Planned if you do, planned if you don't

The newspapers today are full of opinion about a set of leaked documents regarding the Iraq war. All guns blazing for Blair. It raises an interesting dilemma for politicians and the media. In the article in the Telegraph the government comes under heavy criticism for denying they were planning to invade Iraq as early as 2002. Later in the article they accuse the government of not having any plans for the rebuilding of the nation post arrival and defeat of Baghdad.

If we take what the media are saying at face value then the government looks like it cannot win. Let's all be sensible and assume that our defense department has plans for many occasions, all theoretical. Not unreasonable to assume that high probability targets have more advanced and detailed plans than others. On that basis we would assume that theoretical plans for invading Zimbabwe are available. This must be the case as the PM will want to know, when deciding what to do about this or that dictator, what the options are. One assumes that one does not decide to go to war and then worry about plans and chances of success. One would hope.

So the media accusation that Blair told parliament that there were no plans to invade Iraq is not really a surprise. It depends what you mean by plans. On the one hand you can have plans (in the strict sense of the word) but have no 'intention' of using them. This may have been the case for Blair. The question could legitimately have been asked about 'plans' and not intentions and it is the PM's right to interpret the question and answer about 'intentions'.

The second aspect of this is also a bit strange. Lets assume Blair did have the 'intention' to invade Iraq (for whatever reason) when asked the question. This question was raised some time prior to the actual invasion in PM question time. How should he respond? It would seem bloody foolish to answer anything other than no unless you assume that Iraq cannot pick up PM question time on the parliament channel.

I think Blair, while guilty of many many things in this event, is clean in his handling of these questions.

What is worrying is the lack of plans for the rebuilding of Iraq after victory. Maybe something for the defense dept to worry about for the future. Clearly a need for end to end life-cycle of a war and not just the military bit is needed. If the plans for the economy were carried out in the same theoretical way as the military plans then maybe things would turn out differently.

For a start military campaigns of any type are tightly financially controlled. Can you imagine the effect on the ground.

Commander: "Emergency, we need 2 choppers to airlift out wounded and an apache to take out the two tanks pinning us down on the ridge".

Controller: "No problem commander, just complete the business case documentation and submit to central command, copy twice to the treasury and only after sign off from the health and safety officer"

But there may be some advantages to financial controls. Now wars are not about territory (nobody wins resources of enough value to cover the costs these days) but about ideology (although prevention of resource control by perceived enemies and keeping open free trade is noted) or trade. One can start to see the costs of war (especially under end to end planning) starting to look ridiculous. The idea that we go to war over right or wrong is long gone, the world simply is not that black and white.

Eventually the cost benefits of war will be such that negotiation and sanctions will be more likely. As the bean counters arm themselves with the latest versions of Excel and supercomputers to model the effects of global price rises in corn the battles will be fought in the grey rooms of the accountants. Lives will be lost still, but mostly from the stresses on middle age accountants.