Wow! "I'm not sure anything went wrong?... War plans are moot the moment the war begins?" Moot? Just because our military entered Baghdad quickly doesn't mean the war was a success. I have heard nobody on the left suggest that we would not be able to get into Baghdad easily. Generals do not just "guess" what will happen going into war, they "plan" based on war games and history. Apparently, every "guess" that they made after the initial invasion was just a "bad guess". Whoops!!! That could happen to anyone. But nothing went wrong.

Leftybydesign

For those who are interested, here's a URL to the Frontline documentary The Lost Year In Iraq.

Another great piece of documentary journalism from Frontline, and a valuable source of facts on how we got to where we are today... and how things will be even worse tomorrow.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/yeariniraq/view/

The pre-war planning that anticipated 5,000 US troops Iraq by 2006 was also predicated on the Iraqi army having assumed -- successfully -- the responsibility for security and order in Iraq. But look what happened as soon as L.Paul Bremer took charge of the CPA: he disbanded formally and with finality the Iraqi army. Thus, the very mechanism that was essential to the drawdown of the US forces was eliminated by a pen sroke. The White House press corps missed this, as have the bloggers of this story.

Who ordered the disbanding of the Iraqi army is (almost) a mystery. Bremer said "Washington ordered it" alluding to Don Rumsfled, as DoD was the agency responsible for the CPA. But when asked, Rumsfeld said that the directive came from "above my paygrade." But by all accounts, Bush was surprsed by the order. The only individual between Bush and Rumsfeld was Cheney. Who has never addressed this issue (and why haven't the press pressed him on it?).

But in the official chain of command, there is NO ONE between the SecDef and the president. So the one question crying out of clarity is, Why or how did someone NOT in the chain of command give such an order and why did not the president know of it in advance? Does make one wonder who was really running the war.

Finally, the military planning for only 5000 troops was also deceptive: DoD always had plans to turn four Iraqi airbases into US facilities to facilitate deployments in the Mid-East, requiring at least 40,000 US forces to man these bases.

This is exactly what Rove's pupils are brilliant at: choosing the vocabulary, setting the terms of the debate. And who can blame them, it's a great tactic. But it never would have worked, from day one, if they hadn't had a lazy, uncritical and careless mainstream media machine to parrot their words, regurgitate their press releases, treat their straw men and diversions as front page news, take a big fat pass on the hard work of seeking out and publishing the truth. For my money, there's our weakness as a nation; had the press done its job, the scam wouldn't have worked.

I hesitated to post this, thinking it might be too blunt. After reading other letters it will be in good company.

What I want to know about Mr. Snow is if he has to live on a diet of pure shit in order to spew so much of it every day and never run out. Of course, if so, most of this administration is on the same diet.

Here we let the administration set the agenda. Over and over the meme that is now repeated by Republicans and Democrats alike, is that the war has been mismanaged. This blows by everything else that should be on the agenda. The Downing Street Memo, the outing of Valerie Plame to counter dissent, the manipulation of intel, the theft of billions of dollars, the sacking of Iraq, the failure of congress, the failure and complicity of the media, the erosion of constitutional rights, domestic spying, war crimes, the crime of war itself, not supplying troops with armor, not admitting that Iraq has been in a civil war since the day we invaded, the ruse of pretending that foreign jihadis are running the insurgency, the rise in power of the military complex, the death and maiming of countless human beings...and on and so on. Instead, the agenda of Iraq, as set by the administration, as regurgitated by the press, is the mismanagement of the war. Mismanagement of the war. Think about that. Mismanagement of the war.

It is as if they had "managed" the war correctly, then all of the above would fade into the ether.

The question is, should you saddle any military planner with an expectation that they're going to have perfect insight into what happens five years later?

When they get you into a clusterfuck that is rightly called the worst strategic blunder in US history, why, yes you should.

If nothing has gone wrong, then that says something about the loyalty of those who got us into this mess, that they intended to deplete our military and our treasury to no purpose, just as we led the Soviet Union into the "Afghan trap" in the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski. Interestingly, many people predicted precisely where we are today. Those in government who did so were fired. The rest of us who did so were out in the street being mocked by the likes of Tony Snow.

Give it up, joe, you must know you are defending the indefensible...

Yeah, Tony, it's just like the Civil War, excep now the confederates are in the White House, and the war in eye-rack has gone just as millions predicted: quagmire, civil strife, anarchy, insurgencies as far as the eye can see. Death and debt: the Bush legacy. Smarmy Tony Snowjob is disgusting, just as you'd expect from a fuxxsnooze reichwing mediawhore graduate.

The big problem with Snow's comments are that everything that has gone wrong was predicted before the war started by intelligent people who's job it was TOO predict it. And the people who predicted it were fired because it wasn't the rosey fuckin' picture the draft dodgers wanted to hear. Whoever is unwilling to acknowledge that isn't just intellectually dishonest, they are unpatriotic traitors who want to see more troops die in order for their dear leader to save face.

Go crawl under your fucking bed you chicken shit little cowards before the islamofascists come to get you. Silly fucking cowards.

The stupid reporters follow-up question should have been: But what about the fact that everything that has happened since the war began WAS predicted by people who were summarily fired?