Four long years ago I was corresponding with a friend about our hopes and fears for Bush's Administration. I opined that the saving grace of having Colin Powell in the Administration was that he appeared to dislike Dick Cheney - especially Cheney's cavalier attitude toward the lives of American soldiers.1
Powell, I wrote, is taking the job precisely because he stills sees it as his duty to protect his men.
. . .
1 I grant that I had no direct evidence of this, but it was a surmise based on things swirling through the mediasphere as it existed then - none of which I bothered to catalogue. I don't typically footnote my personal correspondence (yeah, I know, sloppy), blogs were barely crawling on the tide-washed shore in those days, and media outlets and their watchdogs didn't yet archive everything for posterity, so I don't remember the precise sources.
Believe it or not, during the 2000 campaign we (meaning Americans) really did discuss whether Bush would invade Iraq and under what circumstances. Yes, some of us even considered how he might manufacture those circumstances. I was an humanitarian interventionist in those days, much to the annoyance of many colleagues who had to listen to the case for intervention one time too many (thus I was something of an Iraq hawk, though in truth more of a Zimbabwe and Afghanistan hawk).
However, as this war got closer, my doubts grew. There was no plan for after. There simply and truly was no plan.
Given that post-war reconstruction happens to be what I do, that was worrying enough to make me go all bitter and ironic, as readers from the early days of this blog will remember.
Given that the way in which the post-war situation has been handled from the very beginning, i.e. without even a passing regard to any of the lessons we've learned about reconstruction over the past sixty years (and my general stance that professionals ought to know the tools of their trade or else find another) and given that the handling itself has been precisely (though surely inadvertently, right?) calibrated to increase the violence rather than lessen it, and given that conflict mitigation during assistance and reconstruction is my direct field of expertise, I am driven nearly blind with rage and black with despair.
This Iraq venture, this boondoggle and quagmire, this unutterably foolish war, this massive and fraudulent waste of precious lives and better-spent billions is a perfect case study in how to fuck things up.
Posted by Martial