This one of the oldest maxims in warfare. One of the reasons that the Pubbies are in such a mess is that the neocons lead Bush into Iraq without any plan for what to do there after the relatively trivial matter of getting Sadam out was done.
Another princpal of war is that it will take a lot longer than you think it will and carries with it the danger of bankrupting the treasury.
Why oh why oh why did the Pubbies go to war without a plan? It destroyed Bush's presidency (he sacrificed all for the power to expend blood and treasure in Iraq) and is destroying the Republican party.
I’m sure they had a plan, it just turned out to not be a very good one.
Plans are much more easily concocted a few years after the fact. Numerous books have come out recently with the authors claiming that if only their advice had been followed everything would have been wonderful.
Let’s leave aside the fact that many of their plans directly contradict each other. How can anyone state with assurance that things might not have turned out even worse had these prescriptions been implemented?
Saddam Hussein not only violated the Armistice he signed at the end of Desert Storm, (violating it more than a 1000 times! As he never stopped fighting us) he purchased weaponized smallpox in 1998 from a Russian defector for $2Million. (This was independently verified by two individuals who did not know one another; one Russian, the other Iraqi.)
You can read about it in the book, The Demon in the Freezer (it is about WMD, mainly smallpox). One could say that Bush, after 9/11, was experiencing a case of “controlled panic” at the nightmare scenario he inherited from the Clintons.