Offering frequent news and analysis from the majestic Evergreen State and beyond, The Cascadia Advocate is the Northwest Progressive Institute's unconventional perspective on world, national, and local politics.

Monday, June 13, 2005

New Memo: U.S. Lacked Full Postwar Iraq Plan

The Washington Post:
A briefing paper prepared for British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers eight months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq concluded that the U.S. military was not preparing adequately for what the British memo predicted would be a "protracted and costly" postwar occupation of that country.

The eight-page memo, written in advance of a July 23, 2002, Downing Street meeting on Iraq, provides new insights into how senior British officials saw a Bush administration decision to go to war as inevitable, and realized more clearly than their American counterparts the potential for the post-invasion instability that continues to plague Iraq.

In its introduction, the memo "Iraq: Conditions for Military Action" notes that U.S. "military planning for action against Iraq is proceeding apace," but adds that "little thought" has been given to, among other things, "the aftermath and how to shape it."

The July 21 memo was produced by Blair's staff in preparation for a meeting with his national security team two days later that has become controversial on both sides of the Atlantic since last month's disclosure of official notes summarizing the session.
The Center of American Progress writes of the memo:
Although the Post's coverage of the memos focused on the British warnings that Bush lacked a post-war plan for Iraq, the Briefing Papers also shed further light on the key allegation in the Downing Street Minutes – that the intelligence on Iraq was being "fixed." The newly released documents show that the Bush administration was indeed selling the Iraq war based on evidence it knew was weak.
Of course, the White House has deployed itself into full defense mode, as the Center for American Progress notes:
The White House has gone into full spin mode on the revelations of the British papers. "There was significant post war planning," said spokesman David Almacy. "More importantly, the memo in question was written eight months before the war began; there was significant post war planning in the time that elapsed." President Bush, however, in an interview he gave to the New York Times last August, admitted he made "a miscalculation of what the conditions would be" in post-war Iraq.
It's becoming increasingly clear that what Bush has told us about Iraq has all been a series of lies. The president has made absolutely no effort to be truthful. This isn't a case of having bad intelligence about weapons of mass destruction. This is a case where a group of war hawks demanded that the United States go to war with Iraq - period. They use whatever reasons they can find to defend the war - and the "spreading democracy/freedom" excuse tends to work quite well.

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