Geopolitical Diary: Iran, Psywar and the Hersh Article
June 30, 2008 | 0200 GMT

U.S. President George W. Bush issued a highly classified presidential finding in late 2007 approving the initiation of covert operations focused on “undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change,” according to a July 7 article in The New Yorker by Seymour Hersh. Congressional leaders reportedly have been informed of the finding, and approved up to $400 million dollars to fund the operation.

This is, of course, explosive news. What is explosive is not that the United States is spending money on covert operations in Iran, but that someone has leaked a highly classified document to a reporter. The secret is now out; indeed, it was released before the article’s publication date. Hersh said only that the person who gave him the information was familiar with the document’s contents. This means his source is a person with extraordinarily high, code-named clearance — not to mention a criminal.

We would expect the Bush administration to be launching multiple investigations to find the leaker. If he is a Republican or a member of the administration or the intelligence community, then massive damage control is essential. If he is a Democrat who leaked (or an official of an agency deemed unfriendly to the administration), the incident represents a political opportunity. Everyone who had access to that document should be attached to a polygraph right now. Washington should have been in turmoil all weekend.

It wasn’t. Aside from some desultory comments, no one seems terribly upset that a major covert operation has been uncovered in the press and thereby crippled.

We are certain that a journalist of Hersh’s stature, writing for a respected publication like The New Yorker, did not make his story up. Since arrests are not pending, we can only conclude that the information was deliberately leaked to Hersh by the administration. This would not be the first time Hersh has been used as a channel by administration leakers. In 2006, he reported that the administration was carrying out covert operations in Iran for roughly the same end. Hersh is not friendly to the administration to say the least. A story by him carries great credibility because it appears to be an authentic scoop by a major journalist revealing things the administration doesn’t want revealed. Such a story therefore increases the sense of uncertainty in Iran substantially more than if a minor, pro-administration journalist published it. As we have pointed out in the case of the Mediterranean air exercises by Israel, the United States and Israel are intent on increased the psychological pressure on Iran. This story fits into that pattern.

The only thing interesting in the story is the idea that until late 2007 there had been no presidential finding and the United States was not engaged in covert operations in Iran to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program and foment regime change. Given the administration’s stance on Iran, it is unthinkable that the intelligence community would not have been running operations in Iran for years focused on just these things. Stratfor has regularly reported on various bombings in the southwestern Arab regions of Iran as well as in Sistan-Balochistan, noting that these would be likely areas to foment unrest.

The latest finding could be an intensification in operations, but the authorization to spend up to $400 million to mess with the Iranians is really not all that much money — especially since that is the cap, and the time frame for expenditures isn’t authorized. But as Hersh made clear in 2006, operations already were under way, meaning a finding had to have been in place.

With all due respect to Mr. Hersh and The New Yorker, this is a report on the obvious. The United States regards Iran as a major target for covert operations, urgently wants to know everything it can about Iran’s nuclear facilities and would love to overthrow the Iranian government. A few hundred million, even on a long shot, is the least the United States would throw at this. As for a finding in late 2007, we do not know where the bureaucratic process is right now, but there have been presidential findings on covert operations in Iran for almost thirty years. Still, the details the administration has decided to make available to The New Yorker via Hersh should make worthwhile reading.

The important point is that unless there has been a massive breach of security, the administration has again acted to increase tensions with Iran — and this just a week after floating the idea of increased diplomatic ties with Iran and about ten days since leaking the report on the Israeli exercises. Since this article has been in preparation for weeks or months, and its publication date has not been under administration control, it remains unclear where in the sequence this leak was intended. But psychological warfare with Iran seems the order of the day, and this article is clearly part of it.

Our read of course might be wrong. Grand juries might be convening as we write and the FBI could be ranging all over D.C. taking statements from everyone with access to covert U.S. plans in Iran. But until that happens, we look at this as another attempt to make the Iranians feel insecure.

