Posted by
GROG on Friday, December 01, 2006 12:38:52 PM
Wouldn't be great if we could just go back in time to late 2002, early 2003 and do it all over again?
Maybe we'd do it right this time.
But what would the right way to do it be? Was the mistake when President Bush adopted Rumsfeld's strategy to push with all haste to Baghdad, leaving few troops to guard the rear?
The problem was that this war was sold as being one that wouldn't require much sacrifice. The experience of the first Gulf War led us to believe that few troops would die. At the same time, we were fighting the real war on terror in Afghanistan and refocusing even more troops on Iraq would have taken even more from that effort.
Or was the mistake when "Jerry" Bremer disbanded the Iraqi Army, depriving our occupation forces with a lethal force with the experience and will to put down Shia uprisings?
Clearly, the notion that we could just put the old guard back into power minus Saddam would be unpalatable to the American public who believed that we would "free Iraq." As the search for WMDs became more futile, it became even more politically unacceptable to not at the very least attempt to bring about substantive politcal change to Iraq.
No. These weren't mistakes in the context in which they were made. They were correct decisions given the paradigm of thought that prevailed in American society, promulgated by the administration and a host of pundits. America would be welcomed as liberators, not despised as occupiers.
The problem was the paradigm. We've got to rewind all the way to where that paradigm was first dreamed up. Back to the end of the Gulf War when Bush the First had the wisdom to call off the troops short of occupying Baghdad and being put in charge of rebuilding Iraq. That action dismayed a host of neoconservatives who made it their goal to right that wrong, to someday finish the job. It was this group, the PNAC, that came up with the fantasy that the US could depose Saddam Hussein and simply impose its own hand-picked successor on a divided Iraqi society.
That fantasy came to rule the not-too-discerning mind of our addled leader-in-chief. The fantasy was too heady for this president to resist. Any clear-headed analysis would see that deposing Saddam and establishing democracy in country that was majority Shia and inclined toward Iran would be a strategically wrongheaded move. Anybody knowing even the basics of Iraqi demographics would know that replacing Saddam would lead to a rupture of society: Shia vs. Sunni, Sunni vs. Kurd, etc., etc.
No the rewind has to go back to Bush. Bush was decieved into believing that this war was a wise war. The unfortunate truth is that our leader was not wise enough to smell a bad deal when it was put in front of him.
Now we're in the quicksand of Iraq with no clear way of getting out.