Like George Packer (The Assassins' Gate) and Larry Diamond (Squandered Victory), they suggest that the shocking lack of planning for a postwar Iraq stemmed in large measure from the administration's assumptions about an easy US triumph and its reluctance to listen to experts in the military and the State Department. And like Richard Clarke (Against All Enemies), they criticize the Bush White House for focusing on the number of al-Qaeda leaders captured or killed, instead of addressing the ideological underpinnings of radical Islam, which continually attracts new converts.
In laying out these arguments, Benjamin and Simon deftly flesh out now-familiar observations with new details and some revealing interviews with officials who worked with the administration or observed the decision-making process firsthand.
Writing that "the move to war" came "faster than has been reported," the authors quote one State Department diplomat who said that a small, secret meeting was held on the Martin Luther King Day weekend of Jan. 2002 to plan the invasion; this official said, "the original idea was to go to war by Tax Day (April 15) 2002."
The authors also quote Colin Powell's former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson -- who recently made headlines with a speech in which he charged that America's foreign policy had been usurped by a small, secretive cabal within the administration -- saying that the essential decision-making and planning for the Iraq war "was not taking place in the statutory process" of the National Security Council, "but in the parallel process run" by Vice President Dick Cheney, who had assembled his own national security staff of 14.
Much of the planning for the occupation, Benjamin and Simon write, was also done "out of channels," with officials "issuing directives without ever having their plans scrubbed in the kind of tedious, iterative process that the government typically uses to make sure it is ready for any contingency." They note, for instance, that the Principals Committee (President Bush's foreign policy Cabinet) did not even meet "to discuss the disbanding of the Iraqi army, which is now seen as one of the critical mistakes that has fed the insurgency."
One of the most disturbing charges that the authors level at the Bush administration is that it has failed to "look beyond al-Qaeda" and "recognize the multiplying forms that the jihadist threat is taking."
It is also a failure to comprehend fully the fallout in the Muslim world of the prison abuses at Abu Ghraib and the detentions at Guantanamo Bay.
In sum, Benjamin and Simon warn, these failures mean "we are clearing the way for the next attack -- and those that will come after."
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