Part 3 (1/2)

Read now, with the benefit of hindsight, the report the group produced clearly is stunning in its prescience. ”The possibility of the United States winning the war and losing the peace is real and serious,” they wrote in a lapel-grabbing tone that was an unusual departure for government experts giving their bosses unwelcome advice. ”Thinking about the war now and the occupation later is not an acceptable solution.” That was what the Army War College group had seen happen with Afghanistan-and some members of that group were hearing from friends at Central Command that the same screwup was happening again.

They also delivered a clear warning about the fragile state of the Iraqi economy-something that Bush administration officials would insist after the invasion had been a rude surprise. Iraq had been strained by decades of misrule, wars, and sanctions, they observed. ”If the United States a.s.sumes control of Iraq, it will therefore a.s.sume control of a badly battered economy.” The writers repeatedly emphasized that Iraq was going to be tougher than the administration thought, or at least was admitting publicly. ”Successful occupation will not occur unless the special circ.u.mstances of this unusual country” are heeded, they warned.

They specifically advised against the two major steps that Amba.s.sador L. Paul Bremer III would pursue in 2003 after being named to run the U.S. occupation. The Iraqi army should be kept intact because it could serve as a unifying force in a country that could fall apart under U.S. control: ”In a highly diverse and fragmented society like Iraq, the military... is one of the few national inst.i.tutions that stresses national unity as an important principle. To tear apart the army in the war's aftermath could lead to the destruction of one of the only forces for unity within the society.” They likewise were explicit in warning against the sort of top-down ”de-Baathification” that Bremer would mandate. Rather, they recommended following the example of the U.S. authorities in post-World War II Germany who used a bottom-up approach by having anti-n.a.z.i Germans in every town review detailed questionnaires filled out by every adult German, and then determining, one by one, who would have their political and economic activities curtailed.

The report received an enthusiastic response from the Army, Crane said later. He believes it also influenced the thinking of some Army generals preparing for the invasion of Iraq. But all that was preaching to the converted. The group heard very little from the office of the secretary of defense or from Central Command. ”It was not clear to us until much later how unsuccessful General s.h.i.+nseki and his staff had been in shaping the final plans,” Crane said later. Then, in mid-2003, after the occupation had gotten off to a fumbled start and Franks had left Central Command and retired from the Army, Crane was told that John Abizaid, the new commander, was handing the report to everyone he met and telling them to read it. It was small consolation.

What is remarkable is that again and again during the crucial months before the invasion, such warnings from experts weren't heeded-or even welcomed. Almost no Middle Eastern experts inside the military were consulted on the war plan, in part because the plan was produced on a very close hold basis that involved few people, and even then only parts of it were shown to most of those involved.

s.h.i.+nseki and his aides were seeing many of the warnings. In the fall of 2002, when Rumsfeld met with the Joint Chiefs to discuss the planning for Iraq, s.h.i.+nseki brought up his concerns. Centcom's Renuart, who attended the session, recalled the Army chief arguing that ”the mission was huge, that you needed a lot of troops to secure all the borders and do all the tasks you needed to do.” Franks's response at the time, Renuart added, was that it wasn't known how many Iraqi troops would capitulate and work for the Americans, so it wasn't clear that tens of thousands of additional U.S. soldiers would be required. This essentially was best-case planning, which is as much an error as is planning only for the worst outcome.

Then, as winter approached, s.h.i.+nseki and the other members of the Joint Chiefs met with the president. Gen. Franks, who joined them, recalled the meeting in an interview as ”a very, very positive session.” Franks recalled s.h.i.+nseki as not so much expressing concern about the overall war plan, but rather pointing out that ”the lines of communication and supportability were long__________ I took it, and I think everyone in the room took it, [to mean that] this isn't going to be a cakewalk.”

Franks also heard concern from Powell about the war plan. ”I've got problems with force size and support of that force, given such long lines of communication,” the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs said in a telephone call, according to Franks's autobiography. It was a difficult position for Powell to put Franks in, because Franks had to report to Rumsfeld, not to Powell, and the two secretaries were like old bulls facing each other down. So Franks essentially thanked Powell for his interest and reported the conversation to Rumsfeld.

