On the occasion of the three year anniversary of the biggest foreign policy blunder since the Vietnam War, the New York Times uses this milestone (or rather, mill stone)to speak the truth about Iraq:
Many who supported the invasion have taken this anniversary to argue that it all would have been worthwhile if things had been run better....
We doubt it. The last three years have shown how little our national leaders understood Iraq, and have reminded us how badly attempts at liberation from the outside have gone in the past. Given where we are now, the question of whether a botched invasion created a lost opportunity might be moot, except for one thing. The man who did the botching, Donald Rumsfeld, is still the secretary of defense.
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Chances are that at the time George W. Bush did not have an inkling of how badly he was being served by the decision makers at the Pentagon. But the fact that Mr. Rumsfeld continues to hold his job tells us that Mr. Bush doesn't care, that he prefers living in the same dream world that his secretary of defense inhabits.
Speaking of the secretary of defense....
the Times anticipated his
pathetic attempt to defend the indefensible, courtesy of the Washington Post, and issues a preemptive response:
In their wishful thinking, Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld undoubtedly tell themselves what they tell us: that the Iraqi people are better off than they were under the brutal dictator, that the Iraqi security forces are gradually learning how to take over defense of their own country and that a unified government is still a good possibility....It is hard to quantify relative degrees of misery and pain in these circumstances. But unlike the horrors of Saddam Hussein, the horrors of the present can be laid at America's doorstep.
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If the mission in Iraq was to create a stable democracy in the heart of the Middle East and inspire neighboring countries to follow the same path, the results have been crushingly bad ...
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The idea that Iraqi security forces are poised to take over the job of protecting the people in a unified country is almost ludicrous.
The rest of the editorial is behind the wall...but spread these words far and wide.