Post-war unrest in Iraq blamed on hurried, inadequate planning

Washington

The classified report on lessons learned in the war says US 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 US President George W Bush and the Pentagon as a major reason for the invasion.

With US 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 report 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 US Central Command headed by General Franks) to effectively execute the mission,” says the report.

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 UN Security Council for a war mandate that he did not receive.