Quote:
Originally Posted by Negotiator
Trying to remove the partisan antics here, it does seem like there's a catch-22 here. Either the Bush administration didn't know what they were getting into in Iraq, with comments like Rumsfeld's "Oh this'll be over in under a year" line and the MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner, or they knew and strung America along for whatever motives. Incompetency at best, deception at worst. As much as we need to move forward with the current situation and focus on "What do we do from here?" I think people are justified in their being ticked off. For 8 years we handed the keys to a guy who either didn't know what he was doing or lied to us by selling us a bill of goods and used over a half trillion dollars of our money in the process.
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Actually, a combination of both.
Deception to make the case that Iraq was an actual, immediate, threat to the security of the U.S. and incompetence in their astounding ignorance about the dynamics in Iraq that toppling Saddam Hussein would unleash.
The book is fairly dry reading, but
Squandered Victory by Larry Diamond gives insight into the unbelievable incompetence of the bush administration. Diamond was litterally begged by Condi Rice to go to Iraq in the fall of 2003 because it had finally dawned on the bush administration that establishing a democracry in Iraq was actually going to be a difficult task. Diamond was a Stanford professor who is an expert in early democracies.
What Diamond found in Iraq was just gross ignorance and incompetence throughout the entire Bush administration and their "plan" for Iraq, hence the title of the book.
Bush actually did believe, because his advisors told him so and he was too ignorant to know better, that the whole process of establishing a western leaning, Israeli-loving, democracy would take about 6-9 months.