Rush to war, forget to plan the rest.

Via Atrios here are some documents of interest, including a shot of a State Department Powerpoint presentation about the planning of the war in Iraq.

Two things worth noting:

A month after September 11th, the State Department began planning for regime change in Iraq. Perhaps they thought Osama bin Laden, who was supposedly "wanted dead or alive" was hiding under Saddam's WMD stockpiles?

A month before the invasion, the State Department fretted that we didn't have a good occupation and reconstruction plan. Good thing those chicken littles were wrong, huh?

I realize this is all nothing new, in a lot of ways. I bet most of this blogs readers already believed both points. But, it's nice to know where to document them and it's important not to let up on the facts about what happened, not just in an attempt to win elections but because the history of this adventure in Iraq will be written, over and over again, by writers from all over the political spectrum. I want that history to deal with the truth which is that the Bush Administration, made up of people who throughout the 1990s were advocating regime change in Iraq (a war that would have created uncertainty in our own economy and destroyed the 90s boom, by the way) used the fear generated by 9-11 to get their way. Those same people then naively assumed, in spite of history, that we would be welcomed in Iraq and that the transition to a new, more acceptable government would be easy.

If Bush were to give an honest answer to Cindy Sheehan, it would go something like this: "We always believed that Saddam had to go and we went after him at our first opportunity. We really didn't think your son, or that just about any soldier, would get killed after the initial combat ended. We pushed this war on our military and then we planned wrong and your son died because of it."

That's what an honest person, being charitable to themselves, would say.