MidEast Report

SOME GOOD SENSE
from Andrew Sullivan:
"It's worth saying here what we now know the president got wrong - badly wrong. There were never enough troops to occupy Iraq. The war-plan might have been brilliant, but the post-war plan has obviously been a failure. We needed more force and we needed more money sooner. The president has no excuses for not adjusting more quickly to this fact: he was told beforehand; he was told afterward; but he and the Defense Secretary were too pig-headed to change course. I still favor the war; but I cannot excuse the lapses and failures of the administration in the post-war. Yes, this was always going to be very very hard. And yes, Iraq was slowly imploding under Saddam and some version of what we are now witnessing was inevitable - and, without the war, it would have happened without our stabilizing presence. Yes, balancing keeping order and winning hearts and minds is not an easy operation to pull off. But with the troop levels we maintained - especially given the limited international support - we made things far harder than they might have been, and our beleaguered troops are dealing with the aftermath. We can still win this. We must still win this. But the president is in part responsible for making it even harder than it might have been."

In addition to having too few troops, the Bush Gang screwed up when they disbanded the Iraqi Army, thereby leaving thousands of unemployed, armed, bored men to wander the streets and eventually either turn to crime or hook up with an insurgent militia, or both. The hasty process of de-Ba'athification was also a mistake, throwing out thousands of government bureaucrats in the interest of making a clean break from the Saddam Hussein regime, but then having no potential replacements or any realistic plan to train them. Giving ex-Ba'athists a stake in a new, free Iraq would've probably been a good idea. Instead, many ex-Ba'athists have come to believe that a democratic Iraq is something to be feared.

posted by Matt Duss @ 11:40 AM