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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (452647)	9/4/2003 4:03:37 PM
From: Doug R	Respond to of 769670

a cul de sac on a one-way street.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (452647)	9/4/2003 4:41:02 PM
From: Doug R	Respond to of 769670

dubyaMD bush managed to leverage our mammoth strength into an improbable weakness. And so much of it was not only predictable, but predicted. according to our own government study we can't maintain the current force for much more than six more months. boston.com a big push for greater UN comes not at a moment of strength for us but in the face of four car-bombings in a month and a palpable sense that we are not in control of the country we are nominally occupying. we may be moving toward a situation in which intra-ethnic and intra-religious rivalries break out into open, if low-level, violence -- a sort of slow-motion civil war. If you want to get a sense of just how unprepared this administration was for what they were getting themselves into, you can't do much better than rereading this piece: [May 3, 2003, Saturday The Bush administration is planning to withdraw most United States combat forces from Iraq over the next several months and wants to shrink the American military presence to less than two divisions by the fall, senior allied officials said ... The United States currently has more than five divisions in... query.nytimes.com] The plan at that time was to quickly draw down the American troop presence in Iraq until they numbered about 30,000 by the fall of 2003. Needless to say, the fall of 2003 is pretty much now. Just think how wide of the mark these guys were. Not that any of this was a surprise, of course. Just before the outbreak of war, then-Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki told a Senate committee that he thought "something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" would be necessary to pacify and stabilize post-war Iraq. He had some experience. He'd led the peace-keeping operation in Bosnia. And he'd dedicated much of his tenure as Chief of Staff to preparing the Army for peace-keeping and other non-traditional and low-intensity combat deployments. A few days later Paul Wolfowitz went up to the Hill and said Shinseki had no idea what he was talking about. His estimate was "wildly off the mark," Wolfowitz said. Obviously it was Wolfowitz who had no clue what he was talking about. talkingpointsmemo.com but since this administration acts like a deer caught in the headlights with regularity, heads that should be rolling will stay around to continue being as stupid as it gets.