Subsequently, as the American troops had captured the Iraqi capital Baghdad and later when Saddam Hussein's last stronghold in Tikrit expected a lot of the primarily military operations in the Iraq war was over. It did not take long before the security situation in Iraq got critical as the chaotic conditions that had led to extensive robberies in Bagdad gradually also had evolved into actual insurgency against the American coalition. May 2003 Paul Bremer took leadership of Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), an institution that was founded to administer Iraq and coordinate the reconstruction efforts. Two of Bremer's first decisions was controversial. One of the decisions was to exclude former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath-party (De-Ba’thification) from holding office and a decision to abolish the Iraqi army. These two decisions highly contributed to the turbulence that had already spread in Iraq and kept on getting worse, which subsequently led to an insurgency that cost a lot of lives and resources.
In the following debate, many have explained the problem with the lack of developments of plans for the coalition to deal with Iraq after the end of major combat operations. However, that was not the case. Plans had been made to tackling the postwar Iraq and a lengthy amount of institutions had been involved in these assignments. In the following thesis, the planning and the process of planning the stabilization and rebuilding before the Iraq war will be analyzed to obtain a better and more nuanced understanding of what created the problems in Iraq.
Throughout the thesis’ analysis, I will find that the planning process did predict many of the problems that occurred and to a certain extent how these issues were to be dealt with. However, the evolvement of the plans was largely influenced by political and institutional power struggles, which interrupted the process and thus played a role in creating the chaotic conditions. Moreover, it appears that it was never fully possible to coordinate the planning that took place in many different institutions even though the president had approved the creation of an office for that precise purpose. Due to the different political wishes and the institutional evaluation of how the situation in Iraq needed to be dealt with after the postwar face, the planning ended with being fragmented and rushed. This contributed to creating the chaotic unrest in Iraq that evolved into a costly and bloody insurgency.