Posted on 03/18/2007 8:06:43 PM PDT by Torie
TOMORROW MARKS the fourth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, as appropriate a moment as any to take stock. What matters most is finding the best policy now -- doing whatever can be done to help Iraq and safeguard U.S. interests in a vital region. But looking back also is essential, particularly for those of us who supported the war.
We will never know what might have happened had Saddam Hussein and his sons been left in power. Nor do we know how Iraq will evolve; history's judgment in five years or 10 may look very different than today's. But the picture today is dire, and very different from what we would have hoped or predicted four years ago. The cost in lives, injuries and dislocations, to Americans and Iraqis, has been tragic; the opportunity costs for U.S. leadership globally have been immense. So there is an obligation to reassess. What have we learned?
The easy way out is to blame President Bush, Vice President Cheney or former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld: The decision was right, the execution wrong. There's no question that the execution was disastrous. Having rolled the dice on what everyone understood to be an enormous gamble, Mr. Bush and his team followed up with breathtaking and infuriating arrogance, ignorance and insouciance. Read Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran's account of the first year of occupation, "Imperial Life in the Emerald City," and weep at the tales of White House operatives sending political hacks to overhaul Baghdad's stock exchange and tinker with its traffic rules as a deadly insurgency gathered strength.
But the war might have spun out of control even under wiser leadership. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
As a sidebar, despite what I think are my rather skillful editing skills, in this case, such editing really cuts the guts out of the editorial. One reads to read the whole editorial before knee jerking. Copyright laws require one making the effort to click one's mouse on the link and and actually reading it, in its entirety. No pain, no gain.
You must have missed both of their editorials on the decision to strike down the DC gun law. Both were excruciating hissy fits.
Are they finally realizing that their current state of affairs and their bottom line, dictate that if for nothing else but financial reasons they embark on presenting the news in an unbiased manner.
It is just another pile of horsefeathers.
I do not agree with the half right half wrong meme.
The War has been a total success.
We have implemented democracy at an incredibly rapid pace.
We have met Al Qaeda in Iraq and destroyed thousands of its loyalists. More importantly, we have crushed them in the hearts and minds game of Iraq.
Iraqis will ALWAYS despise Al Qaeda and be eager to turn them in. They have seen the brutality of Al Qaeda.
Decisively defeating Al Qaeda in Iraq makes Iraq Al Qaeda's Vietnam. They promised to set up the Islamic caliphate in Iraq. They have clearly failed.
3500 casualties is extraordinarily low. Carl Levin predicted at least 10,000 dead in the first six months.
Oil production and elctrical production have all been drastically improved.
I see no need to compromise with the Bush haters who have focused on Iraq as their only issue.
This war has been a great success.
One must hope that that claim proves true in time. I doubt that it will, but I hope that time proves me a negative nabob of negativism.
OK here I go again. I thought invading Iraq in '03 didn't make a heck of a lot of sense and obviously I still don't today.I didn't see Iraq as the next most logical target in the war on terror and I still don't.That being said to pull out now would be extremely stupid and dangerous and I don't support it !!!
The war went well, but the occupation has indeed been disastrous.
The administration aimed from day one for the early withdrawal of troops from Iraq. They did not expect the total collapse of order and were unwilling to allow the exiles to set up an Iraqi government backed by American bayonets. For some reason, they chose not to follow the Afghan model. Instead we get the occupation government.
The occupation was unsuccessful except when it was sucessful. They an Iraqi government now exists is a success. My criticism is that an interim government was not set up in August, 2003. We lost a whole year.
IMO, we needed an Iarqi face on all that killing. Our stooges could have handed out the dough as effectively as Bremer. I am sure they know better how to bribe the sheiks than we do.
thank you! A well defined post.
Now will all the Monday morning quarterbacks please re read the histories of WWII, Korea, Vietnam, etc.
then compare 'occupations"...
SHEEEESH! Give it a break folks. you are all like Dimmies , kids in the back seat, "Are we there yet???"
You mean a nattering nabob of negativism. One of the all-time great putdown phrases.
What is my point? That nobody we sent over there, handed a difficult job they have all managed admirably and with telling effect, is to blame for the slightest particle of any of it. And that includes the higher ups directing. All of the blame belongs to chowderheads here at home, and I for one am not willing to forgive the least of them for the tiniest particle of any of it. Down to the last media addled housewife in Duluth who pulled the wrong lever last November.
They are all on my list.
Can't say everone if only because it was hard to get enough people to go. Bremer had a devil of a time getting qualified people to work in a war zone. DoD ended up providing most of those who went and that was never enough. Remember how the UNO people ran way after the carbomb in August, 2003. Most civil servants had no stomach for the danger.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.