Who Lost Iraq? ...... US News and World

[RedEarth]

Who Lost Iraq?
Success has many fathers. The mess in Baghdad has a lot more
By Chitra Ragavan

Posted Sunday, November 19, 2006

On April 9, 2003, the world watched as U.S. marines and Iraqi citizens toppled an imposing statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad's Firdos Square. Three and a half years later, the promise of democracy in Iraq seems a cruel joke, and the administration in Washington that launched the invasion seems utterly bereft of clues as to how to sort out the mess. "The fall of the statue," says a former White House National Security Council staff member, "is where the story diverges from the White House's expectations."

President Bush's acceptance of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's resignation was intended to signal a change in course on Iraq. But many national security experts say that Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser at the time of the invasion, and the National Security Council share much of the blame for the problems in Iraq. "She did not perceive, and the National Security Council did not assess, what is in the United States' interests and what is in the interests of our enemies," says retired Lt. Gen. William Odom, an outspoken critic of the war who served as military assistant to Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser. "Once you make that basic mistake, there isn't any way to make the war come out good. It's all over."

With her ardent support for the invasion, Odom and others say, Rice was unable to play the traditional role of national security adviser-impartial broker in the rough-and-tumble of interagency government. That was further complicated by the fact that Rumsfeld all but ignored the input of other agencies, then never took responsibility for postwar reconstruction, leaving Rice to try to manage the Iraq rebuilding effort from the White House. "The people who took responsibility for the rebuilding of Iraq-that is, the office of the secretary of defense-expressed no interest in solving problems as problems appeared," says Franklin Miller, one of Rice's principal aides handling the reconstruction effort. "They never brought any issues to the table, and they never took any taskings away."

The problems were compounded, former NSC staff members say, by conflicting information provided by virtually everyone involved in the Iraq effort, including military generals who often gave NSC staffers information at odds with what soldiers on the ground and lower-level military and civilian officials were reporting. "The internal whitewashing was as great as the external whitewashing," says a former senior NSC staff member. "We wasted two years, spinning the situation, using smoke and mirrors to say, 'Hey, it's not as it's being reported. Everything is OK.'"

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/061119/27iraq.htm

[valerief]

1. Certainly not the neocons, even though it was their war. Must be

the Iraqis fault.

[cyberpj]

2. The Democrat Party. They started telling the truth doncha know? nt.

[kenny blankenship]

3. Yeah it must've been the Democrat Party, they secretly wanted Bush to fail

right from the start. And so even though they had zero influence over how he conducted the war and occupation, and even though he what he asked for in funding and was never prevented by Democrats from using more troops in Iraq, it's still their fault Iraq is lost. Every failure has a source and they were against this war from the start because Bush was the leader, ergo their ill will towards Bush caused the war to go wrong.

[Spinzonner]

4. We never 'had' it to lose

It was just the delusional neocons and their swaggering man-child Bush who thought winning a one-sided battle meant that a war to remake an ancient society was won.

In reality, of course, all they did was to uncork the bottle.

(Excude the mixed metaphors)

[MichiganVote]

5. All this tells me is that these people do not and did not do their jobs

[Marrak]

6. Condi and her NSC team...

the worst to have come down the pike. ever!! :crazy:
:kick:

[struggle4progress]

7. Phase 1: "Hey, let's fill a car with soldiers and drive it over a cliff."

Phase 2: "The terrorists hope we won't drive this car over the cliff."
Phase 3: "People, who don't want us to drive this car over the cliff, hate us and love terrorists."
Phase 4: "It would be wrong to turn back now that the car is teeeetering on the edge."
...
Phase X: "America is puzzling over the question: who, if anyone, at fault in the case of the car that went over the cliff?"

[PurityOfEssence]

8. George W. Bush. Personally and unequivocally.

There was no reason to attack this country other than the desire to have a foothold in the region, steal oil, guard agains the collapse of the Saudi government and to buttress Israel.

These were all opportunistic reasons.

Along with this, he wanted to show his daddy that he was the tough guy and show the world we could do whatever we pleased.

He started it; he lost it. It's his fault.

For once in his protected and privileged life, he should be held accountable for SOMETHING.