Administration ignored inconvenient facts about post-war Iraq By Trudy Rubin

How, then, to explain White House failure to act on information about what was likely to happen in Iraq?

Those dangers were not unimaginable. The CIA, the State Department, legislators, a plethora of Iraq experts foresaw the chaos that could follow The Day After. But no one at the White House seems to have listened.

Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki famously warned that several hundred thousand troops would be required to ensure postwar Iraq security. He was sharply rebuked by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz.

The State Department’s Future of Iraq project detailed how to reconstitute the Iraqi army to provide ready security. But the project was junked by Pentagon civilian officials who disbanded the Iraqi army. Most Iraq experts had warned against such a step.

U.S. officials didn’t train new Iraqi security forces to confront an insurgency. I was told by a senior U.S. official in Baghdad in October that U.S. special forces could handle any insurgents so long as they had good intelligence. Iraqi forces would serve merely as adjuncts.

And so we watch as ill- equipped Iraqi police and paramilitary forces scatter before the threat of insurgent violence. And more U.S. troops are being ordered up.

So we must ask why prewar warnings were so willfully disregarded by the Bush team. … I believe top officials blocked out any information they didn’t want to hear. …

When looting and crime exploded in Baghdad after the war, Rumsfeld famously said, ”Freedom is messy,” and left it unchecked. Never mind that Iraq experts, and the best U.S. military commanders, warned that first impressions would be crucial. The early chaos in Iraq set the tone for everything that followed.

Iraqis, schooled for decades to the order of dictatorship, expected a new and better order. Its lack of and U.S. inability to produce it destroyed trust and bred conspiracy theories about U.S. intentions. These still haunt the occupation. And, of course, instability has hurt efforts to rebuild the country and attract foreign investment. …

This was not a failure of imagination. It was a willful rejection of inconvenient facts.
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(Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer.)

Bush believes it’s all in god’s hands. Facts don’t mean much; scripture is everything to a huge number of our fellow citizens. mjh