The Redhunter

The regime planned to restart production of weapons of mass destruction. It continued to hide scientists from U.N. inspectors right up to the time U.N. inspectors left and the war began.

A seized Dec. 15, 2002, memo, written by an Iraqi intelligence agent posing as a U.N. escort, states, "Inside Bader WMD inspection site, there are Russian and Turkish scientists. When we visited the site, they were forced to hide from inspectors' eyes."

And, Saddam continued to tell his commanders he still had such weapons. "For him, there were real dividends to be gained by letting his enemies believe he possessed WMD, whether it was true or not," the report said.

• The quickly assembled air strike on one of Saddam's residences, Dora Farms, in pre-dawn March 19, 2003, never had a chance of succeeding. Saddam had not stayed there since 1995.

• There was no evidence that Saddam or his top aides planned the insurgency, now in its fourth year; in fact, Saddam was sure the Americans would never advance on Baghdad.

"There were no national plans to transition to a guerrilla war in the event of military defeat," the report states.

This fact helps explain why commanders did not predict, nor plan for, the robust insurgency and al Qaeda terrorists now spreading violence.

Saddam's misguided belief that he would stay in power in 2003 was fed by the support he got from France and Russia, his top aide, Tariq Aziz, told U.S. investigators.

Very interesting, no?

By 2002 the sanctions regime was falling apart. As soon as it was gone, Saddam would restart his WMD programs. He'd already started two wars, there was no reason to believe he would not start a third.

The report also puts an end to the notion that we should have predicted the insurgency. Yes we mishandles it for the first year and a half, but no it was not predictable.

French perfidity is nothing new or unexpected. But I have been very disappointed by Putin. When Bush first reached out to him early in his presidency I had hoped that we might reach some understanding, some accord, or at least not work against each other. It's becoming more and more clear that Putin is reverting to his KGB Cold War Days.

The Report

I did some searching and you can download the report here (link courtesy of Welcome to Jermany)

It is of course a pdf file, and they authors have disallowed copy and paste of text. However, this is from the DOD press release on the report

U.S. Joint Forces Command will release on Friday, March 24 an unclassified historical report in book form on the Iraqi view of coalition military operations conducted in Iraq. Conducted by U.S. Joint Forces Command’s Joint Center for Operational Analysis, the Iraqi Perspective Project (IPP) is a research effort focused on coalition military operations in Iraq from March to May 2003. This project focused on the perspectives of the Iraqi civilian and military leadership involved in major combat operations gathered through interviews conducted during the fall and winter of 2003/2004, and an extensive review of Iraqi historical documents done in the months since then.

The project is the first such effort by the U.S. government to understand the views of an enemy military force since World War II, when the U.S. government conducted a comprehensive review of recovered German and Japanese documents, along with interviews of key military and civilian leadership.

The overall objective of this project was to learn lessons from Operation Iraqi Freedom, and use those lessons for ongoing transformation activities.

The report is 230 pages long. From reading the forwrd, the report is based on a two-year study in which they interviewed political and military officials of the Saddam Hussein regime and went through thousands of documents. The objective was simply to find out why the Iraqis made the decisions they did. The results were summarized in the Times article above. I do not have time to go through it tonight but hope this week to read through parts of it.