Ground commanders vs. Franks Franks also was being squeezed from below. In 1991, Gen. Schwarzkopf had made himself both the overall commander and the commander of land forces for the attack into Kuwait. Some in the Army thought that he had been overwhelmed by both tasks-one reason that the Army wasn't able to adjust its operations when the Marines moved into Kuwait faster than expected, and couldn't close the door on the Iraqi army before it escaped northward. Franks took a different course, creating the Coalition Forces Land Component Command. That was the awkward name for the ground forces-the Army, the Marine Corps, and the British army, along with a handful of Poles and other troops-who would ultimately invade Iraq. The CFLCC (which the military took to p.r.o.nouncing ”sif-lik”) was another element of the war plan that amounted to a repudiation of Schwarzkopf's handling of the 1991 war: This time they were going to go to Baghdad and do it right.

Not all was well at CFLCC. Its senior officers had worked for months to get Franks to stand up to Rumsfeld and the Pentagon. Maj. Gen. James Thurman was CFLCC's director for operations, arguably the second most important post in the organization. Neither he nor his commander, Army Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, was happy with the war plans Franks was bringing back from his meetings with Rumsfeld. The initial plan put on the table had in their view been ridiculous. It called for a tiny force, consisting of one enhanced brigade from the 3rd Infantry Division and a Marine Expeditionary Unit-all in all, fewer than ten thousand combat troops. It was little more than an update of the notions that had been kicked around during the nineties by Iraqi exiles, and that Zinni had nixed as a potential Bay of Goats. Over the course of 2002 the planned size of the force got larger, but hadn't quite reached what McKiernan saw as the minimum.

Rumsfeld had come out of the Afghan war believing that speed could be subst.i.tuted for ma.s.s in military operations. Franks had bought into this, summarizing it in the oft-repeated maxim ”Speed kills.” McKiernan and Thurman weren't at all sure of that, and disliked the prospect of being Rumsfeld's guinea pigs.

On December 8, 2002, in what Thurman would remember as ”a key point in the planning,” McKiernan and Thurman flew to Franks's headquarters in Qatar and put their doubts in front of him. McKiernan ”laid out to the CinC and showed him that we needed more combat power for the basic stance,” Thurman later told an official Army historian. The first troop deployment order had just been issued. The two generals pushed their commander for more, and got some, but never got quite enough, in their view. Even four months later, as the invasion began, Thurman later said, ”We wanted more combat power on the ground.”

McKiernan had another, smaller but nagging, issue: He couldn't get Franks to issue clear orders that stated explicitly what he wanted done, how he wanted to do it, and why. Rather, Franks pa.s.sed along PowerPoint briefing slides that he had shown to Rumsfeld. ”It's quite frustrating the way this works, but the way we do things nowadays is combatant commanders brief their products in PowerPoint up in Was.h.i.+ngton to OSD and Secretary of Defense________ In lieu of an order, or a frag [fragmentary] order, or plan, you get a set of PowerPoint slides.... [T]hat is frustrating, because n.o.body wants to plan against PowerPoint slides.”

That reliance on slides rather than formal written orders seemed to some military professionals to capture the essence of Rumsfeld's amateurish approach to war planning. ”Here maybe the clearest manifestation of OSD's contempt for the acc.u.mulated wisdom of the military profession and of the a.s.sumption among forward thinkers that technology-above all information technology-has rendered obsolete the conventions traditionally governing the preparation and conduct of war,” commented retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, a former commander of an armored cavalry regiment. ”To imagine that PowerPoint slides can subst.i.tute for such means is really the height of recklessness.” It was like telling an automobile mechanic to use a manufacturer's glossy sales brochure to figure out how to repair an engine.

The ”black hole” of Feith's policy office At the Pentagon, the policy shop run by Douglas Feith was the organization that was in many ways the civilian parallel of Franks's Central Command in formulating the American stance on going to war in Iraq. Centcom was responsible for handling the war, while Feith's office was supposed to oversee the policies guiding the war and its aftermath.

Both Franks's headquarters and Feith's policy office had notably low morale, but a major difference was that Feith's office was managed worse. While Franks was at least effective in getting what he wanted from underlings, the owlish Feith was a management disaster who served as a bottleneck on decision making. ”He basically was a glorified gofer for Rumsfeld,” said Gary Schmitt, who was hardly an ideological foe-he was the executive director of the Project for a New American Century, a small neoconservative advocacy group that pushed hard for the invasion of Iraq. ”He can't manage anything, and he doesn't trust anyone else's judgment.”

People working for Feith complained that he would spend hours tweaking their memos, carefully mulling minor points of grammar. A Joint Staff officer recalled angrily that at one point troops sat on a runway for hours, waiting to leave the United States on a mission, while he quibbled about commas in the deployment order. ”Policy was a black hole,” recalled one four-star general about Feith's operation. ”It dropped the ball again and again.”

