Explaining to the brain-dead what we already knew
ThinkProgress brings us this tidbit:
Given the [National Defense university's] ties to the Defense Department, it’s therefore significant that it has chosen to publish a withering critique of the Iraq [war] written by Joseph J. Collins, a former senior Pentagon official who served under Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz during the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Collins’s conclusions were based, in part, “on interviews with other former senior defense and intelligence officials who played roles in prewar preparations,” and were completed in fall 2007. From his study:
Measured in blood and treasure, the war in Iraq has achieved the status of a major war and a major debacle. […]
The war’s political impact also has been great. Globally, U.S. standing among friends and allies has fallen. Our status as a moral leader has been damaged by the war, the subsequent occupation of a Muslim nation, and various issues concerning the treatment of detainees. […]
To date, the war in Iraq is a classic case of failure to adopt and adapt prudent courses of action that balance ends, ways, and means. After the major combat operation, U.S. policy has been insolvent, with inadequate means for pursuing ambitious ends. It is also a case where the perceived illegitimacy of our policy has led the United States to bear a disproportionate share of the war’s burden.
No news to us there. But, the thought occurs to me:
We knew WTF we're talking about, and the folks that pushed for the war (and the folks at the top that ran the war) didn't. Not a f*cking clue did they have. Do we really need them to admit error to finally say that the obvious result was a disaster? Sure, it helps to get the "conservatives" (and other that supposedly "actually know something of these things") to do so as well, but why should it even be necessary; they were once wrong, and they can keep on being wrong as long as they want ... as long as we ignore them and anything they say, and make sure none of them ever gets near a position of responsibility again.
posted by Arne Langsetmo @ 10:16 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
"What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income – to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.
That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.
Now let me be clear – I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity.
He’s a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.
But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.
I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda."
Barack Obama, 2002
He pretty much got it.
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