5 Ps

Via Matthew Turner (who also found the 'money quote' in it) a New York Review Of Books article by Wesley Clark entitled Iraq: What Went Wrong which lays out the case for how the US has mismanaged the post-war period in Iraq:

The second major criticism of the war plan—a profound flaw—concerned the endgame: it shortchanged postwar planning. Those who plan military operations for a war must take into account the aftermath. Four steps have to be considered: deployment; buildup; decisive combat; and postconflict operations. The destruction of enemy forces on the battlefield creates a necessary but not sufficient condition for victory. It is not just the defeat of the opposing army but success in the operations that follow that accomplishes the aims and intentions of the overall plan...
Victory requires backward planning, beginning with a definition of postwar success and then determining both the nature of the operations required and the necessary forces. Here the administration's focus and determination on winning the war in military terms undermined the prospects for success once the country was occupied...
The irony is that some members of Congress, having carped for years to the military about their engagement in nation-building, having complained about "mission-creep" and "burden-sharing," now had to support the American military as it coped with this mission virtually alone. It was (and remains) a mission far more difficult, dangerous, and open-ended than any undertaken previously...
In Operation Iraqi Freedom, the successes and failures of both the war plan and military transformation were soon evident on the ground. In its "decisive operations" the military had performed superbly, but in the larger planning effort, and in the thinking about the true nature of modern war, the civilians had misunderstood what was needed. Perhaps it was all too easy to concentrate on the fighting, killing the enemy and destroying his forces. But every serious student of war recognizes that war is about attaining political objectives—that military force is just one among several means, including diplomacy, and that all must be mutually reinforcing...

He also mentions the Kosovo campaign, building on and linking in many of the points he made in his article An Army Of One?. There's also a sense that Clark, the General turned Presidential candidate, may have found the formula to successfully attack the Bush administration over its Iraq policies - something along the line of praising the soldiers while criticising the civilian leadership, while also pointing to his own resume to show how you can get it right.

Update: While I'm talking about Clark, here's an interesting interview with him by Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo.