Blueprint for a Mess: How the Bushies Bungled Iraq

[maha]

(Major New York Times magazine article)

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/magazine/02IRAQ.html

I have made two trips to Iraq since the end of the war and interviewed dozens of sources in Iraq and in the United States who were involved in the planning and execution of the war and its aftermath. It is becoming painfully clear that the American plan (if it can even be dignified with the name) for dealing with postwar Iraq was flawed in its conception and ineptly carried out. At the very least, the bulk of the evidence suggests that what was probably bound to be a difficult aftermath to the war was made far more difficult by blinkered vision and overoptimistic assumptions on the part of the war's greatest partisans within the Bush administration. The lack of security and order on the ground in Iraq today is in large measure a result of decisions made and not made in Washington before the war started, and of the specific approaches toward coping with postwar Iraq undertaken by American civilian officials and military commanders in the immediate aftermath of the war.

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.

[JeebusH]

1. and asshole Zell(out) is telling the country how wonderful ...

Dumbya is and how's he's the right man for the job right now ...

[cliss]

2. When I took business classes at PSU

my professors consistently said the same thing: "a company is only as good as its management". Meaning, you can have great people in the different departments; hard working people in the machine shop, customer service is awesome, but if the president of the company is inept or he is skimming off money for himself (or cooking the books), the company will ultimately fail or be in serious trouble. That's because the rank and file typically does not set policy.

The same theory can be used about the WH. George Bush is an incompetent man. He has floated by on the stream of life and has managed to dodge boulders because of his family name and fortune. So when he "assembled" his cabinet, he had no idea what he was doing. He probably had to consult his dad, and had plenty of help as he was doing it.

The end result was a collection of buffoons, clowns, and sinister men with agendas of their own. I know sometimes people like to turn that into "the poor man was duped by his own people". I refuse to believe that. Whether he knew who they were or not (most probably the case), the result is his doing.

So what are we left with? Using the company comparison, we have a company which has been gutted. The management has raided the company savings account, and has managed to piss off its employees. More than half of them are seriously planning to quit.

The only solution to the problem is to get rid of the management. You've got to throw them all out. Start over with a new set of managers, who can get in there and hopefully salvage what's left and start to build the company back on its feet again.

[jbfam4]

3. well said

[maha]

6. Oh, you are so right. n/t

[susu369]

4. Great read - very informative

Thanks for posting.

[Tatiana]

5. Awesome article.

The journalist who authored this piece obviously has done his research and presented a very damning account of why Bush's doctrine doesn't work and why we are now stuck with "Bush's $87 billion Mess," as Newsweek puts it.

Everyone should read this for a better understanding of the Iraq situation. Many thanks for posting, maha.

[fizzana]

7. Reading that only makes me more certain that the outcome in

Iraq is already predetermined and the result won't be pretty.