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The Anniversary

6 Comments

It’s hard to believe that it’s been seventeen years. Glenn Reynolds has some links and thoughts. Yes, Barack Obama was feckless, but part of the reason we got him was due to the fecklessness of George Bush, and the mismanagement of Iraq. I thought at the time the administration had a strategic plan for the Middle East, but I was wrong.

[Update a while later]

Here’s a lot more.

6 thoughts on “The Anniversary”

  1. The USA usually wins its wars but loses the peace on account of boredom. For example, the South was given back to the Confederates little more than a decade after it was liberated.

  2. The South was “liberated”? What an interesting point of view.

    Rand, it does seem a lot longer than seventeen years to me. Not sure the administration had a plan for the middle east, but apparently the warmongers in the deep state did.

    1. “The South was “liberated”? What an interesting point of view.”

      I’m sure you’re thinking in terms of systems of government, but in South Carolina and Mississippi, at the eve of the Civil War, enslaved people outnumbered free people, which makes “liberated” seem quite appropriate, and makes various theories about federalism seem rather beside the point.

  3. “I thought at the time the administration had a strategic plan for the Middle East, but I was wrong.”

    The problem was that the Administration had *two* plans. One from the DoD, and one from Saudi Arabia, through the US State Department. The DoD plan would have handed over to a US-organized “Government-in-Exile” (GIE) under the Iraqi National Congress by May of 2003, and had US Forces leaving by 2005. Unfortunately, the State Dept. was assigned to prepare this GIE by March of 2003. State delayed that, because they favored the Saudi Plan. The Saudi plan excised any democratic regime in Iraq, which they feared worse than Saddam, and established a US-run colonial regime. The delay of the State Dept. in setting up the GIE, so that its first conference in the US did not happen till January of 2003, allowed State to pronounce in June that a purely Iraqi Regime was simply not possible.

    Thus, the plan that preserved Saudi options was followed, with draw-down of US Forces still planned for 2006. We know the result, as Al Zarqawii described in his letter to Bin Laden, that we created a fine opportunity for him to drown Iraq in blood. That opportunity being the US colonial regime that the Saudis felt more comfortable with.

  4. My great great grandfather and two of his brothers fought in the Union army in the Civil War. The eldest of the three was killed in combat.

    Somehow I doubt any of them would give a damn what today’s leftists think about the war they fought in.

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