The "told you so crowd gets it wrong again

USA Today:

As the insurgency has intensified, so has the scrutiny of the White House over warnings it received before the war that predicted the instability. An examination of prewar intelligence on the possibility of postwar violence and of the administration's response shows:

• Military and civilian intelligence agencies repeatedly warned prior to the invasion that Iraqi insurgent forces were preparing to fight and that their ranks would grow as other Iraqis came to resent the U.S. occupation and organize guerrilla attacks.

• The war plan put together by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Army Gen. Tommy Franks discounted these warnings. Rumsfeld and Franks anticipated surrender by Iraqi ground forces and a warm welcome from civilians.

• The insurgency began not after the end of major combat in May 2003 but at the beginning of the war, yet Pentagon officials were slow to identify the enemy and to grasp how serious a threat the guerrilla attacks posed.

What the "told you so crowd" fails to comprehend is that the fact an insurgency was not a good reason not to liberate Iraq. What it does is gives the US an opportunity to destroy the myth of the Arab way of war as well as the myth of anti war pukes in the US who equate insurgencies with a "quagmire." Defeating the insurgencts, which we are doing, kills both of those birds and it is one reason the anti war pukes are so frantic to defeat President Bush. If the insurgents are defeated, they will have lost one of their primary arguments for restraint in the use of force by the US.

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