A recently declassified Joint Chiefs of Staff Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) History Brief gets it dead wrong. According to the JCS, the United States military did not begin planning for the 2003 invasion of Iraq until 9 July 2002, less than two months before President George W. Bush “approv[ed] overthrow of Saddam Hussein” on 29 August 2002. The Pentagon’s propagation of such an untrue history further underlines the importance of the National Security Archive’s recent three-part, document-supported expose –written by Joyce Battle, John Prados, and Christopher Ames– on the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) PowerPoint slideshow excludes important historical decisions from its pithy account of the war. As Joyce Battle’s EBB (Electronic Briefing Book) shows, the JCS–under instructions from Bush and his Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld– actually began drafting Iraq war plans more than one and a half years earlier, in September 2001. (more…)
