From the Christmas day

Start your day with TPM.
Sign up for the Morning Memo newsletter

From the Christmas day Post

The U.S. military invaded Iraq without a formal plan for occupying and stabilizing the country and this high-level failure continues to undercut what has been a “mediocre” Army effort there, an Army historian and strategist has concluded.

“There was no Phase IV plan” for occupying Iraq after the combat phase, writes Maj. Isaiah Wilson III, who served as an official historian of the campaign and later as a war planner in Iraq. While a variety of government offices had considered the possible situations that would follow a U.S. victory, Wilson writes, no one produced an actual document laying out a strategy to consolidate the victory after major combat operations ended.

As a result of the failure to produce a plan, Wilson asserts, the U.S. military lost the dominant position in Iraq in the summer of 2003 and has been scrambling to recover ever since. “In the two to three months of ambiguous transition, U.S. forces slowly lost the momentum and the initiative . . . gained over an off-balanced enemy,” he writes. “The United States, its Army and its coalition of the willing have been playing catch-up ever since.”

Some things are just unforgivable. <$NoAd$>And this crew does a lot of them.

Latest Editors' Blog
  • |
    May 8, 2024 1:55 p.m.

    One person I didn’t mention yesterday in the Trump VP veepstakes was Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders. There are various…

  • |
    May 7, 2024 3:06 p.m.

    For whatever reason people are now back to discussing who Donald Trump will pick as his running mate. I guess…

  • |
    May 7, 2024 10:07 a.m.

    Very weird story here to keep an eye on. Last week either 15 or 17 police cars at a Portland…

  • |
    May 6, 2024 2:06 p.m.

    A TPM Reader passed on to us this post from David Pozen writing at Balkinization on the recent events at…

Masthead Masthead
Founder & Editor-in-Chief:
Executive Editor:
Managing Editor:
Associate Editor:
Editor at Large:
General Counsel:
Publisher:
Head of Product:
Director of Technology:
Associate Publisher:
Front End Developer:
Senior Designer: