I've been consistently saying the same thing since 2003. FR lost a lot of good people who were banned or self-exiled when they didn't toe the GWB line on foreign intervention. We warned that the U.S. involvement in the Middle East was going to be a disaster.
It had nothing to do with our own foresight, either. We had plenty of evidence to fall back on. Case in point:
"I think that the proposition of going to Baghdad is also fallacious. I think if we we're going to remove Saddam Hussein we would have had to go all the way to Baghdad, we would have to commit a lot of force because I do not believe he would wait in the Presidential Palace for us to arrive. I think we'd have had to hunt him down. And once we'd done that and we'd gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we'd have had to put another government in its place. What kind of government? Should it be a Sunni government or Shi'ite government or a Kurdish government or Ba'athist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable? I think it is vitally important for a President to know when to use military force. I think it is also very important for him to know when not to commit U.S. military force. And it's my view that the President got it right both times, that it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq." -- U.S. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, 4/29/91
After the U.S. invasion in 2003, Iraq turned out exactly the way Cheney predicted it would in 1991.
The GWB administration was filled with war criminals or incompetent baboons. Take your pick.
I'm no fan of Obama, but nobody who tries to push any blame for Iraq off on him knows what they're talking about.
Again, I respectfully disagree, and take umbrage to binning into those two choices. Decisions were made based on what was known at the time. Good people were involved in many of those decisions. I don't think its fair to paint all those who supported the troops during that post 911 time as they went forth to prevent such an attack from ever happening again as either criminals or baboons. As much as I have grown to dislike GWB in years since then, I am still grateful it was a Bush administration in place on 911 and not a Gore administration.