As we mark the three year anniversary of the Iraq debacle, it
is important to remember what was being said by the war cheerleaders. Who can forget this:
We're all neo-cons now. Chris Matthews - 2003
Now, three years after the Iraqis forgot to greet us with flowers, the administration is shocked, shocked I tell you, at the intensity of the insurgency. They say that no one anticipated the levees...ummmm...the level of violence that we have seen in Iraq. But the first ever embedded reporter got it...and wrote about it in 1919:
"Mesopotamia is a sinister, pestilential land. Not only has she devoured her own empires and kingdoms born of the soil, Ur of the Chaldees, the Assyrian Niveneh, three dynasties of Babylon, Ctesiphon of the Chosres; she has laid her blight on the greatest Empires of the West. It was in the malarious swamps of the Euphrates that Alexander caught the fever that cut short his life; it was at Ctesiphon that Julian and his Roman legions lost the Empire in the East."
And if Edmund Candler was alive today, he would have been dismissed as another moonbat with a pre-9/11 mindset.
Of course we don't have to go back 87 years to find people who understood the many obstacles in overthrowing Saddam
Hussein:
If you're going to go in and try to topple Saddam Hussein, you have to go to Baghdad. Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you do with it. It's not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that's currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists? How much credibility is that government going to have if it's set up by the United States military when it's there? How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?
Those were the words of Dick "a-malfunctioning-heartbeat-away" Cheney in 1991. Eighty-seven years ago, Edmund Candler knew Iraq was unwinnable and 16 years ago, Dick Cheney knew it too. The events of the past three years bear out the truth of their words.