Just like all those hand-wringers said - winning the war would be easy, but what do you do afterwards? Turns out the Thug Cabal had either no answer, or at best, a really bad one.
- Nearly 40 days after the fall of Baghdad, US efforts to restore order and establish a functioning administration in Iraq (news - web sites) are faltering as US forces struggle to cope with lawlessness, a fragile infrastructure and fractious Iraqi political forces, analysts said. "It's close to a fiasco," said Loren Thompson, an analyst with the Lexington Institute, a Washington research organization.
"The contrasts between the efforts to rebuild Iraq and the stunning military victory could hardly be more pronounced...."
"We've planned more for this than other ones," said the defense official. "But when you don't know what you're really going to have to face, it's tough to plan, project the degree of looting or how people would react."
In the view of the critics, though, the Pentagon made a fundamental miscalculation in believing that Iraq could be stabilized without a major commitment of troops over a long period of time.
"The problem is that they overlooked one key consideration, which is how do you assure civil order so that you can get on to all those other activities," Thompson said.
"I think the Bush Pentagon is so reluctant to accept open-ended military commitments, so ill disposed to acknowledging that it has a military that isn't up to all the tasks they face, that it simply assumed that it could restore civil order with a small, small force," he said.
