**Joel[/v], the question was not whether Bush did what it needed to or what it should have. The question was “What are examples of bungling?”.
The fact that France announced an absolute veto is not Bush’s fault, but the fact that Bush could neot get a majority of the Security Council to tell france that they were being unreasonably stubborn is a failure of Bush’s diplomacy.
The length of time it took to get countries to come on board with coercion and bribes is an indication that the U.S. was failing to make its case in the international arena. Regardless whether we “needed” to, we failed to.
Bush senior was able to get several more Arab countries to publicly join his coalition. The failure of Bush’s diplomacy is in failing miserably to make this appear a defense of the region rather than an assault on Iraq. The Arab countries would have had less to fear from their own people if Bush had persuaded everyone (or anyone) that he was actually acting in the interests of anyone other than U.S. stomping power.
Bad forged evidence? Surely you recall the absurd claims that Powell presented regarding Iraqi nuclear capability. (Iraq may have actually been working on such a capacity, but Powell’s “evidence” was forged:
Some evidence on Iraq called fake
Fake Iraq documents ‘embarrassing’ for U.S. UN Inspectors Say U.S. Relied on Forged Reports of Iraq Nuclear Efforts (Google Cache) )
Rumsfield should not have made a public declaration that placed Blair in the position of defending an unpopular policy that his chief “ally” claimed did not require British participation. (That is sort of one of the key points of the nature of diplomacy–not embarrassing your friends out of stupidity.)
The majority of Amerricans currently support the war once we were engaged. Once we engaged, I supported our efforts to end it as swiftly as possible. You, however, are ignoring the fact that on the eve of war, the various polls showed the support for the war to be around 70% if we went in as part of a U.N. declared intervention but at only around 50% if we went in alone. The fact that American society will tend to rally behind troops in combat does not change the fact that Bush was unable to persuade more than half of us it was a good idea before he launched his unilateral assault.