"Army Buried Study Faulting Iraq Planning"

That is the headline at the New York Times. The NYT tells of a report by the RAND Corporation, produced in 2005 and suppressed by the Army. It critiques the lack of planning going into Iraq. Now why would the Pentagon not want us to know that?

One serious problem the study described was the Bush administration’s assumption that the reconstruction requirements would be minimal. There was also little incentive to challenge that assumption, the report said.


“Building public support for any pre-emptive or preventative war is inherently challenging, since by definition, action is being taken before the threat has fully manifested itself,” it said. “Any serious discussion of the costs and challenges of reconstruction might undermine efforts to build that support.”

There is also considerable discussion about the lack of coordination among various governmental departments (State and Defense, to name two), and lack of mediation among them.

h/t to Paul Kiel at TPM
--the BB