What Wolcott Says

James Wolcott, as usual, has a way with words when it comes to the Iraq fiasco:

I was skeptical about the claims and rationales for the war in Iraq, and three years later I don't think such skepticism was unjustified. Today we learned that the search for WMDs is being wrapped up with no evidence of banned weapons being discovered. Now [Roger] Simon has posted that the WMD threat was never the primary reason he supported the war. That may be. But that's how it was sold to the American people with scare talk to convince us that we must act now before it was Too Late and, as Condi Rice said more than once, the next smoking gun turned out to be a mushroom cloud. And again and again warbloggers would pounce upon a discovery of this mobile lab or that stash of shells or that trace of ricin and say aha! here they are, why aren't the MSM reporting this?--only to learn a few days later this was rusty material left over from the Iran-Iraq war...

Jim Lobe, delving into a 220 page report from the Defense Science Board regarding the preplanning for the war, writes:

"Before the war, the Pentagon civilians, who were backed by Vice President Dick Cheney, sought to exclude the State Department or the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from postwar planning and operations largely because of their belief that the two agencies would promote Sunni Arab nationalists in the place of Saddam Hussein. They, on the other hand, supported exile leader Ahmed Chalabi, a secular Shi'ite who, they believed, was committed to a thorough de-Ba'athification of Iraq and staunch alignment with the U.S. and even Israel.

"They also believed Chalabi's repeated assurances that U.S. troops would be greeted as 'liberators' by virtually all Iraqis, rather than as 'occupiers' and so planned to quickly draw down the 140,000 troops who invaded the country to only about 30,000 by early 2005."

Well, we've seen how well that panned out. Pessimism, schmessifism. It doesn't matter if the glass is half-empty or half full if the glass is filled with blood needlessly shed.

And now we've got to figure out a way to both get out of Iraq AND clean up the mess we've created (well, as to the latter, I'm hoping some folks recognize our culpability in that respect). That's not all that easy--to paraphrase Alistair Horne (and yes, I'm STILL trying to get through his very long history of the Algerian War), wars often continue on far longer than they should, killing more people, because leaders simply can't figure out a way to cease hostilities while at the same time saving face (and that's very loose paraphrase--if anyone requests, I can put the exact quote in comments, once I get home).

Given what we know about Team Bush, I think it's a pretty safe bet that the whole saving face thing is a lot more significant to them than the deaths of additional soldiers and civilians. To be honest, I also think they couldn't give a shit about the destruction they've brought about in Iraq, and most likely will wind up blaming the Iraqis themselves.

What a waste.