To much to summarize. Just go read TPM\ here.
Here's the takeaway from the NYT:
The Army is accustomed to protecting classified information. But when it comes to the planning for the Iraq war, even an unclassified assessment can acquire the status of a state secret.
That is what happened to a detailed study of the planning for postwar Iraq prepared for the Army by the RAND Corporation, a federally financed center that conducts research for the military.After 18 months of research, RAND submitted a report in the summer of 2005 called “Rebuilding Iraq.” RAND researchers provided an unclassified version of the report along with a secret one, hoping that its publication would contribute to the public debate on how to prepare for future conflicts.
But the study’s wide-ranging critique of the White House, the Defense Department and other government agencies was a concern for Army generals, and the Army has sought to keep the report under lock and key.
A review of the lengthy report — a draft of which was obtained by The New York Times — shows that it identified problems with nearly every organization that had a role in planning the war. That assessment parallels the verdicts of numerous former officials and independent analysts.
The study chided President Bush — and by implication Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who served as national security adviser when the war was planned — as having failed to resolve differences among rival agencies. “Throughout the planning process, tensions between the Defense Department and the State Department were never mediated by the president or his staff,” it said.
The Defense Department led by Donald H. Rumsfeld was given the lead in overseeing the postwar period in Iraq despite its “lack of capacity for civilian reconstruction planning and execution.”
The State Department led by Colin L. Powell produced a voluminous study on the future of Iraq that identified important issues but was of “uneven quality” and “did not constitute an actionable plan.”
Gen. Tommy R. Franks, whose Central Command oversaw the military operation in Iraq, had a “fundamental misunderstanding” of what the military needed to do to secure postwar Iraq, the study said.
RAND, for those who don't know, is about as far away from a left-wing think tank as you can get while still remaining credible, and the report detailed here was done at the request of the US Army itself. I don't care how hard you try, charges of "left wing bias" just aren't going to stick.
TPM alum Spencer Ackerman gets to the heart of the matter with this:
One of the reasons the U.S. possesses the mightiest Army in the history of mankind is because it’s an adaptive, learning institution. To deny the Army the benefits of learning from the Iraq debacle in order to insulate George W. Bush from criticism is a betrayal of that institutional mission.
Over and over and over again, the loyalists inside this administration put their party before their country. Rather than protect and defend all Americans, they chose instead to protect and defend their political masters.
Hey America, do you feel safer yet?
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