THE POST-WAR PLAN

(Via Atrios)

GEN. BERNARD TRAINOR: Well, these -- I think it can be generally stated that there were erroneous assumptions made upon which the planning floundered. The ground attack went to Baghdad in record time. However, along the way they ran into the sort of resistance that they had not expected. But if you're looking for the weak link in the process, it wasn't the operation itself, the invasion itself. It was the plan for the end of the invasion. And I use the term "plan," because a lot of people say that there wasn't any plan after Saddam's regime fell.

But there was a plan. And the plan was for the United States military to get out of Iraq as quickly as possible, turn Iraq over to a U.S.-supported Iraqi government, on the assumption that the infrastructure, both the political and economic infrastructure, would be largely intact, and that the international community, the U.N. and others, would get involved in the post-Saddam period. That was a fatally flawed assumption, and as a result, a fatally flawed plan.

So, if you're looking for the problem that emerged with the insurgency, that would be kind of the fundamental principle. There were lots of other little mistakes that went through it, which turned out to be very large mistakes: disbanding the Iraqi army, not having sufficient American forces to follow on the invasion -- as a matter of fact, cutting back on the forces that were involved in the invasion -- and all of these things closed a window of opportunity of reasonable stability that existed immediately after the fall of Baghdad. But that window of opportunity only stayed open for a short period of time, and it slammed shut, and the insurgency emerged