Army's History of Iraq After Hussein Faults Pentagon
By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 29, 2008; A03

A new Army history of the service's performance in Iraq immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein faults military and civilian leaders for their planning for the war's aftermath, and it suggests that the Pentagon's current way of using troops is breaking the Army National Guard and Army Reserve.

The study, "On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign," is an unclassified and unhindered look at U.S. Army operations in Iraq from May 2003 to January 2005. That critical era of the war has drawn widespread criticism because of a failure to anticipate the rise of an Iraqi insurgency and because policymakers provided too few U.S. troops and no strategy to maintain order after Iraq's decades-old regime was overthrown.

Donald P. Wright and Col. Timothy R. Reese, who authored the report along with the Army's Contemporary Operations Study Team, conclude that U.S. commanders and civilian leaders were too focused on only the military victory and lacked a realistic vision of what Iraq would look like following that triumph.

"The transition to a new campaign was not well thought out, planned for, and prepared for before it began," write Wright and Reese, historians at the Army's Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. "Additionally, the assumptions about the nature of post-Saddam Iraq on which the transition was planned proved to be largely incorrect."

The results of those errors, they add, were that U.S. forces and their allies lacked an operational and strategic plan for success in Iraq, as well as the resources to carry out a plan.

Their analysis is to be released tomorrow, but the 696-page document was posted last night on the Army's Combined Arms Center's Web site. The New York Times first reported the study's findings yesterday.

The study also calls into question the focus of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on issues such as a modernization of the U.S. military, rather than on the war.

"The intense desire to continue DOD's transformation to smaller and lighter forces, to implement a perceived revolution in military affairs in the information age, and to savor the euphoria over seemingly easy successes in Afghanistan using those techniques seemed to outweigh searching through the past for insights into the future," the study reports.

It also reports that Army National Guard and Reserve soldiers have demonstrated in Iraq and Afghanistan that they "are a fully capable, and indeed, an absolutely essential part of the Army." But it warns that "the price paid by reservists and communities to sustain the long and repetitive mobilizations, however, may not be sustainable in the future."

The Army study is a follow-up to "On Point: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom," which looked at the initiation of combat operations in Iraq through April 2003. The new work picks up from the moment President Bush announced the end of major combat operations on May 1, 2003, and goes through the January 2005 Iraqi elections. The authors make clear that the Army never thought it would need such a study, largely because few people believed the war would last much beyond 2003.

Barnett: The coming battle in the Pentagon

By Thomas P.M. Barnett
Sunday, June 29, 2008

A vociferous bureaucratic battle will occur across the first two years of the next administration, one that will greatly determine our military's future capabilities in this long war against radical extremism.

On one side will be pitted the "big war" crowd with its emphasis on "resetting" the force following the inevitable drawdown in Iraq.

This is mostly the air-sea crowd from the Air Force and Navy. On the other side will stand - ironically enough - those mostly ground forces from the Army and Marines that are logically slated to benefit maximally from any such "healing period."

The "reset" argument rests on one very conspicuous assumption: Iraq was a one-off, not to be repeated and certainly no harbinger of future conflicts.

It was, in effect, a second Vietnam, an asymmetrical war that cannot be effectively won using conventional military power.

To actually succeed in such warfare, you must make our force increasingly symmetrical to the enemies we face in insurgencies; more focused on generating security, winning hearts and minds, training up foreign militaries, and encouraging economic development.

Adapting the U.S. military to these tasks, says the big war crowd, will thus ruin it for great power war, something it must remain optimized to wage lest America invite such conflict in decades ahead.

In effect, the big war crowd asks us to either abandon our historic role as globalization's bodyguard right at the apogee of our international liberal trade order's expansion around the planet or continue trading off hypothetical future casualties from big war scenarios against current actual casualties from small war operations, suffering far more of the latter to prevent the possibility of the former.

