First, here’s what I said in March of ’03, as we were ramping up the shock-n-awe machine:

They might lie dormant for a while, but periodically operations would be carried out – against US troops, against humanitarian workers, against any Western economic development operations (read, oil companies) that dared set up camp in Iraq, and most crucially, against the humanitarian infrastructure. Anything that can make life better for the civilian population is a target – hospitals, schools, food convoys – and even if these operations claim innocent Iraqi lives, it is entirely possible that US forces will be blamed for their failure to provide the promised security.

Now, if you read all of my analysis, it’s clear that I wasn’t 100% dead-on – I didn’t predict all that has happened and in places I gave too much credit to the Saddam crew – but it’s intriguing that the more we learn, the righter those of us who saw this coming actually were. For instance, a new USNWR report makes clear that Saddam did in fact have a well-conceived “post-defeat” strategy, and that it did in fact include things like attacks on infrastructure and the international aid mission.

I have referred back to my March ’03 entry a couple times in recent months not because I want you to believe that I’m a genius, but because it’s hard to imagine that our government couldn’t, with all the intel in the world, see what was so patently obvious to many of us sitting out here with access to no intel at all. It wasn’t just me, and if you read through the Pit blog entries leading up to the war you’ll see others chiming in who were also doing some solid thinking on the subject. How dramatic a failure are we talking about when those of us up here in the cheap seats, working off of nothing more than what’s available to anybody with a dial-up connection, can routinely do a better of assessing contingencies than Bush, Rumsfeld, and the most advanced intelligence operation in the history of the world?

Don’t take my word for it. Read the USNWR report and make up your own mind.