For dumb reasons, all of this dumbness enabled by dumb legislators, as well as being fought in a dumb way, resulting in a dumb, stupid civil war which is being further enabled by another bunch of dumb, stupid legislators, creating the biggest and dumbest deficit and indebtedness ever in the whole damned world and history, as well as featuring dumb, stupid and stupidly arrogant torturers, clunks, dumoxes and asses... and it's my birthday and I get to call everyone dumb, every damn, dumb person who ever did anything to create or enable the unending continuation of damn dumb stupidity.
My damned dumb birthday presink brought to me by that damned dumb New York Times, who along with its damned dumb stupid "reporters" like Judith Miller et al, beat the damn, dumb stupid drums of war because a lying, thieving ass like Ahmed Chalabi told them to.
The title of my damned, dumb stupid birthday presink?
Occupation Plan for Iraq Faulted in Army History
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Hell! Who couldn't have seen that coming?
Unless you were a damn, stupid dumb ass with your finger up...
And, absolutely, lead story. You'd a thunk the New York Times would be too damned ashamed of its dumb stupid complicity in bringing the invasion and occupation of Iraq about to show how incredibly stupid it had been.
To give credit to where credit is due, a study is cited, a nearly 700-page account: On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign.
http://usacac.army.mil/...
The U.S. Army, God bless them, was never that dumb. They warned George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, et al, they warned that damned dumb, stupid herd of elephants every step along the way into and throughout the invasion and occupation of Iraq but Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz et al were too damned dumb and stupid to listen to them.
What about this little doozy of stupidity, as related by the Times:
Soon after American forces toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, Gen. Tommy R. Franks surprised senior Army officers by revamping the Baghdad-based military command.
The decision reflected the assumption by General Franks, the top American commander for the Iraq invasion, that the major fighting was over. But according to a new Army history, the move put the military effort in the hands of a short-staffed headquarters led by a newly promoted three-star general, and was made over the objections of the Army’s vice chief of staff.
"The move was sudden and caught most of the senior commanders in Iraq unaware," states the history, which adds that the staff for the new headquarters was not initially "configured for the types of responsibilities it received."
Whoopdidoo!. Franks was prolly just doing what Dick Cheney told him to.
And, one good smart guy:
Lt. Col. Paul Yingling of the Army ignited a debate when he wrote a magazine article that criticized American generals for failing to prepare a coherent plan to stabilize postwar Iraq.
Yingling just wasn't privy to the grotesque stupidity of Donald Rumsfeld so how could he know that there wasn't supposed to be any damn plan to stabilize Iraq?
Just for a little rundown on what was done wrong:
A big problem, the study says, was the lack of detailed plans before the war for the postwar phase, a deficiency that reflected the general optimism in the White House and in the Pentagon, led by then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, about Iraq’s future, and an assumption that civilian agencies would assume much of the burden.
.... Inadequate training was also a factor. Lt. Col. Troy Perry, the operations officer of the First Battalion, 68th Armor Regiment, told Army historians that his unit trained extensively, but not for the sort of problems that it would encounter in setting up "stability operations" for securing Iraq once Mr. Hussein’s government fell.
Then, there was good old Paul Bremer:
L. Paul Bremer III, who replaced Jay Garner, the retired lieutenant general, as the chief civilian administrator in Iraq, issued decrees to disband the Iraqi Army and ban thousands of former Baath Party members from working for the government, orders that the study asserts caught American field commanders "off guard" and, in their view, "created a pool of disaffected and unemployed Sunni Arabs" that the insurgency could draw on.
Didn't he decide he was supposed to be called "Viceroy Bremer"?
Tommy Franks did his part, under direct orders from George W. and company:
Some of General Franks’s moves also appeared divorced from the growing problems in Iraq. Before the fall of Baghdad, Col. Kevin Benson, a planner at the land war command, developed a plan that called for using about 300,000 soldiers to secure postwar Iraq, about twice as many as were deployed.
But that was not what General Franks and the Bush administration had in mind. In an April 16 visit to Baghdad, General Franks instructed his officers to be prepared to reduce forces rapidly during an "an abbreviated period of stability operations," the study notes.
Stability!
What damned stability?
Another good guy to be noted:
When Gen. Jack Keane, the vice chief of staff of the Army, learned of the move, he was upset. General Keane had helped General McKiernan assemble his headquarters, which had long been focused on Iraq and had more high-ranking officers than V Corps, which had been deployed from Europe. General Keane assumed that General McKiernan’s headquarters would oversee what was fast becoming a troubled occupation.
"I think we did not put the best experienced headquarters that we had in charge of that operation," General Keane said in an interview with Army historians. "It took us months, six or seven or eight months, to get some semblance of a headquarters together so Sanchez could at least begin to function effectively."
General Keane told the historians that he raised his concerns at the time with Lt. Gen. John P. Abizaid, who had been picked to succeed General Franks as the head of Central Command.
"I said, ‘Jesus Christ, John, this is a recipe for disaster,’ " General Keane told Army historians. "I was upset about it to say the least, but the decision had been made and it was a done deal."
‘Jesus Christ, John, this is a recipe for disaster,’
My sentiments exactly, General Keane.
Well, Happy Damn Birthday to Me! And I'd like to kick Judith Miller in the you know what just to make my day. And that Scooter Libby? Good thing I don't know where he lives.