I don't believe the Pentagon gets to make that first call; it's simply beyond their pay-grade in our civilian-controlled national security establishment.

For America to cede its international leadership to rising great powers such as Russia and China in coming years would yield a decidedly less American and therefore less safe world, making great power war far more likely.

As for the second option, or basically continuing to low-ball our global counterinsurgency effort while overfeeding our big-war Leviathan force, I find that both strategically unsound and morally indefensible in terms of American lives needlessly sacrificed.

In the end, the bureaucratic push to "reset" the force masks the warrior's nostalgia for the "simpler" wars of the past and industry's greed for the super-expensive systems associated with such top-line, symmetrical conflicts.

Notwithstanding simplistic analogies to pre-World War I Europe's levels of economic integration, the essential truth remains: Nuclear weapons killed great power war. That means any future "resource wars," however implausible, would nonetheless involve our enemies employing asymmetrical forms of resistance, such as proxy wars.

Indeed, if Iraq teaches the world anything, it's that the American military cannot be resisted symmetrically but can be bled asymmetrically.

Listen to Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis decry, already in late 2005 following a command tour in Iraq, the strategic mindset that suggests: " 'Let's hold our breath and get through this, then we get back to proper soldiering by planning for China 20 years from now.' "

Going on: "If we fight China in the future, we will also find IEDs and people using the Internet. If we go to Pyongyang and we're fighting there six months from now against a mechanized unit, 100,000 Special Forces would be running around doing what they're doing to our rear area now. So guess what? This is the best training ground in the world. For the German troops it was Spain, right? Well, Iraq is ours."

Iraq is ours. Get used to hearing that because that's the strategic outlook of the generation of Army and Marine Corps officers already forged by the first seven years of this long war. It is not your father's military because Iraq is not Vietnam.

Thomas P.M. Barnett (tom@thomaspmbarnett.com) is a visiting scholar at the University of Tennessee's Howard Baker Center and author of the forthcoming book "Great Powers: America and the World After Bush."

© 2008 Knoxville News Sentinel

Maybe Tata, Jaguar/Land Rover is not such an odd couple
By Sharon Silke Carty, USA TODAY
MUMBAI, India — Down a tree-lined street, the headquarters of Tata Sons feels tucked away. Practically hidden. One of India's most respected and admired companies occupies the Bombay House, a brown, four-story building built by Tata (TTM) in 1924, two blocks from traffic-jammed Mahatma Gandhi Road.
Still, the only time Ravi Kant, the chairman of Tata's (pronounced TAH-tuh) burgeoning motor division, gets a break from honking taxis down the block and the boisterous birds chattering at his window is when hammering by workers somewhere in the building drowns out other sounds.

PHOTO GALLERY: More about corporate giant Tata, its cars
From this modest, wood-paneled office, Kant is overseeing the most audacious double-play the auto industry has seen in years: Launching the world's cheapest car, the Tata Nano, and taking over luxury brands Jaguar/Land Rover from Ford Motor.

Although the Jaguar deal won't close until June and Nano production begins later this year, Kant already has issued a clear directive: Keep these vehicle lines separate and distinct. "Each is going to chart its own future and own course," he says. "The conflict would come if we were to try to put them together."

Tata's catapult into the news took many Americans by surprise. And with regard to Jaguar, some have questioned whether an Indian company almost unknown in North America is the best steward for one of the world's best-known car brands.

"We are talking about perception and image," said shareholder activist Evelyn Y. Davis at Ford's annual shareholder meeting earlier this month. "Tata sells cars that are $2,500. … How could the board sell us out to people like that, who sell cars like that?"

In fact, Tata Motors has built vehicles for more than 50 years and is part of a $28.8 billion international conglomerate with businesses that range from luxury hotels to iron and steel to cosmetics. The company is highly respected by Indians, who regard the Tata family as Americans regard the Fords. Indeed, Tata's textile mills had a head start on Henry Ford's admired labor practices, instituting eight-hour days in 1912, two years before Ford did it at auto plants in the Midwest.

