After being warned in a discussion about chemical weapons, Willy Pete, by a commentator elsewhere that "Those guys at Kos and the European media are untrustworthy", I posed the following. Just food for thought.
I have no doubt that parties spin things in their own direction. But in Iraq, it looks to me like we really did make serious mistake after serious mistake, many piled on top of one another. My guess would be there were three main factions arguing for a war in Iraq:
- The Neocons who were enamored with the idea of speeding up democratically based capitalism using fast strike, high tech forces
- The business faction which foresaw energy and other investment/high return opportunities in the environment the neocons said they could create with minimum expense
- The political faction which sensed high approval ratings and the continuation of the War Administration image which had served them well after 9-11
Each of these viewpoints hyped their own forecasted abilities/results and downplayed their own shortcomings, they engaged in a sort of group snow job on one another. And those views were fanned by folks like Chalabi and Shia/Iranian elements. Each of our three factions fell so in love with one another's ideas they simply tuned out any dissent. Up to and including going after dissenters anyway they could. And Bush was loyal to them all, although exactly how loyal they've been to him, how much their efforts were centered on the interests of the Presidency, is a serious question. The loyalty shouldn't flow exclusively from the top to subordinates, it should flow the other way and it should flow more strongly up than down. And it is my guess that that wasn't the case. I think Bush got used up, down, and sideways by Cheney, Rummy, and the whole GOP apparatus: Afterall, it isn't the Senators or Congressmen who will pay the price so much, at least not in terms of their own agenda for the time being, if Bush goes down in flames over this.
Thing is, they were all wrong. Although note-the business interest got part of what they hoped for, and the neocons got to try out their pet theory. But Bush got screwed because in the end it was an expensive bloody slide down a razor blade and the blame for that will land squarely on him in the end.
We are absolutely fucked now. No matter what we do, no matter what happens, no matter who takes the reigns, we will be blamed for any shit that goes wrong in Iraq or nearby regions for the next twenty years at least. And if anything goes right, you can bet we won't get a shred of credit for it in that area or anywhere else outside of the US.
To even begin to get out of this, the President needs to kick Cheney, Rummy, the whole fucked up self-serving cabal, right out on their asses and out of his political life. Will he do that? The winged primates in rectums across the world aren't warming up their airfoils just yet.