More on a lack of planning from Larry Diamond, via Praktike

For those of you who might have missed it, back on June 15 I published a post entitled Recent info on a lack of planning in Iraq which discussed an interview with Larry Diamond on "The Daily Show." For info on Diamond and his book, Squandered Victory : The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, go back and read that post. For the sake of convenience, here is a repeat of some of 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.

(emphasis added). I have not read Diamond's book because I already have enough outrage over the lack of planning, but Praktike (who I have cited before) has done what I could not bear to do, and recently described the experience:

I just picked up a copy of Larry Diamond's new book, Squandered Victory, at the AUC bookstore. So far I've wanted to hurl it at the wall at least five times--not because I don't like the book, but because the anecdotes Diamond relates are so frustrating. I've only read the first four chapters, but those are packed with observations and anecdotes that I haven't seen elsewhere. Highly recommended.

One story that really got me was the tale of former ambassador to Yemen Barbara Bodine suggesting to Rumsfeld in March of 2003 that it would behoove the Bush administration to develop a plan to pay Iraqi civil servants. Rumsfeld replied that American taxpayers would never go for it and that he was not concerned if they were paid for several weeks or even months; if they rioted in the streets in protest, he said, the US could use such an eventuality as leverage to get the Europeans to pick up the tab.

Stunning, no?

Unfortunately, I have to say that this is not stunning. Three days ago, in Planning? We don't need no stinking planning, I said that my own lengthy posts do not come close to discussing all the planning failures, and Praktike has provided proof of that. And this latest example of Rumskull's rumskullery is not stunning because 1) it follows perfectly the pattern of blind stupidity I have exposed in my previous lengthy posts, and 2) as Robert Merry said (see Planning?), the idiots who brought us the Iraq war engaged in nothing but ideological planning--"you basically create the pattern that you want the world to be in and then you fit the policy to coincide with that particular pattern, even though it bore no relationship to reality." (emphasis added).

Nothing the Bush administration did in regard to planning for the post-war period had any relationship to reality or common sense. And because of the arrogance, stupidity, and delusion of these idiots (including but not limited to Rumskull, Cheney, Wolfowitless, Rice, Feith, Perle, and George his own self), we have a great big SNAFU that is FUBAR.