Better appreciation of Tata's strengths and history turned Ken Gorin from critic to fan. Head of the Jaguar Business Operations Council, a U.S. dealer group, he once told The Wall Street Journal that sale to an Indian owner would cast "doubt over the viability of the brand."

Having gotten to know the soon-to-be owners better, he now says, "I initially expressed some reservations, and I believe I was wrong."

Ubiquitous presence

Around Mumbai, you can see the Tata conglomerate's influence on almost every corner.



By Sharon Silke Carty, USA TODAY,
Brightly colored tailgates on Tata trucks are a common sight on Mumbai's streets.

There are Tata-brand trucks everywhere in the crowded streets. Many are painted in vibrant colors with "Horn OK Please!" plastered along the back, encouraging other drivers to make noise as they pass as a safety precaution.

There are the blue and white Tata Indicom billboards, advertising Tata's cellphone service. Indicom posters are plastered on apartment buildings, next to bridges, on trains.

Tourists heading to one of Mumbai's major attractions, the Gateway of India monument, click photos of the stately Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel behind it, yet another Tata business. Tata's chain of luxury hotels includes Boston and San Francisco locations and the Pierre hotel across from Central Park in New York.

Tata owns Tetley Teas, a watch and jewelry maker, an insurance company, a fertilizer business, a satellite TV service, a charter airline, a management consultancy and companies in information technology, engineering, steel and publishing.

Most of Tata's consumer products are sold in India, a market with about four times as many people as the USA. Its emerging economy is among the world's fastest-growing, with an annual rate of about 8.5%.

India is expected to be the world's fifth-largest auto producer by 2013, according to Detroit consulting firm AlixPartners, behind the USA, Japan, China and Germany. Tata is its largest vehicle producer, thanks to its commercial vehicles, but third in passenger cars.

Tata has experience taking over global brands, and its strategy has been to let each business run as its own entity, with modest input from the home office.

Kant points to Daewoo, the South Korean truck manufacturer, as an example. When Tata took over the company in 2004, many expected it would integrate Daewoo into its own truck operation in India. Instead, Daewoo still operates mostly as a Korean business.

"We want to be seen not as an Indian company operating in South Korea, but as a South Korean company operating in South Korea," Kant says. "There is a big difference."

Facing hurdles

This year will be a challenge for Tata Motors' new lines.

The rising cost of commodities is making it difficult, if not impossible, for Tata to hold Nano's price to 100,000 Indian rupees, about $2,500 at current exchange rates.

At the Jaguar/Land Rover unit, where Tata planned to keep current management, it now must find a new CEO. Geoff Polites, CEO for three years, died in April after a long illness.

The first thing Tata management will do when the purchase closes is tour Jaguar and Land Rover operations, with a week in the United Kingdom and a second in the USA. Gorin, the head of the dealer council and owner of The Collection dealership in Coral Gables, Fla., says he's excited to meet Tata's top executives and hear their plans.

But even as Tata adds these brands and expands its own car lineup, Kant says, Tata is not aiming to be the next Toyota.

"At this moment, our focus is on making sure we strengthen our position in the segments we are already in," Kant says, "and seeing that Jaguar and Land Rover go on to become not just a very cherished brand but a very profitable brand."

There are other issues facing Tata. Some, such as pensions and high wages, are similar to those in the U.S. auto industry. Indian labor is still far cheaper than in the USA: The average factory worker earns $1.20 an hour, vs. upwards of $20. But wage inflation has become a significant concern as India's economy heats up and demand for skilled labor grows.

For an Indian company, Tata has unusually big obligations to its workers. In the more than 50 years Tata Motors has made vehicles, it has built a strong social safety net for workers with pensions, jobs for life and a job for one of their children.

The company is trying to increase productivity instead of slashing benefits, Kant says. But it's a tough balance.

