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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: geode00 who wrote (193249)	7/26/2006 3:46:43 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi geode00; Re: "I won't give the Bushies any benefit of the doubt. I believe they knew, 100%, that Saddam had no WMDs and that we would not be greeted as liberators by at least the part of the population we were going to overthrow. I don't think even the Bushies (although I think Bush was absolutely ignorant) were that stupid." The "Bushies" aren't a single mind. I would think that there were some of them that knew that Saddam had no WMDs, and that there were some of them that knew we'd be shot at, but that these were sufficiently in the minority that they got overruled. Bush's opinion ratings are setting new records for bad. If Karl Rove had known that the Iraq invasion was doomed, he'd have never let it happen. The thing is a political disaster for the Republican party. There is no way they went into this with a realistic view of what their chances were. Humans, like chickens, horses and dogs, are a pack animal. Pack animals tend to look to their leader for their opinions, and consequently tend to all do the same damned dumb thing together. That's part of our nature that the military is well aware of and takes account of. Go back and look at the commentary on this thread from before the war. The population of the US was very angry after the terror attacks and wanted revenge even if it wasn't exacted on the perpetrators. A few people some of whom were stupid, and some of whom had foreign axes to grind, put out a tale that promised a way of fixing the problems in the Middle East with Democracy. That was very attractive to the Republican mind (one uses a different bait with Democrats), and the attraction was enough for enough people to ignore the warnings and sign on for what they expected to be a good and easy war. Every war is unique, but almost all civilians, and very many military, are too stupid to realize this. To analyze the result of a war, one must consider the details of the terrain, personnel, weapons, motivations, history, infrastructure, etc., etc., etc., which requires more general knowledge than the vast majority of people have at their disposal. Instead most people, civilian or military, analyze by analogy. Example: The Kuwait liberation was easy despite many people warning about it beforehand. The war in Afghanistan was easy despite many people warning about it beforehand. Given this series of happenstances, why should anyone worry about the warnings before the war in Iraq? Iraq would be easy also, by analogy. From the history of the other two wars, it is clear that the experts can be safely ignored. They were wrong before, they would be wrong again. When you have a meeting where experts debate these things, it is the arguments by analogy that convince the decision makers (who are not experts). From the above analogy, you should see how easy it was to convince the President that Iraq would be easy. It's not like he's the sharpest blade in the shed. And the other political advisers, particularly Rumsfeld, aren't too bright either. These people are not well read on military affairs or on the history of the area. They are not good at estimating psychological motivations, and they tend to let their own opinions of the United States color their thinking about how other people view the US. There is no way that they could make a careful and reasoned decision as to how difficult Iraq would be. -- Carl