Mistakes, we've made a few

Figuratively speaking.

In response to a question at one point, Ms. Rice acknowledged that the Bush administration had made "tactical errors, a thousand of them, I am sure" in Iraq and perhaps elsewhere. She was speaking figuratively, her spokesman said later.

Ms. Rice asserted that whatever tactical failures there may have been, the strategic decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power had been right. "Saddam Hussein was not going anywhere without a military intervention," she said.

Figuratively?

Mr. Gordon and General Trainor recount in granular detail the behind-the-scenes maneuvering as the invasion plan came together, making it clear not only that by the end of 2001 the administration's focus had shifted from Afghanistan to Baghdad, but also that planning for an invasion was already at an advanced stage.

The authors contrast the feverish preparations for war with Iraq taking place in 2002 at the Pentagon and the United States Central Command under Gen. Tommy R. Franks with the misleading statements emanating from senior officials. "I have no war plans on my desk," President Bush told a May 23, 2002, news conference. Given that planning for the war had been under way for six months, "the president's statement was true in only the most literal and trivial sense," the authors write. General Franks, the authors note, went even further. When a radio reporter asked him that same month how many troops he would need to invade Iraq, he replied that Secretary Rumsfeld "has not yet asked me to put together a plan to do that." If even half of what Mr. Gordon and General Trainor report about the state of planning by late May 2002 is true, this was a lie.

Obsessed with minimizing the size of the invading force, Secretary Rumsfeld dismissed advice from experts inside and outside government who argued for a larger contingent than the 140,000 or so troops sent into Iraq. His efforts "played havoc" with the military's preparations, according to the authors, and sowed the seeds for the anarchy that followed the fall of the Hussein regime. The plan that Central Command wrote under Secretary Rumsfeld's close supervision was also based on hopelessly optimistic Central Intelligence Agency predictions that Iraqi units would capitulate -- i.e. not merely surrender but also change sides. "Rarely has a military plan depended on such a bold assumption," the authors write.

But although planning for the Iraq invasion began within weeks of Al Qaeda's Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, a combination of hubris, arrogance, naivete and sheer incompetence meant that little attention was paid to what the military terms "Phase IV," or post-conflict operations. Secretary Rumsfeld insisted on the Defense Department being in charge of Phase IV. But General Franks, whose responsibility it was to ensure that the United States military was prepared for the occupation, "seemed content to leave the lion's share of the Phase IV planning to others in the government," the authors write. As late as Feb. 20, 2003, barely a month before the invasion, "there was no plan" for Phase IV, recalled a colonel on the staff of Jay Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general, whom Secretary Rumsfeld charged with overseeing the early phase of the occupation.

"Cobra II" provides fascinating insights into what went wrong in the first critical weeks after the fall of Baghdad. What stands out in particular is the frustration of the military leaders on the ground with decisions taken by their political bosses. General Garner's replacement, Ambassador Paul Bremer, not only made the error of abolishing the Iraqi Army, but compounded it by preventing the United States military from holding local elections for fear that "the wrong guy" might win.

The consensus of the military leaders quoted in "Cobra II" is that these decisions, combined with the lack of enough troops to restore order, caused the United States to miss a window of opportunity and lose the initiative in the weeks following the invasion. In a reference to the insurgency that erupted in the power vacuum created by these mistakes, Mr. Gordon and General Trainor conclude that "none of this was inevitable." If true, that is surely the greatest tragedy of this painful war, and in "Cobra II" the authors present their case in compelling fashion.

They did it their way.

Seriously though, at what point does Doctor Rice decide that the tactical "mistakes" made by the messianic fools in the administration of which she is a complicit part overwhelm the "rightness" of their strategic decision. Figuratively speaking, of course.