To my previous post, commenter Cairncross wrote:
...it takes some chutzpah to accuse Bush of doing everything badly, given that Mr Tomasky and his ilk were so very eager to declare defeat in Iraq. Had it not been for Bush, that defeat might have become a reality...
Oh come now. Iraq was going catastrophically for four-and-a-half years. And whose fault was that again? I understand that it's fun to lob grenades at opponents of the invasion, but the way I remember it, not a single liberal of my "ilk" was involved in the planning and the prosecution of the war.
In other words: the war was botched by the people who started and executed it. Bush and Rummy were told repeatedly that it would need around 400,000 soldiers. Bah -- 130,000 is plenty. Bush and Paul Bremer were told repeatedly (and quite often by liberal critics, who were not just on the sideline screaming about American imperialism but were actually engaged in the specific debates of the time) that dismantling the Iraqi army and de-Baathification would prove to be errors. There were longstanding rules of thumb about pacification and fighting insurgencies that were ignored with blithe insouciance.
The people who messed up the war were the people who waged it. Period. So Bush finally settled on a strategy that produced some results. Good, but historically small recompense for the fact that things went so horribly in the first place only because he and his people were such ignorami. And yes, they messed it up like just about everything they touched. There is so little debate on this question that one is left to admire Cairncross's willingness to swim against the tide in a way.
