George W. Bush is an arrogant idiot

I've been reading some new books about Iraq lately. One is Cobra II, written by a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general (the three-star kind of general) and a NY Times military correspondent, who go into excruciating and well-researched detail about the missteps of the Bush Administraton and senior brass. They don't seem to have set out to make Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and company look like aggressively uninformed dolts but that's the impression they leave. "Make no mistake about that," as Dubyah likes to say.

To summarize a long story, Bush went into Iraq with several objectives and failed at all except the toppling of Saddam. They sent a barely sufficient number of troops. The success of our troops, and our U.K. allies, is a tribute to the fighting spirit of our professional Army and Marine Corps. The CIA and military intelligence continually gave no useful information or gave false reports. George Washington knew as much about the location of the British Army as our field commanders knew about the Iraqis, which is to say, practically nothing.

Bush, et al., failed to understand the religious and ethnic subtleties of the people of Iraq. They failed to anticipate the Fedayeen resistance and failed to pay sufficient attention to them. They expected parades but our troops got showered with bullets and rocket propelled grenades. Once Saddam fled the city, Bush and the top brass believed the war was over, despite the fact that we were still engaged in combat in large areas of Iraq. Like the dog who chased cars until he caught one and didn't know what to do with it, they had no plan for the day after the war ground to a conclusion. Almost immediately, they began talking of bringing the troops home. They brought the experienced field commanders home and sent in replacements. They halted the influx of new military units. Keeping the peace in Iraq requires more troops than were needed to fight their way into Baghdad, because manpower is necessary to control the borders, man checkpoints, halt looting, engage in civil affairs, and keep the economy running.

In short, there was a window open in which to bring some semblance of democracy to Iraq but it was squandered by decisions to cancel an election, dissolve the Iraqi army (leaving thousands of men unemployed), and "de-Baathisize" the public institutions such as schools and universities to the point that they were crippled. That window is slammed shut.

So, now what? "Cut and run?" That was how we left Viet Nam but this part of the world is much more incendiary. We need to stay the course but do it more intelligently. Republicans ask, do the Democrats have better alternatives? That's a fair question, and in return I ask, do the Republicans have alternatives better than what we have seen to date? We have to wait until 2008 or later to find out, sad to say.