Downing Street Redux

Whiskey Bar only has limited use for this Post article (and have I mentioned only some thousand times or so that I highly respect Billmon?)--but I'll go with half a loaf being better than none at all:

A briefing paper prepared for British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers eight months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq concluded that the U.S. military was not preparing adequately for what the British memo predicted would be a "protracted and costly" postwar occupation of that country.

The eight-page memo, written in advance of a July 23, 2002, Downing Street meeting on Iraq, provides new insights into how senior British officials saw a Bush administration decision to go to war as inevitable, and realized more clearly than their American counterparts the potential for the post-invasion instability that continues to plague Iraq.

In other words, the expectation in Britain was that there would be more than "just one vase."

The fact that the Post made this a front page article suggests--at least to me--that a tiny crack might be appearing in the walls of fortress Bush. However, as plenty of others note, don't expect the media lap dogs to turn into the hounds of hell any time soon. They are as invested (embedded?) in the operation as deeply as the neo-cons, and continue to do their utmost to deny that a shitstorm is raging in Mesopotamia--either by the traditional propaganda technique of simply NOT REPORTING on said shitstorm, or, when required to adopt more flexible techniques, pretending that reporting has been done (hence, Russert's reference to "the famous memo," i.e., the original Downing Street document, which was so famous that NBC hadn't bothered to mention it previously).

Now, I for one am moderately surprised that Iraq turned so ugly, so fast. But I was under the assumption that the military was planning for something more akin to Gulf War I, at least in terms of numbers of soldiers involved. Which wouldn't have made the war any less illegal, but WOULD have made it decidedly less LETHAL for 1700 soldiers, at least 20-25 thousand Iraqis (and maybe a lot more). That said, I also figured that eventually we would've pissed off enough people eventually to ensure the formation of a violently anti-American nation, just as the CIA covert op that restored the Shah had what they call a major "blowback" some 25 years after the fact. In other words, pay now or pay later.

Team Bush apparently never considered the costs. Britain did, and after reading the article, I'm surprised Blair was so enthusiastic about the project. And, of course, the piece contains a most unsurprising account of the mule headed hubris of the neo-cons, in this case Paul Wolfowitz once again showing a remarkable capacity for consuming shoe leather:

Testimony by then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, one of the chief architects of Iraq policy, before a House subcommittee on Feb. 28, 2003, just weeks before the invasion, illustrated the optimistic view the administration had of postwar Iraq. He said containment of Hussein the previous 12 years had cost "slightly over $30 billion," adding, "I can't imagine anyone here wanting to spend another $30 billion to be there for another 12 years." As of May, the Congressional Research Service estimated that Congress has approved $208 billion for the war in Iraq since 2003.

$208 billion dollars could do an awful lot if spent HERE in the US instead of going into Operation-Where's-the-Money-Going? But the memo shows that nation building, which is what Bush wrought with his foolhardy invasion, isn't exactly on the neo-con radar screen. And when all is said and done, I think we'll find some rather odd spending decisions, particularly considering that there were/are genuinely real needs for the soldiers sent off on this task--needs being met with hillbilly armor instead of anything resembling a plan.

Then again--they're called the Mayberry Machiavellis.