With all the attention the press aren’t devoting to the Downing Street Memo these days, it might be instructive to pause and reflect that our government not only lied about their intention of going to war with Iraq, and warped the available intelligence in service of that intention, but also added a heaping helping of utter, mind-bending stupidity to the mix.

(For more on The Memo/The Minutes, see:

• BTC News’ White House writer, Eric Brewer;
• After Downing Street;
• The Downing Street Memo, and
• Congressman John Conyers’ memo-related page, and his weblog)

We’ll leave it to the Constitutional scholars to determine whether stupidity is an impeachable offense — judging purely from the experience of the previous Oval Office occupant, it is, and there’s a fairly low threshold — and just focus on the fact of it.

In 1995, James T. Quinlivan wrote a report for the Army’s War College on the mathematics of peacekeeping. In it, he noted that “There are no simple answers to the question of how many troops are required for any sort of military operations. However, the purpose of stability operations–to create an environment orderly enough that most routine civil functions could be carried out–suggests that the number of troops required is determined by the size of populations.”

Quinlivan went on to note that in several well-known examples of extended peacekeeping operations in troubled lands, the ratio of peacekeepers to population was 20 per 1,000, a ratio similar to the one employed in Bosnia and Kosovo.

In February of 2003, then-Army chief of staff General Eric Shinseki was publicly ridiculed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, for telling the Senate Armed Forces committee that “several hundred thousand” troops would be required to establish and maintain order in Iraq following an invasion, should one happen to happen.

With Iraq’s population of 25 million, fulfilling that 20 per 1,000 ratio would require about 500,000 troops. According to a story published by Knight Ridder last year, “Central Command originally proposed a force of 380,000 to attack and occupy Iraq [a ratio of about 15 per 1,000]. Rumsfeld’s opening bid was about 40,000, “a division-plus,” said three senior military officials who participated in the discussions. Bush and his top advisers finally approved the 250,000 troops the commanders requested to launch the invasion. But the additional troops that the military wanted to secure Iraq after Saddam’s regime fell were either delayed or never sent … two Army divisions that Centcom wanted to help secure the country weren’t on hand when Baghdad fell and the country lapsed into anarchy, and a third, the 1st Cavalry from Fort Hood, Texas, fell so far behind schedule that on April 21 Franks and Rumsfeld dropped it from the plan.”

40,000, for those who don’t care to do the math, is about 340,000 short of what Central Command chief Tommy Franks wanted, about 210,000 short of what he was told he would get, and about 140,000 short of what he actually got. And Franks wasn’t pulling that 380,000 out of his peaked hat: he got it from the invasion and occupation plan developed by his predecessor, General Anthony Zinni.

Tim Schmoyer, proprietor of the Sisyphean Musings weblog, noted that Shinseki’s estimate appeared to be drawn in part from another War College report, this one (pdf) authored by Dr. Conrad C. Crane and Dr. W. Andrew Terrill, and published on January 29 of 2003, about a month before Shinseki offered his estimate and less than two months before the invasion began.

The title of the report is Reconstructing Iraq: Challenges and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario, and the introduction includes this memorable line: “With the winds of war swirling around Iraq, it is time to plan for its post-conflict reconstruction.”

Two months seems like very little time to allot for planning the future of a nation, but compared to the Pentagon’s efforts, the War College guys were light years ahead. From another 2004 Knight Ridder story:

In March 2003, days before the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, American war planners and intelligence officials met at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina to review the Bush administration’s plans to oust Saddam Hussein and implant democracy in Iraq.

Near the end of his presentation, an Army lieutenant colonel who was giving a briefing showed a slide describing the Pentagon’s plans for rebuilding Iraq after the war, known in the planners’ parlance as Phase 4-C. He was uncomfortable with his material – and for good reason.

The slide said: “To Be Provided.”

But it never was provided, and the result, as neatly summed up in the 3^rd Infantry Division’s after-action report, was chaos.

3ID (M) transitioned into Phase IV SASO [the "to be provided" phase] with no plan from higher headquarters. There was no guidance for restoring order in Baghdad, creating an interim government, hiring government and essential services employees, and ensuring the judicial system was operational. In retrospect, perhaps division planners should have been instructed to identify and address these issues earlier, given the likelihood that higher would not provide such information.

Emphasis ours. “Higher” is Central Command. The italicized sentence is the closest any military report will come to calling the authors’ superiors and their civilian leadership a bunch of morons.

The tragedy, or among the tragedies, is that an enormous amount of planning had been done, not only by General Zinni prior to Tommy Franks taking over at Central Command, but through an exhaustive State Department effort that was reported by the New York Times, in a rare instance of unblinkered Iraq coverage, coincident to the two October, 2004, Knight Ridder stories cited above.

A yearlong State Department study predicted many of the problems that have plagued the American-led occupation of Iraq, according to internal State Department documents and interviews with administration and Congressional officials.

…

Despite the scope of the project, the military office initially charged with rebuilding Iraq did not learn of it until a major government drill for the postwar mission was held in Washington in late February, less than a month before the conflict began, said Ron Adams, the office’s deputy director.

The man overseeing the planning, Tom Warrick, a State Department official, so impressed aides to Jay Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general heading the military’s reconstruction office, that they recruited Mr. Warrick to join their team.

George Ward, an aide to General Garner, said the reconstruction office wanted to use Mr. Warrick’s knowledge because “we had few experts on Iraq on the staff.”

But top Pentagon officials blocked Mr. Warrick’s appointment, and much of the project’s work was shelved, State Department officials said. Mr. Warrick declined to be interviewed for this article.

The existence of the State Department study was not exactly a secret. In fact, alert reporters might have observed some of the planning sessions had they been so inclined. But the Pentagon chose to disregard the study, and, as the Times story notes, to withhold it from its own planners.

There’s much more to the story than what’s related here, including the astonishing series of bone-headed decisions made by the second proconsul, Jerry Bremer — some of which are chronicled in the Knight Ridder stories, and many more of which we’ll return to at another time.

The upshot is that even had the administration not lied about their intentions and the intelligence they employed to support those intentions, their conduct of the war has been deliberately, criminally stupid. The only factor rendering the lies the more significant of the sins is that the stupidity would never have been seen had the war been forestalled. And for the latter failure, the failure to recognize the lies and hound the administration about them, the press has much to answer.

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