there is further evidence of what many have long suspected, that Colin Powell knew better:

According to Franks, Secretary of State Colin Powell contacted him directly, without going through the chain of command, to voice his concern that the U.S. was invading Iraq with a comparatively small, highly-mobile force, instead of the kind of overwhelming massive force such as Powell deployed when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Persian Gulf War.

Franks said he considered Powell's views as from a different time and situation.

Except that Powell was right. Unfortunately, Powell has stuck close to the loyal soldier model, and has lent his gravitas and credibility to a foreign policy that has seems to have largely ignored his advice.