"We have respect for individuals, and have respect for people and for their families," Kant says. "All that we would still like to do, within the boundaries imposed by economics."

Charitable works

Tata has a long history of charity and humanitarian efforts, focused on improving India. Since its founding in 1868 by Jamsetji Tata during India's 89 years as a British colony, the family-held Tata Group has put a sizable chunk of its profits into Indian charities and social programs. The founder created a technical college and trusts for other charitable ventures.

The tradition continues. Last year, current CEO Ratan Tata accepted the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy on behalf of his family. Tata's dedication to charitable works isn't common among Indian companies, says Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation.

"Tata is in a class by themselves," says Gregorian.

Even Tata's move into hotels is said to have been a pro-India move: As legend has it, the founding Tata decided to open luxury hotels after being turned away by a British hotel.

Tata Motors likes to talk about the Nano as if it is a project to improve Indians' lives. It's designed to replace motorbikes, the dominant mode of transportation for many of India's working class. Entire families pile onto them, with Dad driving, Mom in her sari or traditional flowing salwar kameez outfit on the back and two or three children squeezed in around them.



By Sharon Silke Carty, USA TODAY,
Many Indians rely on motorbikes for transportation, often riding in pairs or even in larger groups. Tata says the Nano provides a safer, afforable alternative.

A cheap, sturdy car, even without air bags and three-point seat belts in the back seat, is safer, or so Tata's thinking goes.

Kant says he expects the Nano will also be a key factor in India's changing demographics. The government is tripling investment on infrastructure to $500 billion a year and focusing on roads to connect remote, often poor, villages with each other and with cities.

"People want to change their quality of life, and through the roads, will go from one place to another," he says. "It will be explosive growth, and Nano will be an answer. Nano is not an urban product; it is a product for the country."

Learn as you go, with expert advice

Nano fits with how Indians see the Tata car brand: cheap, but useful, and one of their own.

"They are cheap cars, let's not kid ourselves. They are like McDonald's," says Vikas Sehgal, an automotive partner at Booz Allen Hamilton. "But the last time I checked, McDonald's has higher profits than Charlie Trotter's in Chicago."

After decades of experience in such vehicles as trucks and tractors, Tata Motors launched its first small sedan in 1998, the Indica, on the premise that India needed its own car. In 2002, Tata launched the Indigo, a slightly larger sedan that runs on diesel and gas.

The Indigo was riddled with problems, with consumers reporting they needed to fix radiators, engines and wiring within months. Mumbai residents who owned Indigos often would bring their complaints straight to the top, approaching Ratan Tata as he walked his dog through a public park in the mornings. He took notes, and brought the complaints back to engineers to be fixed.

The company was able to develop its car line and fix problems relatively quickly, in part by pairing with car manufacturers including Chrysler, Nissan and Fiat for technology.

"You don't have to do everything from scratch like you used to," says John Casesa, managing director of Casesa Shapiro Group. "These new companies have skipped stages of development that car companies used to go through. It's easy to hire German engineers, Italian designers, Japanese manufacturing people."

The speed and ability to adapt that Tata Motors has shown has some people wondering if Americans and others in developed countries underestimate its ability to manage a company such as the Jaguar and Land Rover operation.

"People are not underestimating Tata at all. They are ignoring it," says Sehgal. "The company is a global company, contrary to popular belief. If I were a (carmaker), I'd be afraid."

The company's plan to keep separate the Jaguar and Land Rover unit is part of what reassures dealer group head Gorin that Tata will be a good fit.

"Your fear as an automobile dealer is, what's going to happen? Is it going to grow and prosper?" Gorin says. "We really believe it will. They're a company that can invest and grow it long-term, and that's really critical."

Tata Motors chief Kant says he realizes the luxury brands still may struggle for a time because of the state of the economy. But he says Tata plans to own Jaguar and Land Rover for a long time and eventually will prove the skeptics wrong.

