[Doug Loss]

I’m surprised that no one has mentioned the fact that there was a detailed plan for the post-victory administration of Iraq, and that Jerry Bremer threw it out entirely. Now why he wasn’t immediately sacked and someone put in who would enact the plan, I have no idea.

[Defiant]

One of Bush's big mistakes was he let the State Dept. win the power struggle to administer Iraq, at a time when the Defense Dept. was doing a great job of it. I think Powell must have put his foot down, and Bush made a political decision not to lose Powell as he was heading into an election. He needed to stay firm on that. I would never have let those pinheads into Iraq, except as minions processing applications.

Of course, this goes hand in hand with his failure to clean out the State Dept. in the first place. Had it been a decent set of foreign policy experts, headed by a Jeanne Kirkpatrick or a John Bolton with a group of young, conservative intellectuals doing the policy work, we could potentially have trusted the Dept. But we instead had Powell, that bald sucker Armitage and a bunch of people who claimed expertise, but were just Dem and leftist hacks.