It is useless to go down this road. The BIG question is: "What do we do about it?" Immediate withdrawal is not a rational option. What policies will lead to some reasonable result?
I have not yet detected any failed policies of the current administration, only the failed attemps to discredit it!
OK, what policies have not failed? I'm sure you can document a few and explain how they have not failed. The President hasen't been able to but maybe you can.
Maybe you can explain why the power isn't on 24/7. Or maybe why the water isn't on 24/7. OR why the oil revenue isn't helping rebuild Iraq. And I'm sure the desertions of the Iraqi troops and police can support the success of some policy.
Sorry but these are not Bush administration failures!
Failure to adequately plan for the aftermath of the invasion is their failure. The buck stops there, and they f-ed it up..
Iraq is literally floating on a sea of oil. We’re talking about a country that can finance it’s own reconstruction, and very quickly.”
“It is inconceivable that it would require more troops to occupy and secure Iraq than it would take for the invasion.” "It is unknowable how long that conflict will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months."
Vice President Cheney, on NBC's Meet the Press: "I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators. ... I think it will go relatively quickly, ... (in) weeks rather than months." He predicted that regular Iraqi soldiers would not "put up such a struggle" and that even "significant elements of the epublican Guard ... are likely to step aside."
"I think we may well have some kind of presence there over a period of time," Cheney said. "The level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."
no, no F-ups anywhere, its all going swimmingly, and all according to plan...
Yeah, I guess Bush and Cheney should 've coordinated better with AQ and Iran, so that everybody would've been on the same page as to how this was s'posed to play out.. the 'failure' in all this is the Uncle Sugar mentality that we've been carrying for the past 60 years, it didn't start with Bush, and prob'ly won't end with him..
50 billion dollar estimate for the entire war... how well did that work out? But still, no mistakes no errors, Bush is infallible
http://money.cnn.com/2002/09/02/news/911cost/ The Pentagon has estimated a one-time cost for an Iraq war of about $50 billion -- about 0.5 percent of GDP -- and O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution has estimated the war could carry a one-time price tag of between $30 billion and $50 billion. But occupying a post-war Iraq and helping it rebuild could cost between $5 billion and $20 billion per year, O'Hanlon said, with the costs shrinking with time.
And there ya go.. back before common sense became socially unacceptable, these ops were demanded to be largely self-supporting, and therefore infinitely sustainable.. then we developed this notion that either you had to hemorrhage out your own treasury or risk being labeled a 'conqueror'.. maybe a backlash to the Versailles treaty, who knows.. in any case it sux...
