"Thinking 'outside the box' but 'inside a compartment'"

The PowerPoint slide that brought us "shock and awe."

As Al Swearingen might have said, "Ad fucking hoc."

WASHINGTON, Feb. 14 — When Gen. Tommy R. Franks and his top officers gathered in August 2002 to review an invasion plan for Iraq, it reflected a decidedly upbeat vision of what the country would look like four years after Saddam Hussein was ousted from power.

A broadly representative Iraqi government would be in place. The Iraqi Army would be working to keep the peace. And the United States would have as few as 5,000 troops in the country.

Military slides obtained by the National Security Archive under the Freedom of Information Act outline the command’s PowerPoint projection of the stable, pro-American and democratic Iraq that was to be.

Those planners now claim that the PowerPoints were not, as you might think, intended to show how smoothly the Iraq invasion would go, but rather to show Congress that it "would be a multiyear proposition, not an easy in-and-out war." Albeit, one requiring only 5,000 troops.

It seems the biggest danger they thought troops would face would be outbreaks of allergies and diabetes as a result of all of the flowers and sweets thrown their way.

Regardless, not even these pathetic "planning" documents explain why, in the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad, the mission called for seizing and guarding only one building, the Oil Ministry. Not even the Finance Ministry, let alone the national museum.