U.S. Report Ties Iraq Unrest to Poor Planning

By: Charles Aldinger

A "brutally honest" report prepared for the U.S. military Joint Chiefs of Staff blames post-war unrest in Iraq on hurried, inadequate planning before the invasion, defense officials said on Wednesday.

The classified report on lessons learned in the war says U.S. commanders were so busy preparing to defeat Iraq's military and directing the fight that they were given too little time to properly prepare for "Phase IV" peace, according to the officials.

It also flays planning for so-far fruitless efforts to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The threat from such chemical and biological weapons was cited by President Bush and the Pentagon as a major reason for the invasion.

"It is a brutally honest report", one of the officials, who asked not to be identified, told Reuters. "It shows that the military is self-critical - not just satisfied with 93% effectiveness in combat."

The assessment, first reported in the Washington Times on Wednesday, has not yet been approved by Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the nation's top military officer.

With U.S. troops being killed daily in guerrilla attacks in Iraq and suffering more casualties in the post-war period than in the drive to capture Baghdad, the Bush administration has come under sharp criticism from members of Congress over strategy in the unsettled country.

The Times published excerpts from the report - which gave high marks for joint war fighting capabilities among U.S. military services and the ability to bomb "time-sensitive" targets - that were confirmed to Reuters by defense officials familiar with it.

'Limited Focus'

The newspaper quoted the report as saying: "Phase IV objectives were identified, but the scope of the effort required to continually refine operational plans for defeat of [the] Iraqi military limited the focus on Phase IV", the reconstruction of Iraq.

"Late formation of Department of Defense [Phase IV] organizations limited time available for the development of detailed plans and pre-deployment coordination", it added.

The report, compiled from interviews with senior officers such as now-retired Army Gen. Tommy Franks, who headed the war effort, does not name any individuals for blame. But it charges that planning for the hunt for weapons of mass destruction was inadequate, especially because the military was not trained for such efforts.

"Weapons of mass destruction elimination and exploitation planning efforts did not occur early enough in the process to allow CentCom [the U.S. Central Command headed by Franks] to effectively execute the mission", the Times quoted the report.

The newspaper said the report, prepared last month, showed that Bush approved the overall war strategy for Iraq in August 2002, eight months before the first bomb was dropped and six months before he asked the U.N. Security Council for a war mandate that he did not receive.

Senior Bush administration officials, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, have conceded in recent weeks that the administration failed to anticipate the guerrilla war against U.S. troops in Iraq.

The United States currently has about 140,000 troops in Iraq and the deployment has left the American military stretched to fulfill missions around the world.

The U.S. Congressional Budget Office warned in a report on Tuesday that the demands of troop rotations around the world could leave the Defense Department without fresh Army units for Iraq next year unless tours of duty stretch beyond a year.