In the summer of 2001, Feith had been confronted on his management flaws by top aides at a large meeting. Lisa Bronson, a veteran specialist on weapons proliferation, stood and said, ”This is the worst-run policy office I've ever seen.” Another Feith aide agreed, saying later that the decision-making process in Feith's office was the most tangled he'd seen in twenty years of government work.

Feith stood his ground, explaining to subordinates that ”I don't treat you any differently than Rumsfeld treats me.” He said his fussiness over memos reflected the importance he and Rumsfeld placed on precision in thinking and writing.

Feith amounted to a less impressive version of Wolfowitz, filling the post the older man had held during the 1991 Gulf War. A 1975 graduate of Harvard, he was similar to Wolfowitz in his academic approach. To the military way of thinking, which tends to like orderly discussions that march toward clear decisions, he appeared far too woolly. For Feith, as for Wolfowitz, the Holocaust-and the mistakes the West made appeasing Hitler in the 1930s, rather than stopping him- became a keystone in thinking about policy. Like Wolfowitz, Feith came from a family devastated by the Holocaust. His father lost both parents, three brothers, and four sisters to the n.a.z.is. ”My family got wiped out by Hitler, and ... all this stuff about working things out-well, talking to Hitler to resolve the problem didn't make any sense to me,” Feith later told Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker New Yorker in discussing how World War II had shaped his views. ”The kind of people who put b.u.mper stickers on their car that declare that 'War is not the answer,' are they making a serious comment? What's the answer to Pearl Harbor? What's the answer to the Holocaust?” in discussing how World War II had shaped his views. ”The kind of people who put b.u.mper stickers on their car that declare that 'War is not the answer,' are they making a serious comment? What's the answer to Pearl Harbor? What's the answer to the Holocaust?”

”Doug's very smart, almost too smart,” said a Bush administration official who has known Feith for decades and generally is sympathetic to his views. ”He's a very impressive conceptual thinker, a rapid-fire genius. But. But. Not everyone else is so smart. And once in a while, something very hard comes along, something that requires a lot of deliberate thought.” And in such cases, Feith's rapid-fire approach becomes dangerous.

”Doug is a first-generation American, and the son of a Holocaust survivor,” a background that has shaped Feith's views and approach. ”And the fact that they are minoritarian views, shared by only a few people, makes him believe it all the more. He takes almost as axiomatic some of his views-for example, that weakness invites aggression. Or invoke diplomacy only when you have your adversary cornered.”

The personal histories of key players in the Bush administration may have made for an unusual and volatile mix. It was an unusual and powerful combination: The men at the White House were risk takers, while their subordinates and ideological allies at the Pentagon were men counseling that it was unwise to wait to act against evil, no matter what the conventional wisdom was. Add them up, said this unhappy Bush administration official, and you get an unusual mix: ”These people are brinksmen.”

Rumsfeld, who rarely seems to go out of his way to praise his subordinates, did so with Feith, later defending him as ”without question one of the most brilliant individuals in government... just a rare talent. And from my standpoint, working with him is always interesting. He's been one of the really intellectual leaders in the administration in defense policy aspects of our work here.”

Not everyone was so impressed. Senior military officers especially seemed to be rubbed the wrong way by him. Franks, the Central Command chief, called Feith ”the dumbest f.u.c.king guy on the planet.” Jay Garner, the retired Army lieutenant general who reported to Feith for five months as the Bush administration's first head of the postwar mission in Iraq, came to a similar conclusion. ”I think he's incredibly dangerous,” Garner said later. ”He's a very smart guy whose electrons aren't connected, so he arc lights all the time. He can't organize anything.” Remarkably, Feith was the person in charge of day-to-day postwar Iraq policy in Was.h.i.+ngton-the official that Franks was told would handle the postwar end of things. A man who couldn't run his own office very well, by many accounts, was going to oversee the rebuilding of an occupied nation on the other side of the planet.

Incoherent planning for the aftermath The U.S. invasion of Iraq, Army Lt. Col. James Scudieri wrote later, ”may be the most planned operation since D-Day on 6 June 1944 and Desert Storm in 1991.” The irony is that in eighteen months of planning, the key question was left substantially unaddressed: What to do after getting to Baghdad. Franks, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, and other top officials spent well over a year preparing to attack Iraq, but treated almost casually what would come after that. ”I think people are overly pessimistic about the aftermath,” Wolfowitz flatly stated in an interview in December 2002.

