From Holden:
Gen. Tommy Franks has a new book coming out, in which he says he warned President Codpiece about the inadequacy of the war plan for Iraq:
The U.S. general who routed Saddam Hussein’s army in three weeks warned before the invasion that a quick victory could lead to a “catastrophic success” because neither the United States nor Iraq was prepared for postwar anarchy.
He also offered a few choice opinions about selected administration officials, including Rummy:
Franks’ struggles to run the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld breathing down his neck drives the narrative. At one point, Franks writes, he even threatened to quit.
“Since the start of Operation Enduring Freedom, we’d become accustomed to the demands of Secretary Rumsfeld,” Franks writes. “But now even my industrious planners found that the daily barrage of tasks and questions was beginning to border on harassment.”
And Douglas Feith:
Franks calls the undersecretary of defense for policy “a master of the off-the-wall question that rarely had relevance to operational problems.” He adds, “I generally ignored his contributions.”
Franks later quotes himself as saying during the planning for the invasion of Iraq that Feith had achieved the reputation in some military circles as “the dumbest . . . guy on the planet.”
He also gave us a bit to ponder:
Four days before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, then the commander of the U.S. military in the Middle East, told his intelligence staff that his greatest fear was “a terrorist attack against the World Trade Center in New York,” according to his new memoir.