"People are free to make their own opinions, but I think time will prove who is right," he says.

"We are very confident that we have done the right thing, we have paid the right price. We have tremendous confidence in the management, and we are very excited by the products which are coming out."





Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2008-05-27-tata-jaguar-land-rover_N.htm

June 29, 2008
Occupation Plan for Iraq Faulted in Army History

By MICHAEL R. GORDON
WASHINGTON — Soon after American forces toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, Gen. Tommy R. Franks surprised senior Army officers by revamping the Baghdad-based military command.

The decision reflected the assumption by General Franks, the top American commander for the Iraq invasion, that the major fighting was over. But according to an Army history that is to be made public on Monday, the move put the military effort in the hands of a short-staffed headquarters led by a newly promoted three-star general, and was made over the objections of the Army’s vice chief of staff.

“The move was sudden and caught most of the senior commanders in Iraq unaware,” states the history, which adds that the new headquarters “was not configured for the types of responsibilities it received.”

An aide to General Franks said that the former commander had covered Iraq decisions in his book, and General Franks told Army historians that it was the Pentagon’s responsibility to make sure the new Iraq headquarters was properly established.

The story of the American occupation of Iraq has been the subject of numerous books, studies and memoirs. But now the Army has waded into the highly charged debate with its own 696-page account: “On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign.”

The unclassified study, the second volume in a continuing history of the Iraq conflict, is as noteworthy for who prepared it as for what it says. In essence, the study is an attempt by the Army to tell the story of one of the most contentious periods in its history to military experts — and to itself. It adds to a growing body of literature about the problems that the United States encountered in Iraq, not all of which has been embraced by Army leaders. Lt. Col. Paul Yingling of the Army ignited a debate when he wrote a magazine article that criticized American generals for failing to prepare a coherent plan to stabilize postwar Iraq.

In 2005, the RAND Corporation submitted a report to the Army, called “Rebuilding Iraq,” that identified problems with virtually every government agency that played a role in planning the postwar phase.

But the “On Point” report carries the imprimatur of the Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth. The study is based on 200 interviews conducted by military historians and includes long quotations from active or recently retired Army officers. Publication was delayed six months so that General George W.. Casey Jr., the current Army chief of staff and former top commander in Iraq, could be interviewed and senior Army leaders could review a draft.
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The study’s authors were instructed not to shy away from controversy while withholding a final verdict on whether senior officials had made mistakes that decisively altered the course of the war, said Col. Timothy R. Reese, the director of the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., who along with Donald Wright, a civilian historian at the institute, oversaw the volume’s preparation. Even so, the study documents a number of problems that hampered the Army’s ability to stabilize the country during Phase IV, as the postwar stage was called.

“The Army, as the service primarily responsible for ground operations, should have insisted on better Phase IV planning and preparations through its voice on the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” the study noted. “The military means employed were sufficient to destroy the Saddam regime; they were not sufficient to replace it with the type of nation-state the United States wished to see in its place.”

The study focuses on the 18 months after President Bush’s May 2003 announcement that major combat operations in Iraq were over. It was a period when the Army took on unanticipated occupation duties and was forced to develop new intelligence gathering technique, armor its Humvees, revise its tactics and, after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, review its detention practices.

A big problem, the study says, was the lack of detailed plans before the war for the postwar phase, a deficiency that reflected the general optimism in the White House and in the Pentagon, led by then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, about Iraq’s future, and an assumption that civilian agencies would assume much of the burden.

“I can remember asking the question during our war gaming and the development of our plan, ‘Okay, we are in Baghdad, what next?’ No real good answers came forth,” Col. Thomas G. Torrance, the commander of the Third Infantry Division’s artillery, told Army historians.

The allied land war command, which was led by Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan and which reported to General Franks, did additional work on the postwar phase, but its plan was not formally distributed to the troops until April 2003, when the ground invasion was under way.