At first, in the summer of 2002, the ball was tossed to the exhausted planning staff at Central Command, which had just finished invading Afghanistan and then written two versions of a plan to invade Iraq. ”End of July, we've just finished the second plan, and we get an order from Joint Staff saying, 'You're in charge of the postwar plan,'” recalled Col. John Agoglia. They were flabbergasted. At that point they thought the invasion would be launched in just six months. ”We said, 'Oh, s.h.i.+t,' did a mission a.n.a.lysis, and focused on humanitarian issues,” such as minimizing the displacement of people, stockpiling food to stave off famine, and protecting the infrastructure of the oil fields, he said.

The decision to place the Defense Department-whether at the Pentagon or at the Central Command headquarters-in charge of postwar Iraq may have doomed the American effort from the start. As a subsequent Rand Corporation study put it, ”Overall, this approach worked poorly, because the Defense Department lacked the experience, expertise, funding authority, local knowledge, and established contacts with other potential organizations needed to establish, staff, support and oversee a large multiagency civilian mission.”

It wasn't that there was no planning. To the contrary, there was a lot, with at least three groups inside the military and one at the State Department working on postwar issues and producing thousands of pages of doc.u.ments. But much of the planning was shoddy, there was no one really in charge of it, and there was little coordination between the various groups. Gen. Franks appeared to believe that planning for the end of the war was someone else's job. The message he sent to Rumsfeld's subordinates, he wrote in his autobiography, was: ”You pay attention to the day after and I'll pay to attention to the day of.” The result would be that while there was much discussion, and endless PowerPoint briefings, there wouldn't be a real plan for postwar Iraq that could be implemented by commanders and soldiers on the ground.

To handle the stepped-up load of planning for postwar Iraq, Franks created a new office, Joint Task Force IV, under Brig. Gen. Steve Hawkins, an Army engineer. For months Hawkins had scores of staff planners working on Phase IV- that is, the phase that followed Phase Ill's major combat operations-but failed to produce much. ”We were told that JTF-IV would be a standing task force,” recalled Agoglia. ”We thought that it would be the core of planning for a post-conflict headquarters. Instead, it was Steve Hawkins and fifty-five yahoos with shareware who were clueless.”

Despite months of work, ”they didn't produce a plan,” Army Lt. Gen. Joseph Kellogg said. ”They may have war-gamed it, but planned it? Nope.” That may seem a harsh verdict, but it is borne out by a look at the cla.s.sified PowerPoint briefings JTF-IV produced. It is fas.h.i.+onable to criticize the U.S. military's heavy reliance on PowerPoint, but the thirty-two slides in the JTF-IV summary of planning for postwar Iraq are extreme in their incoherence, with unexplained distinctions between ”military success” in Phase III and ”strategic success” under ”civilian lead” in Phase IV. (Interestingly, another briefing, on reconstruction issues, noted in an aside that the Army experience in Bosnia and Kosovo indicated that the postwar situation in Iraq would require around 470,000 troops, more than triple the number that actually would be deployed.) Maj. Eisenstadt, an intelligence officer in Central Command's headquarters in 2001-2, said that most of Hawkins's work was discarded for reasons that were never clear to him. Another military expert who reviewed the product of the task force said its work was so mediocre that insiders just began ignoring it. ”It was a very pedestrian product, and it looked like a war college exercise,” he said. ”They were not reaching out to real-world people and information.”

A V Corps planner agreed with that account. ”Centcom set up a cell to do Phase IV planning before the war, but it never produced anything,” he said. ”It just got tied up in scenarios-like what happens if there are large refugee flows?” It never actually produced a usable blueprint for running postwar Iraq.

But no one appears to have informed other military planners about the flim-siness of Centcom's Phase IV work. A cla.s.sified prewar briefing by the next lower headquarters, the Coalition Forces Land Component Command (CFLCC), on its own Phase IV plans breezily noted that it was ”Working with CJTF-4 to ensure seamless transition.”

Calling Gen. Garner By late December, it was clear both at Central Command and at the Pentagon that the JTF-IV effort to plan for postwar Iraq was faltering. ”If there was something that as a planner we didn't do so well, it was that we didn't prepare Franks so well for the reconstruction and stabilization piece,” Agoglia said. ”We didn't do as good a job as we should of walking him through the postconflict piece.” And ”in January '03 we realized that JTF-IV wouldn't work. It was broken.”

