Recent info on a lack of planning in Iraq

Actually, this post will cover only one aspect of such new information. This post will not discuss the recent disclosure of an official British briefing paper from eight months prior to the war complaining about the woeful lack of planning by the Bush administration for the post-war period (for a discussion of that topic, check out the blog of Faithful Progressive). Instead, this post will discuss an interview from June 14 on The Daily Show.

Jon Stewart's guest was Larry Diamond. Here is a biography of Diamond:

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy. He is also codirector of the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. At Stanford University, he is professor by courtesy of political science and sociology and coordinates the democracy program of the new Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. During 2002–3, he served as a consultant to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report Foreign Aid in the National Interest. Currently he serves as a member of USAID's Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid. He has also advised and lectured to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other governmental and nongovernmental agencies dealing with governance and development.

During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. He is now lecturing and writing about the challenges of postconflict state-building in Iraq. Diamond has also worked with a group of Europeans and Americans to produce the Transatlantic Strategy for Democracy and Human Development in the Broader Middle East, published in 2004 by the German Marshall Fund of the United States. During 2004–5, he has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations' Independent Task Force on United States Policy Toward Arab Reform.

Diamond has lectured, taught, and conducted research in some 25 countries over the past thirty years. During 1982–83 he was a Fulbright Visiting Lecturer at Bayero University in Kano, Nigeria. In 1997–98 he was a visiting scholar at the Sun Yat-Sen Institute of the Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. His research and policy analysis are focused on the relationship between democracy, governance, and development in poor countries, particularly in Africa.

(emphasis added). Diamond appeared on TV in part to promote his new book, Squandered Victory : The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq. Here is a description of the book:

In the fall of 2003, Stanford professor Larry Diamond received a call from Condoleezza Rice, asking if he would spend several months in Baghdad as an adviser to the the American occupation authorities. Diamond had not been a supporter of the war in Iraq, but he felt that the task of building a viable democracy was a worthy goal now that Saddam Hussein's regime had been overthrown. He also thought he could do some good by putting his academic expertise to work in the real world. So in January 2004 he went to Iraq, and the next three months proved to be more of an education than he bargained for.

Diamond found himself part of one of the most audacious undertakings of our time. In Squandered Victory he shows how the American effort to establish democracy in Iraq was hampered not only by insurgents and terrorists but also by a long chain of miscalculations, missed opportunities, and acts of ideological blindness that helped assure that the transition to independence would be neither peaceful nor entirely democratic. He brings us inside the Green Zone, into a world where ideals were often trumped by power politics and where U.S. officials routinely issued edicts that later had to be squared (at great cost) with Iraqi realities. His provocative and vivid account makes clear that Iraq-and by extension, the United States-will spend many years climbing its way out of the hole that was dug during the fourteen months of the American occupation.

(emphasis added). While the description of the book does not expressly mention the planning aspect, Diamond did talk about it in the interview.

STEWART: In your mind–because you talk about how you respect the people that are working in Iraq day in and day out–is this a situation with Washington just not being responsive to the real problems on the ground and the situations there?

DIAMOND: Washington was not responsive before we went to war or after we went to war to the need for adequate resources to see this mission through.

STEWART: But during the six weeks of war...

DIAMOND: Hey, that was great. We won the victory in the war, and we squandered it after the war because of the lack of commitment of resources and knowledge.

STEWART: Still hope?

DIAMOND: There’s still hope. I think it could still be turned around, but it’s going to cost more, and take a lot longer, and it’s going to be a much more painful experience than it need have been if we succeed, and there’s no guarantee of that.

(emphasis added). Here we have statements from someone who not only has firsthand knowledge of what was done and not done in terms of the post-war period, but was personally asked by Condoleezza Rice to go to Iraq. Read his comments again. If you still think--like Wolfowitless--that there was a great deal of planning for the post-war period, you should do three things: 1) drink a entire pot of strong coffee with a Red Bull chaser so you can truly wake up and face reality; 2) read Franks on planning for the post-war period; 3) read "Blind Into Baghdad" by James Fallows.