Inadequate training was also a factor. Lt. Col. Troy Perry, the operations officer of the First Battalion, 68th Armor Regiment, told Army historians that his unit trained extensively, but not for the sort of problems that it would encounter in conducing “stability operations” for securing Iraq once Baghdad fell.

A fundamental assumption that hobbled the military’s planning was that Iraq’s ministries and institutions would continue to function after Saddam Hussein’s government was toppled.

“We had the wrong assumptions and therefore we had the wrong plan to put into play,” said Gen. William S. Wallace, who led the V Corps during the invasion and currently leads the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command.

Faced with a brewing insurgency and occupation duties that they had not anticipated, Army units were forced to adapt. But organizational decisions made in May and June 2003 complicated that task. L. Paul Bremer III, who replaced Jay Garner, the retired lieutenant general, as the chief civilian administrator in Iraq, issued decrees to disband the Iraqi Army and ban thousands of former Baathists from working for the Iraqi government, orders that the study asserts caught American field commanders “off guard” and “created a pool of disaffected and unemployed Sunni Arabs” that the insurgency could draw on.

Some of General Franks’s moves also appeared divorced from the growing problems in Iraq. Before the fall of Baghdad, Col. Kevin Benson, a planner at the land war command, developed a plan that called for using about 300,000 soldiers to secure postwar Iraq, about twice as many as were deployed .

But that was not what General Franks and the Bush administration had in mind. In an April 16 visit to Baghdad, General Franks instructed his officers to be prepared to rapidly reduce forces during an “an abbreviated period of stability operations,” the study notes. “In line with the prewar planning and general euphoria at the rapid crumbling of the Saddam regime, Franks continued to plan for a very limited role for U.S. ground forces in Iraq,” the report says.

The next month, General Franks directed General McKiernan, then the senior officer in Baghdad, to leave Iraq, along with the staff of his land war command, which had helped plan the invasion and had overseen the push to Baghdad.

A new headquarters would be established to command the military forces in Iraq. It was to be led by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, who was newly promoted and had led the First Armored Division into Iraq. General Sanchez had been picked to succeed General Wallace as the head of the Army’s V Corps, which was to serve as the nucleus of the newly established command.

When Gen. Jack Keane, the vice chief of staff of the Army, learned of the move, he was upset. General Keane had helped General McKiernan assemble his headquarters and assumed it would oversee what was fast becoming a troubled occupation.

“I think we did not put the best experienced headquarters that we had in charge of that operation,” General Keane said in an interview with Army historians. “It took us months, six or seven or eight months, to get some semblance of a headquarters together so Sanchez could at least begin to function effectively.”

General Keane told the historians that he raised his concerns at the time with Lt. Gen. John P. Abizaid, who had been picked to succeed General Franks as the head of Central Command.

“I said, ‘Jesus Christ, John, this is a recipe for disaster,’ ” General Keane told Army historians. “I was upset about it to say the least, but the decision had been made and it was a done deal.” Asked about the decision to establish a new headquarters, General Franks told Army historians that he had told the Pentagon what he needed and that it was the Defense Department’s responsibility to ensure that it was rapidly installed. He said that he thought it was sufficient to tell Mr. Rumsfeld and Richard B. Myers, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “ ‘Here is what we’re going to do in Iraq. Here is what we need in Iraq. We need a joint headquarters.’ ” He added that he told them, “ ‘You figure it out .’ ”

General Sanchez, who has retired from the Army and recently published a book about his time in Iraq, told historians that his new command was hampered by staff shortages and by the failure to coordinate the transfer of responsibilities to his new headquarters.

“There was not a single session that was held at the command level to hand off or transition anything,” he said.

Summing up the episode, General Wallace told historians that the shift to a new headquarters involved a complicated transfer of responsibilities at a critical time.

“You can’t take a tactical headquarters and shift it into an operational headquarters at the snap of your fingers,” he said. “It just doesn’t happen.”