RAND ON THE POST-WAR

The RAND corporation has a draft report that suggested we would need 500,000 troops for the post-war occupation. Bremer sent a copy to Rummy and brought the issue up with Fredo, to no avail. RAND has continued to study the Iraq War but we haven't heard of the results until today because they are too embarassing to the Bush regime. A key finding: "As it became clear that decisions made by civilian officials had contributed to the Army’s difficulties in Iraq, researchers delved into those policies as well."

Army Buried Study Faulting Iraq Planning
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
Published: February 11, 2008
NY Times

After 18 months of research, RAND submitted a report in the summer of 2005 called “Rebuilding Iraq.” ... But the study’s wide-ranging critique of the White House, the Defense Department and other government agencies was a concern for Army generals, and the Army has sought to keep the report under lock and key.

A review of the lengthy report — a draft of which was obtained by The New York Times — shows that it identified problems with nearly every organization that had a role in planning the war.

The study chided President Bush — and by implication Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who served as national security adviser when the war was planned — as having failed to resolve differences among rival agencies. “Throughout the planning process, tensions between the Defense Department and the State Department were never mediated by the president or his staff,” it said.

The Defense Department led by Donald H. Rumsfeld was given the lead in overseeing the postwar period in Iraq despite its “lack of capacity for civilian reconstruction planning and execution.”

The State Department led by Colin L. Powell produced a voluminous study on the future of Iraq that identified important issues but was of “uneven quality” and “did not constitute an actionable plan.”

Gen. Tommy R. Franks, whose Central Command oversaw the military operation in Iraq, had a “fundamental misunderstanding” of what the military needed to do to secure postwar Iraq, the study said.