Plan? What Plan?

Some news-worthy items from yesterday and today bear noting. First, lets start with Condolezza Rice and her back-tracking on the use of aluminum tubes. The tubes, Rice said, "are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs." Apparently, the information is based on one CIA analyst's idea and has been widely discounted by nuclear power experts. Now, she says, I "knew there was some debate out there but ... I didn't know the nature of the debate." The fact is, no one in the intelligence community had any idea how the tubes would be used.

Rumsfeld also chimes in this week. "Why the intelligence proved wrong [on weapons of mass destruction], I'm not in a position to say," Rumsfeld said in remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. "I simply don't know." (CNN.COM) When asked about the Saddam/Al-Qaeda link, he offers, "To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two."

Paul Bremer in the same article appears to chide the Bush Administration for the apparent lack of planning and awareness on a variety of issues. Not enough troops led to lawlessness, led to the sacking of many museums, offices, retail stores, etc.

My position on the war, to be clear, is that there was no clear, incontrovertible evidence that the U.S. faced an imminent threat from Saddam, and that the road to war was contrived. The rationale for war was based on the weakest of intelligence and no true facts. The current seeping of information about how weak that intelligence actually was is now becoming mainstream. The details regarding the war planning are seeping into the mainstream media, as evidenced by Bremer. Those details indicate that many facets of the war planning were ignored, set aside to worry about at a later date. Current events in Iraq, the lawlessness, the looting, the lack of border control, the lack of internal security all seem to bear these anecdotes out.

Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, and Cheney are now beginning to realize that many of their reasons for war with Iraq are evaporating. Support among the coalition is waning as Poland considers withdrawing ALL troops by years' end and Australia may follow suit. Many countries have suspended financial support due to the lack of internal security. "The truth will out," as Shakespeare wrote, and I think it is in the process of outing.