Plan 549

The conventional wisdom that we've already lost the war in Iraq is becoming more firmly-rooted with each passing day. To illustrate the extreme, this past Saturday the WaPo featured a piece by Douglas Brinkley about Bush's legacy with the following headline--Move over, Hoover.. The media and Democrats were similarly agog today over Robert Gates' succinctly negative answer to the question, "are we winning?".

While it's too early to make the win-lose call (which heavily influences Bush's standing in the history books) we're certainly not "winning" in the conventional sense at the moment. But if we're losing, and if it's a civil war, it was planned all along. Let's look back:

Five men met in an automobile in a baghdad park a few weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime in April 2003, according to U.S. intelligence sources. One of the five was Saddam. The other four were among his closest advisers. The agenda: how to fight back against the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. A representative of Saddam's former No. 2, Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, was there.

But the most intriguing man in the car may have been a retired general named Muhammad Yunis al-Ahmed, who had been a senior member of the Military Bureau, a secret Baath Party spy service. The bureau's job had been to keep an eye on the Iraqi military—and to organize Baathist resistance in the event of a coup. Now a U.S. coup had taken place, and Saddam turned to al-Ahmed and the others and told them to start "rebuilding your networks."

We've heard less about Yunis than al-Duri, which amounts to almost nothing. Just a column here or there, like this one from 2005 in US News detailing "Plan 549":

Plan 549, a document purporting to provide guidance from Saddam Hussein to his forces . . . calls for attacks on water plants. Such attacks could be devastating in terms of the populace's confidence in the coalition and public order."

The current discontent can be rooted to the administration's apparent obliviousness to the potential for such asymmetrical tactics.

And it's not like Bush 43 wouldn't have known. His cabinet was loaded with Gulf War experts and his own father was only a secure phone call away. To think he wasn't adequately warned about the potential after-effects is akin to believing that Elvis is still alive and working at a Wendy's in Detroit. Powell's "you break it you bought it" line still echoes.

Why then would he take the risk? Detractors might blame it on over-confidence, ignorance, arrogance, gullibility, Chalabi, Curveball, Saudi Royals, AIPAC, PNAC, Israel, Laurie Mylroie or the Czech Republic. We know his strategy was to stop "swatting at flies", but why choose Mesopotamian flies after admitting they didn't attack us on 9/11?

He also knew any preemptive war might be criticized ad infinitum by the WaPo and Times, or that certain MSM reporters might be tempted to embed with the opposition, such as Michael Ware. He had the luxury of seeing the MSM reaction to our Afghanistan campaign where the word quagmire was used within a month, and that was the so-called "just war".

He also knew of Saddam's disinformation apparatus, his cunning, and his ruthlessness. There were many examples of this from his own team, but in "State of Denial" Bob Woodward relays a conversation between Prince Bandar and Bush in 2002 regarding an exchange between Saddam and King Fahd:

At another time Saddam pointed to the people around him--high and low--and told Fahd, "They are the most loyal to me". "It is nice to be surrounded by the most loyal people", Fahd replied. "Oh, no, no, I didn't say that, Your Majesty," Saddam corrected. "I told you they were very loyal to me because every one of them, his hand is bloody. Every one of them knows that when I die, you will never find a piece this big from my body." Saddam indicated the smallest piece of flesh between his fingers. "I'll be cut to pieces, and if that happens to me, they're all finished."

So while the 40 pound brains at the Council on Foreign Relations like Joe Klein have already given this round to Saddam, the Commander-in-Chief keeps on keeping on. He should have expected the asymmetrical brutality. Perhaps he did.

But it's not exactly a given that Klein or anyone else in internetland possess a full set of facts. A previous paragraph mentioned that Bush has previously admitted Saddam had no ties to 9/11, but he's never said that Saddam had no ties to other terrorist acts against America. He's also never said word one about Iran's possible roles in previous attacks, which are legend.

The near future might bring some illumination to those looking closely enough. The terrorist surveillance program will soon come under the scrutiny of an anti-war chairman. Bush was careful to keep the circle of knowledge tight, so assuming he wasn't building the first block of a coming fascist utopia the only other plausible explanation was to address a very serious threat. If the Democrats quickly dummy-up and move on we'll know it's important.

More clues could come from, of all places, the Scooter Libby trial:

Libby's bid for classified information is significant for two reasons. If the government decides the material Walton orders released cannot safely be made public, the case could be dismissed. If the case goes forward and the evidence is allowed, the trial could offer a behind- the-scenes look at the White House in the early months of the war in Iraq.

That is, unless the greymail gambit is successful. If not, we may learn a tiny bit more about any unconventional threats that possibly influenced Bush's decision-making.

Glenn Reynolds has challenged bloggers to add value to the Iraq debate by organizing a blogstorm of new ideas and directions, which sounds like a great idea. But such an endeavor might be largely fruitless without knowing everything there is to know on the forces that drove us there in the first place.