A New View Of How The White House Arrived At The Current Mess In Iraq

In a largely unnoticed report by US News and World Report, the magazine provides extensive detail of the failures in side the Administration since 2003 to plan for and monitor the post war recovery in Iraq and the battle with the insurgency.

Key quote:

An extensive review of the National Security Council's role in the Iraq war and its aftermath-based on interviews with a dozen former NSC staff members, senior officials from the State Department and the Pentagon, and outside security experts-reveals new details of the White House's failure to effectively manage the interagency effort on Iraq. The review by U.S. News is based on a detailed recounting of the NSC's interagency deliberations, including the daily and weekly secure video teleconferences conducted from the White House's Situation Room. Rice and Hadley declined to be interviewed for this account. Rumsfeld failed to respond to an interview request.

Several important new books, including Fiasco, by the Washington Post's Pentagon correspondent, Thomas Ricks, and State of Denial, by Bob Woodward have chronicled the many missteps in the Bush administration's prewar planning and post-invasion conduct. But historians will be discussing for years how a venture vested with such singular importance by its advocates could have been conceived and executed with such myopia and ineptitude. To date, the administration has failed to meet a single one of the reconstruction goals it set for itself back in 2003-goals for rebuilding infrastructure, defraying reconstruction costs by increasing oil production, and instituting a constitutional democracy with functioning courts and the rule of law.

The article is titled, "Who Lost Iraq?: Success has many fathers. The mess in Baghdad has a lot more."