In mid-January, just eight weeks before the invasion, the lead in planning for the postwar situation was taken away from Central Command and moved to the Pentagon. Retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, who had led the relief effort in northern Iraq in 1991, was eating in a restaurant in New York when he received a call from Feith's office. Rumsfeld wanted him once more to lead postwar operations in Iraq-a task that was expected to be mainly humanitarian work, likely focused on aiding refugees and perhaps the civilian victims of Iraqi chemical or biological weapons. Garner initially refused, but agreed to go see Rumsfeld. ”He can be pretty persuasive, and I said I'd do it if my company agreed and if my wife agreed,” he recalled.

Garner told Rumsfeld that he would need some retired generals, senior officers who understood the military and the management of a large organization. ”Rumsfeld said, 'OK, anybody but Zinni,” he recalled. Garner interpreted this not as a personal grudge on the part of the defense secretary, but rather an a.s.sessment that the White House saw Zinni as an adversary. ”It came across to me that we wouldn't be able to sell Zinni, because he already was against the war.” Indeed, Garner soon would run into trouble on several lower profile staff members he proposed, especially from the State Department's own planning project, called the Future of Iraq.

On January 20, the White House issued a cla.s.sified National Security Presidential Directive that established the Pentagon postwar planning office, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian a.s.sistance. But the creation of this new office hardly cleared the way for more effective postwar planning. ”ORHA stands up, and it's a second ad hoc organization,” said Agoglia. ”We thought they worked for Franks, they said they worked for Sec Def, and that began some p.i.s.sing contests.... They didn't listen to anyone, because they were a bunch of friggin' know-it-alls.”

Conrad Crane, the Army historian who later studied the record of the planning for the war, concluded that the establishment of ORHA just two months before the beginning of fighting simply came too late to be helpful. ”It created much more confusion than coherence,” he said, because it cut off Centcom's work. ”Everybody said, 'I'm working with ORHA now.'”

A bad feeling inside the Army Watching the moves toward war, the Army community fretted, no one more so than Norman Schwarzkopf. Retired generals play a shadowy but important role in the U.S. military establishment, and especially in the Army. They are part Greek chorus and part shadow board of directors, watching and commenting on their successors' work. They tend to be well informed about current operations, because some are hired as consultants and mentors in war games and war college seminars, and others maintain friends.h.i.+ps with former subordinates who have risen to the top.

Within the retired community, four-star generals play a particularly weighty role. Within that tiny group, none are more influential than four stars who have commanded combat operations. After Colin Powell-who was necessarily muted in his military commentary because of his struggles with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz-the retired four-star general with the most public influence during this period likely was Schwarzkopf. As if that weren't enough, he also was allied with the Bush family. He had hunted with the first president Bush and had campaigned for the second, speaking on military issues at the 2000 GOP convention in Philadelphia and later stumping in Florida with Cheney, his secretary of defense during the 1991 war.

In the months before the invasion of Iraq, Schwarzkopf was worried. In January 2003 he made it clear in a lengthy interview that he hadn't seen enough evidence to persuade him that his old comrades from twelve years earlier-Cheney, Powell, and Wolfowitz-were correct in moving toward a new war. He thought UN inspections were still the proper course to follow. He also worried about the c.o.c.kiness of the U.S. war plan, and even more about the potential human and financial costs of occupying Iraq. ”The thought of Saddam Hussein with a sophisticated nuclear capability is a frightening thought, okay?” he said, sitting in his office in Tampa, overlooking a bland skyline of hotels, bank headquarters, and gla.s.s-sheathed office buildings. ”Now, having said that, I don't know what intelligence the U.S. government has. And before I can just stand up and say, 'Beyond a shadow of a doubt, we need to invade Iraq,' I guess I would like to have better information.”

He hadn't seen that evidence yet, and so-in sharp contrast to the Bush administration-he supported letting the UN weapons inspectors drive the timetable: ”I think it is very important for us to wait and see what the inspectors come up with, and hopefully they come up with something conclusive.” He had a far less Manichaean view of the Middle East than Bush and Cheney had developed after the September 11 attacks. ”It's obviously not a black-and-white situation over there. I would just think that whatever path we take, we have to take it with a bit of prudence.” Had he seen sufficient prudence in the actions of his old friends in the Bush administration? He didn't want to touch that question. ”I don't think I can give you an honest answer on that,” he said. He also was unhappy with what he was hearing out of the Army about Rumsfeld. ”Candidly, I have gotten somewhat nervous at some of the p.r.o.nouncements Rumsfeld has made.”

