In a rehearsal and post-Iraq planning conference held February 21-22, 2003, at the National Defense University, key staffers noted the following problems a month before the war began:
*’Current force packages are inadequate for the first step of securing all the major urban areas, let alone for providing interim police. …We risk letting much of the country descend into civil unrest [and] chaos whose magnitude may defeat our national strategy of a stable new Iraq, and more immediately, we place our own troops, fully engaged in the forward fight, in greater jeopardy.’
* ‘…If fewer funds are available than required, we risk leaving behind a great unstable mess with potential to become a haven for terrorists.’
…*’The conference did not take up the most basic issue: What sort of future government of Iraq do we have in mind, and how do we plan to get there?’
*With no sufficient plan for police from U.S. troops or a civilian government of Iraq, ‘What happens to law and order in the meantime?’ “
– Bob Woodward, State of Denial, Page 125