In its five years, the war in Iraq has revealed a remarkable contrast. On the one hand, there’s the impressive performance of the troops on the ground. On the other, there is the incompetence of those who sent them there.

Up to now, that second point has mostly been made by those labeled war critics. But this week, the Army itself came out with a major report essentially saying the critics are right.

It didn’t use the word “incompetence,” but it might as well have. In short, the 700-page report, titled “On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign,” said there was a rush to war with almost no planning to secure the peace, and negligent decisions — like disbanding the Iraqi military — that led to the instability and violence that continues there today.

I’m writing about the report because I’d have expected it to make a bigger splash. If you Google the recent Obama-Clinton rally in Unity, N.H., you’ll find over 5,500 stories. When I Googled the Army report, I found about 350.

I suppose that’s in part because of so-called Iraq fatigue, in part because the same points have been made often by pundits, authors and even retired military.

It’s almost astonishing now to see the Army itself echo the critics’ claims.

To those who may think I’m one more critic, I actually supported this war at first. I remember early on wanting to feel it was being done right, but even as I wrote columns cheerleading the effort soon after Baghdad’s fall, there were signs that made me wonder what was going on over there. Or rather — what was going on with the people over here running the war.

Remember the looting that followed the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime? I wondered, as does this new report, why Washington let it go on for days. Anyone with a television could see this wasn’t just a few folks grabbing things from stores, it was a catastrophic stripping of everything of value. I later talked to a soldier returning from an Iraq tour who said that even window frames were torn out.

Strangely, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld shrugged off the looting. But every hour of it cost Americans billions to restore the damage. Perhaps more important, it made the Iraqi middle class lose faith in America’s ability to maintain order.

The report says our leadership assumed things would quickly stabilize in Iraq as they did after the war in Bosnia and Kosovo. That’s another way of saying there was no planning for what to do after Saddam’s fall.

It seems incomprehensible, since the stated goal was not just the removal of Saddam but the establishment of democracy in a nation that had never experienced it. Yet I remember talking to a reporter who’d been embedded with U.S. troops. He said a front-linelieutenant told him off the record that he had no instructions — zero — on what to do next once he got to Baghdad. Indeed, the new report says the leadership believed post-combat Iraq would need “only a limited commitment by the U.S. military.”

It was a false assumption, one of many mentioned in the new report.

Like the dismissal of the Iraqi army. Others have said this was a huge mistake that instantly created tens of thousands of disaffected, armed, resentful Sunnis ripe for recruitment by the insurgency. Apparently, no one on high worried about that, or seemingly worried about much at all.

I remember another early sense of dread when stories came out about ammunition dumps not being secured. The report cites this as a mistake, too, and it’s not just Monday morning quarterbacking to say it should have been done. You’d think that would be a major priority — taking control of the very arsenal just used against us.

Instead, the whole focus was on weapons of mass destruction, in part for the political reason of proving the administration’s premise for the war. Many troops were sent probing everywhere for any sign of them, even a few drums of poison chemicals. Yet almost no troops were assigned to secure the greater threat posed by weapons of the traditional kind. So those arsenals were ignored, and looted — and not just by a few Baathists grabbing rifles. People backed up trucks and drove off with huge caches of weapons for the insurgents to use against us.

I also wondered, as the country fell apart into warring factions, why the White House didn’t anticipate that. Let me put it in the words of an Arab American I talked with who predicted the invasion would lead to a mess. He told me that people in the region often say Iraqis are “crazy.” Of course, it’s not fair to paint a whole country with that brush, and he didn’t meant it that broadly. But he did mean, as the last five years have shown, that ancient hatreds there are so deep, divisions between sects so fierce, that many were and are obsessed more with score-settling and power-grabbing than building a new nation.

And why didn’t leadership take a moment to look at a map and realize, oh yes, Iran — they’re the ones who do have weapons of mass destruction, and worrisome intentions, and Iraq has long been a counterbalance to that. Yet we chose to take away that counterbalance, and turn Iraq into a Shiite-dominated nation leaning toward our greater nemesis.

Finally, despite pre-war efforts to link Saddam to al-Qaida, it turns out he felt threatened by them. So he had been doing our work keeping al-Qaida from turning Iraq into its new base. Now that’s our work.

By “our” I mean our troops. The Army, with admirable candor, has said the men and women on the ground are shouldering a far greater burden, and have paid a big price, because of bad planning from on high.

Those who criticized the war have often had their patriotism questioned. They’re told they don’t support the troops. I think they do.

Far more than our leadership has.

mpatinkin@projo.com