"...was the betrayal by our ally Turkey, which no one could reasonably have expected.
Turkey did not "betray" the U.S.
It was a major miscalculation on Rummy's part, if he thought the Turks would go along with the idea.
Hell, I could have told you that the Turks's wouldn't be able to afford, politically, an entire U.S., heavy armoured division,
with scores of tanks, hundreds of vehicles, and ten thousand+ U.S. soldiers
to transit their nation, on the way to attack a neighboring Islamic nation.
Any idea to the contray, is just flat-out IGNORANT!
(and yes, I'm freely insulting scores of freepers, and the pentagon brass, too. bronx cheers loudly offered to you all...)
I used the word "betray" advisedly. The Generals did not just refuse to let us through. First they held out for a large aid payment. Then they pretended that someone in parliament had acted unexpectedly. Then they dragged things out, while the whole division sat on ships offshore. Then after the war started, they finally said "no." As a result that whole division had to come all the way around to the gulf and was more than a week getting to the fighting.
They could have just refused from the start. Or they could have secretly advised Bush that they couldn't afford to do it. Instead, they made things just as bad as they could by their behavior. My personal theory is that Chirac got to them and bribed them with an offer to get them into the EU if they helped him out. No way to know that, of course, but their behavior couldn't have been more damaging.