[andyfox]

So the administration didn't prepare properly for the aftermath of the invasion and it's the poster who points this out that lacks decency?

All the government working groups concluded that occupying Iraq would be far more difficult than defeating it. Mr. Wolfowitz either didn't notice this evidence or chose to disbelieve it. He said, "It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army. Hard to imagine."

None of the government working groups that had seriously looked into the question had simply "imagined" that occupying Iraq would be more difficult than defeating it. They had presented years' worth of experience suggesting that this would be the central reality of the undertaking.

The National Intelligence Council at the CIA ran a two-day exercise on postwar Iraq. Mr. Rumsfeld's office forbade Pentagon representatives from attending. Disbanding the Iraqi army was a catastrophic error which created an instant enemy class. Every pre-war study had warned against it and everyone viewed it as something that would be disastrous, except the decision-makers.

Virtually everyone who had thought about the issue had warned about the risk of looting. U.S. soldiers could have prevented it--and would have, if so instructed. So the looting spread, destroying the infrastructure that had survived the war (when the U.S. entered Baghdad, the city was largely undamaged by a carefully executed military campaign) and creating the expectation of future chaos. Rumsfeld opined "stuff happens."

The debacle that ensued was not because the government did no planning but rather because a vast amount of expert planning was willfully ignored by the people in charge. Almost everything bad that has happened in Iraq since the fall of Saddam was the subject of extensive pre-war discussion and analysis. The administration that chose to ignore these analyses has the blood of our boys on its hands. Your indignation at the original poster is misplaced.