I’m with RickJay that this was a classic groupthink problem. Where it went sideways? Failing to appreciate that invading without an international consensus left us stuck on the “tar baby” if everything didn’t go according to plan. And that IMHO is the nub of our problem in Iraq. The “right” answer is to bring in a multinational peacekeeping force, but no one will step up to this thankless task because we (the US) insisted on going ahead without a consensus. The flaw in this was apparent to many of us at the time, but not to the decision-makers in the administration. I blame groupthink.
I think Sailboat has it right. The outcome in Iraq wasn’t necessarily predicted, but certainly it was considered (and considered acceptable) by people who have enormous financial interests in a prolonged military operation there. They sensed a political opportunity to create and sustain a profitable war for a good, long time–and with a slim majority of the American people cowed or rallied into supporting it.
What they couldn’t have predicted or controlled was Katrina, which is where the wheels really came off. Without such an obvious catastrophe to demonstrate this administration’s incompetence, Bush would still be hovering around 50%, Cindy Sheehan would be a national pariah, and the Dixie Chicks wouldn’t be winning any Grammys.
That it took something so blatant to move the needle should give us pause. And if that doesn’t do it, consider this: one in three Americans ***still ***believes Bush is a good president.
Truthfully, I still for the life of me can’t figure out the logic behind the attack. I worked for a newspaper at the time, so I got ALL of the scoop that came through the wires, and everything looked really thin. The administration presented its evidence, and from the get-go, it all looked like just crap. Aluminum tubes? Tractor trailer processing plants? Enriched uranium? At every turn, all of the suppositions for WMD, our main reason for the war, turned out to be false. We had no international support. The UN weapons inspectors found nothing of consequence. And yet we still went in.
Like everyone else on this board, I’ve probably read everything I can find on the situation, thought of a million different ways to resolve it and come to the conclusion that it would have been wisest not to engage in it at all. I think of how Eisenhower restrained from getting directly involved in the Suez crisis in 1956 as an example of the better way to handle circumstances such as this.
Now it looks like there is no easy way out. And today the Brits announce they are leaving. While it’s easy to say that “hindsight is 20-20,” given the information our leaders had prior to this action, it wasn’t too hard to see that this was a possible outcome. Arrogance and underestimation overule logical thought and clear proof every time.