No Accident

Why doesn't this surprise me?

Months before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forbade military strategists from developing plans for securing a post-war Iraq, the retiring commander of the Army Transportation Corps said Thursday.

In fact, said Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid, Rumsfeld said "he would fire the next person" who talked about the need for a post-war plan.

But in a strange way, it does surprise me. I was slightly comforted thinking that the administration was just incompetent and didn't do the most basic kind of planning because they didn't know what they hell they were doing in the first place. But now we know — the ginormous fuck-up that is Iraq wasn't an accident, it was all done on purpose.

And the question now, of course, is "what the hell?" The military has contingency plans to do pretty much anything. It would not surprise me in the least if I were to learn that there are half a dozen scenarios for invading England or nuking South Dakota in the event that some home-growns occupy a missile silo. Planning for events that have ridiculously low probabilities is exactly what the military does. And yet for some reason, Rumsfeld actively prevented his guys from planning for problems that almost everyone else could see coming from a mile away.

Problems resulting from regime change and a land war in Asia? Who would have guessed?