Notes from my reading of Cobra II. Page number followed by paraphrase/verbatim from the book.

• 10 - Douglas Feith. the undersecretary of defense for policy and a member of Rumsfield's inner secretary wrote a  memo on the limited value of hitting targets in Afghanistan. The 9/11 commission  cast the memo as a series of proposals by Keith, but in fact, many of the notions had come from Rumsfield himself
  
• 14 - Clinton left office believing that Saddam was a manageable nuisance; the new Bush team believed differently
• 15 - Zalmay Khilazad, the NSC aide for the Middle East believed that supporting the Iraqi resistance in exile could lead
• 15 - While the smell of smoke still lingered in Pentagon after 9/11 attacks, Feith tells Newbold - "Why are you working on Afghanistan? You ought to be working on Iraq"
• 16 - At Sep 15 war council on how to respond to 9/11 attack, Rumsfield and Wolfowitz go with 3 targets, Taliban, Al Qaeda and Iraq and contend that only Al Qaeda and Iraq were strategic threats. Powell pushed back, insisting on need to have Afghanistan as focus and the difficulty in having a coalition if it was not. Rumsfield says that a coalition not willing to stand with the US is not worth having
• 17 - Dell Dailey - the 2 star head of the Joint Special Ops command
• 18 - Richard N. Perle secures an influential position for himself as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory panel that counseled Rumsfield on military and defense planning issues
• 18 - Neither CIA nor State Department was a fan of Chalabi but Perle, Wolfowitz, and aides in Cheney's office saw him as a talented and dedicated organizer who had made more than his share of enemies with his single-minded focus on stirring a rebellion in Iraq
• 18 -Chalabi argued that Saddam could be toppled by Iraqi insurgents with US air power, turning Iraq into a good, stable, modern, pro-Western free market economy
• 19 - Rumsfield makes it clear that simply toppling Taliban was not enough. He felt that there was a need for another show of US power and that show could be staged in Iraq. There was no flowery talk of inculcating democracy in the heart of the Middle East
• 19:20:21 - The plan of a attack on Iraq, called Vigilant Guardian, started with how to seize the oil fields in south of Iraq. The assumptions that mainly guided this planning effort were that Saddam's military was weakened by more than a decade of sanctions and a welcoming Iraqi population in the south
• 23 - There is a saying in Washington that you can done a lot done if you do not want credit for it. Rumsfield took the notion a step further. It was better that he not recieve credit. Rumsfield understood that there was political value in being able to stand at the Pentagon podium and say that the Bush admin was implementing the military's plan
• 27 - There was a gaping hole in the occupation annex of the plan. CENTCOM would have the responsibility of general security. But there was no plan for the political administration, restoration of basic services, training of police or reconstruction of Iraq. The civilian complement to the plan was never completed
• 32 - "Feith spies": It was highly unusual for CENTCOM's war planning team to include Rumsfield's aides. The civilian team from the defense secretary's office influenced planning by military officers
• 33 - Doug Macgregor was the first one to talk about a quick rush of American force to Baghdad, avoiding contact as much as possible with Iraqi forces. He channeled his views to Rumsfield through Newt Gingrich
• 35 - Rumsfield sends a note to Franks to review Shock and Awe, a study co-authored by Harlan K. Ulman and James P. Wade
• 51 - Bush asserts in late May that he had no war plans on his desk. Tommy Franks during the same time period, when asked about the number of troops for invasion of Iraq replies that he does not have a number because his boss has not yet asked him to put together a plan to do that. This was after almost 6 months had been spent discussion and preparing various war plans
• 54 - The British military leadership is uncomfortable with the half-baked war plans presented to them but the British civilian leadership attitude is more faith based. Faith in Bush's and his administration's competency that is. They stake their support on the belief that the US would not take the momentous step of invading and occupying Iraq unless it was persuaded that it had a winning plan
• 55 - Saddam was not looking for a war with the US and he was not expecting one either. His main concern was threat from within - the Shiitte uprising and then Iran. US was a distant third.
  
• 56 - "Iraqi Perspectives" - a study done by US Joint Forces Command provides an unvarnished view of how the Iraqi leadership managed its military establishment, sized up its foes, and prepared for war. It has not been made public.
• 57:59 - Cult of personality in Baghdad v/s cult of the new at Pentagon. At Pentagon the in thing for Rumsfield was to discard every war plan that was old and start fresh. In Baghdad, Saddam decreed that old plans were successful and nobody dared talk about new war strategy
• 71 - Bush, Rice and Powell meet over a long dinner on August 5th, 02 where Powell tells Bush that he had been receiving briefings about the war plan, but had not heard enough on what the aftermath might look like. When the US took out the Iraqi military it would be striking a blow at the institution that held the country together When the army cracked, the Iraqi government structure would crack and Bush would be the proud owner of 24 million people. This entire prognosis by Powell strikes at the very heart of the argument that hindsight is always 20-20. With the accuracy of an Oracle, Powell predicted the exact things that occurred later but in the fog of war and ideology, he might as well have been talking to himself.
• 82 - There was a profound and irreconcilable tension between Rumsfield's push to enact his principles of transformation by beginning the attack with a lean force and the administration's rationale for the war., disarming Iraq and preventing WMD from falling into the wrong hands.
• 158 - David Kay, the security expert who would later lead the CIA effort to investigate the mystery of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and who joined Garner's team as Mayer's boss resigned, determined to distance himself from a venture he concluded was headed for trouble. "I told Jay that it was headed for disaster," Kay disclosed. "There was a reluctance to divert resources to post-conflict maintenance of law and order and when you don't you get organized crime and political chaos"
• 164 - Tommy Franks shows opening scenes from The Gladiator to pump his commanders on the even of the war (March 14, 2003). Shock and Awe starts on March 21st at 9 pm
• 177 - As the war was waged, allied planes would carry out strikes against other time sensitive targets, including Chemical Ali. But not one of the top 200 figures in the regime was killed by an air strike. The US' recon, communications, and precision weapons gave it the capability to strike enemy leaders, and to strike quickly. But such attacks would be only as good as the intelligence they were based on, and as the opening night of the war demonstrated, that intelligence was often not reliable
• 197 - It was the first day of the war and already there was a rift between the allies (US and the British)
• 216 - "There'll be people who will tell you that you will see Iraqis waving flags and that you will greet them and shake their hand, but I have been in the city before and I tell you they are going to fight. We'll fight first and talk about it later.
• 311 - When he returned to camp Doha, McKiernan received an angry phone call from Franks at 5:25 p.m. Wallace had given a joint interview to the NYT and the Post the day before in which he had shared some of his concerns about the Fedayeen.
• 410 - As a result of Perkin's unexpected fight to the heart of Baghdad, McKiernan and Franks faced some new opportunities and decisions
• 497 - But President Bush and his team committed five grievous errors.
• 506 - The United States' hopes for a lightning victory were quickly dashed and it suffered mounting casualites
• 506 - None of this was inevitable. The US military commanders who battled their way to Baghdad and endured the long, hot summer of 2003 believed that there was a window of opportunity in the early weeks and months of the invasion, which was allowed to close. Though some degree of opposition was unavoidable, the virulent insurgency that emerged was not inevitable but was aided by military and political blunders in Washington
• 507 - For all this, the future of Iraq still hangs in the balance. The determination of American forces to fill the void left by the civilian poliycmakers and to engage the Iraqis, as well as fight the insurgents, has kept alive the hope of an outcome that would justify their sacrifice.