A COMPREHENSIVE LOOK AT US FAILURE IN IRAQ
Blueprint for a Mess

Required reading from the New York Times Sunday Magazine:

Despite administration claims, it is simply not true that no one could have predicted the chaos that ensued after the fall of Saddam Hussein. In fact, many officials in the United States, both military and civilian, as well as many Iraqi exiles, predicted quite accurately the perilous state of things that exists in Iraq today. There was ample warning, both on the basis of the specifics of Iraq and the precedent of other postwar deployments -- in Panama, Kosovo and elsewhere -- that the situation in postwar Iraq was going to be difficult and might become unmanageable. What went wrong was not that no one could know or that no one spoke out. What went wrong is that the voices of Iraq experts, of the State Department almost in its entirety and, indeed, of important segments of the uniformed military were ignored. As much as the invasion of Iraq and the rout of Saddam Hussein and his army was a triumph of planning and implementation, the mess that is postwar Iraq is a failure of planning and implementation.

This is a pretty long article, but worth your time, especially if you find yourself in arguments with people who still support the whole debacle but don't have access to the facts. Here are some subtitles from the article to whet your appetite:

1. Getting In Too Deep With Chalabi

2. Shutting Out State

3. Too Little Planning, Too Late

4. The Troops: Too Few, Too Constricted

5. Neglecting ORHA (The Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance)

6. Ignoring the Shiites

Clearly, US failure in Iraq is enormous, and the blame rests squarely on the shoulders of the White House. Check out our government's wild, gross negligence in all it's lurid detail by clicking here.

Thanks to Tom Tomorrow for the link.

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