—DONALD RUMSFELD, DEPARTMENT OF DEFENCE TRANSCRIPT The Repeat Per formance U.S. troops entered Baghdad on April 9, 2003, leading to the immediate collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Looting on a massive scale broke out, but U.S. forces did not attempt to stop it. When reporters asked about the escalating level of violence and chaos in Baghdad, Secretary of Defense Donald Rums-feld made his now-famous comment: “Freedom is untidy.”1 A flood of books and studies later demonstrated that Rumsfeld viewed the security situation in Iraq through rose-colored glasses. Equally in a state of denial was CENTCOM’s General Franks. In what is now widely viewed as one of the most significant blunders in American military history, Rumsfeld and Franks had given little if any thought to how post-Hussein Iraq would be governed. CENTCOM did not even begin reconstruction planning until five months after the fall of Baghdad. But by that time, the Iraqi insurgency was in full swing, and the reconstruction plan was quickly junked in favor of a counterinsurgency plan, which also had not been worked on prior to the fall of Baghdad.2 On April 16, Franks cheerfully announced that most U.S.