Schwarzkopf was a true son of the Army, where he served from 1956 to 1991, and some of his comments reflected the deepening estrangement between that service and the defense secretary. ”The Rumsfeld thing ... that's what comes up,” when he calls old Army friends in the Pentagon, he said. ”When he makes his comments, it appears that he disregards the Army. He gives the perception when he's on TV that he is the guy driving the train and everybody else better fall in line behind him-or else.”

That dismissive posture bothered Schwarzkopf because he thought, like many in the Army, that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, and their subordinates lacked the experience or knowledge to make sound military judgments by themselves and were ignoring the better informed advice of senior generals. He said he preferred the way Cheney had operated during the Gulf War. ”He didn't put himself in the position of being the decision maker as far as tactics were concerned, as far as troop deployments, as far as missions were concerned.”

Rumsfeld, by contrast, worried him. ”It's scary, okay?” he said. ”Let's face it: There are guys at the Pentagon who have been involved in operational planning for their entire lives, okay?... And for this wisdom, acquired during many operations, wars, schools, for that just to be ignored, and in its place have somebody who doesn't have any of that training, is of concern.”

So, said Schwarzkopf, he doubted that an invasion of Iraq would be as fast and simple as some seemed to think. ”I have picked up vibes that... you're going to have this ma.s.sive strike with ma.s.sed weaponry, and basically that's going to be it, and we just clean up the battlefield after that.” Like many in the Army, he expressed even more concern about the task the U.S. military might face after a victory. ”What is postwar Iraq going to look like, with the Kurds and the Sunnis and the s.h.i.+tes? That's a huge question, to my mind. It really should be part of the overall campaign plan.”

The administration may have been discussing the issue behind closed doors, but he hadn't seen it explained to the world, especially its a.s.sessment of the time, people, and money needed. ”I would hope that we have in place the adequate resources to become an army of occupation,” he warned, ”because you're going to walk into chaos.”

Col. Spain's prewar gutting The first time that Col. Teddy Spain got a bad feeling about the Iraq war was two months before it actually started. In late January the military police commander partic.i.p.ated in Victory Scrimmage, a big preparatory exercise for the war held at Grafenwoehr, Germany, at the U.S. training base there, in the cold hills near the Czech border. At one point during the exercise, after some notional troops had been ”killed,” Spain, who would lead an MP brigade into Iraq, turned to some Army chaplains sitting nearby and ordered them to plan a memorial service. They thought he was joking, he recalled. ”No, this is serious business,” he emphatically responded.

Even as the exercise was held, the size of the U.S.-led invasion force was being whittled down. ”First AD and First Cav were there,” he said, referring to two of the Army's big armored divisions, the 1st Armored Division and the 1st Cavalry Division. ”Then they got knocked out of the plan.” He chuckled, years later, at the memory. ”They call themselves 'America's First Team,'” referring to the 1st Cavalry's motto, ”and we said, 'Yeah, the first team to go home.'”

But it was less amusing when the planners then turned to Spain and informed him that his brigade was being kept in the plan, but with a major reduction in its troop numbers. ”They just gutted my a.s.sets.” Rather than lead twenty companies into Iraq, he was told, he would begin the war with less than three. It was a decision that Spain, a tall, drawling southerner with a pa.s.sing resemblance to television journalist Tom Brokaw, would think back on repeatedly in the coming months and years, as he dwelled on how he could have done better securing Baghdad in the spring and summer of 2003. He could have done it, he believed, if only he'd had those missing companies of MPs.

Others felt the same way. Van Riper, the retired Marine general who was an old friend of Zinni's, had seen the war plan in October 2002, and noted that it included a division west of the 3rd Infantry Division to control much of Anbar Province. But in January 2003, he was told, that division was dropped from the plan. Instead, Anbar would be treated as an ”economy of force” area, with a relatively small number of Special Forces sent in, with the mission of preventing Scud missile launches westward against Israel. This last-minute change was crucial, because it left open the door northwest of Baghdad for Baathists and intelligence officials to flee to the sanctuary of Syria, taking money, weapons, and records with them with which to establish a safe headquarters for the insurgency that would emerge that summer. (Some of this movement occurred before the war began, when, according to retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, the head of the U.S. National Imagery and Mapping Agency, satellite imagery showed a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria.) The Army division deleted from the plan ”would have blocked much of the movement to the Syrian border,” Van Riper said.