...Michael Gordon and Gen. Bernard Trainor have attempted to do the same thing with "Cobra II," their history of the drive to capture Baghdad March-April of 2003. They have succeeded in producing an unsparing account of the campaign that includes its strengths and weaknesses, while acknowledging the courage and determination of our service personnel in battle...
Along the way Mr. Gordon and Gen. Trainor present a number of revelations. The intelligence community thought it had spotted Saddam Hussein going into a bunker outside of Baghdad before the campaign was supposed to kick off. Due to the need to act quickly, President Bush chose to make the decision to strike prematurely. Due to the fleeting nature of the perceived target, Gen. Tommy Franks, the overall military commander, was not involved in the decision to actually start the war. Unfortunately, the intelligence proved to be false. Saddam was never in the reported location on the outskirts of Baghdad, nor was there a bunker at the location. This was the first of an ongoing series of intelligence bungles.
The Pentagon has taken a lot of heat for the fact that it did not buy into the State Department's plan for post-war Iraq. It is an urban legend in Washington that if that plan had been implemented, things would have been "just peachy" following the Ba'athist collapse. Mr. Gordon and Gen. Trainor clearly agree with the assessment of arms inspector David Kay that the State Department plan was a compilation of essays on things that would be "unimplementable."...
War Lessons Learned
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