Friday, December 29, 2006

Gulf War II: The critic's view summarized

The New York Review of Books: Iraq: The War of the Imagination summarizes the Woodward, Suskind and Risen on the Bush administration's path to perdition with additional commentary and footnotes. Mark Danner promises a future article on the "third act", namely what comes now.

Bush/Cheney et al combined bad data with bad judgment and terrible execution to produce a strategic blunder an order of magnitude worse than the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. America dutifully reelected them, so their voters share the blame.

Despite all that has gone before, I am cautiously optimistic. There is so much at stake in Iraq that many powerful forces, and immense numbers of less powerful people, will conspire to try to salvage the situation; albeit at an immense cost in lives and economic productivity. Perhaps, if there are enough of these forces, the colossal and catastrophic incompetence of George Bush and Dick Cheney can be managed and redirected, and these two men can retire to give speeches we can all ignore.

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