What will it take to get the full incompetency of Bush vis-a-vis Iraq across?

That's the most succint and OTM critique of Bush's war I've yet heard.

I wonder what DOES Stuart think now, wherever he is. He can't believe that things were as he was claiming, not anymore.

No one in Europe can possibly believe that the Americans would elect Bush, but then you just have to remind them that certain states still teach creationism. Their jaws usually drop, but then they understand all.

It's shocking to think that so much information and incontrovertible evidence could not sway people to at least reconsider their allegiance in this election. It's somewhat heartening to hear that some of the neocons are appalled at the ways things went down in Iraq, but to me, that just strengthens their resolve.

I'm glad I'm nowhere near the place and getting farther away soon.

This is so late in the game it deserves a kick in the pants rather than kudos. Plus it's delivered by an anonymoid when there is no reason to grant anonymity for something so obvious a reporter could say it.

"Catastrophic success" is another invented term to rationalize why things have cocked up so royally. "Catastrophic success" -- that's a description for the result when the strongest military in the world goes through a decrepit patsy like Iraq in two weeks? Fire the man who came up with that. Going in, anyone with even a shred of sense knew armored divisions were going to be in Baghdad in about ten days. The Wehrmacht had more trouble with Poland.

The stupid assumption everyone bought is that war would be over when you've overrun the foe's capitol. Even Nazi Germany planned better.

Here, "The Complete Idiot's Guide to War:"

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0314/smith.php

Everyone has a short memory but the attitude for war was best described as one of overwhelming glee. And the people planning and conducting it where hailed as whiz-bangs by the media until it turned bad. Example, Jay Garner, the first tool sent to oversee the puppet state right after capitulation was backslapped and applauded as a
virtual Doug McArthur in post war Japan. Then when it blew up in his face, he was out of there before the paint was dry in the Green Zone.

What I simply don't understand is the silence of so many who supported this war about the appalling amateurism with which it has been conducted.

Sullivan. What does this sissy crap mean? There was an appetite for this war that would not be denied. The mainstream media was complicit. Anyone who thought different before it started was suppressed or relegated to the fringe. There's a lot of embarrassment working as well as a desire to rewrite what went down. If one is going to throw around the term "amateurism" rather than "gross miscalculation" or "big-time errors," it describes things only in a shallow way. Perhaps it would be more sophisticated to compare the national strategy-making to something, like, say, the psychology at work when the Fuhrer handed out directives to his general staff for the Russian Front.

"The military's plan to defeat Saddam's army worked brilliantly and American troops have distinguished themselves on the battlefield.

Iraq's military never had even the slightest chance against the Pentagon. It had been mauled in the first war and no longer had any capability to defend itself from US air power. They could not move significant heavy divisions or conduct counter-offensives, even tactical retreats, without having them shot up. Even when they weren't moving, they were shot up and bombed.

The US military did what it was supposed to do. The tendency to have to hand out praise at every opportunity shows they still have problems with being critical of the national aim.

However, the review found that the president and many of his advisers ignored repeated warnings that rebuilding Iraq would be harder than ousting Saddam and tossed out years of planning about how to rebuild Iraq, in part because they thought pro-American Iraqi exiles and Iraqi "patriots" would quickly pick up the pieces.

This was said before and during the war and when it was printed, if it did at all, was usually relegated to poor play inside. Post action reviews by the same news organs that perpetrated the fraud in the first place don't deserve much credit. Politically, I would think that that half of the nation which supports Bush knows this on a gut level and find these things more to be self-serving than convincing.

The CIA predicted up until the war's opening days that the Iraqi
army would turn against Saddam, which never happened.

This entertains the fancy that the CIA is reliable and that its intelligence was trusted or should be trusted, at some point. People who work with the unclassified product and culture of the CIA knew before the war that the intelligence apparatus was broken. They advised caution. Again, most were ignored by the media for the sake of war glee and the stories about wonder weapons and victory.

Y'know, it's certainly appropriate that such news analyses run. But they're not that good and I'm not convinced they have much effect
anymore. Maybe I'm wrong. But this kind of work could have been done more than a year ago and had greater impact if vigorously pursued.

So fuck Knight-Ridder.

So do I.