An Expensive Lesson Unlearned
Warren P. Strobel of McClatchy Newspapers notes After two days, no answer to ‘how this ends’
WASHINGTON — They sat behind burgundy-covered witness tables for more than 16 hours of testimony and answered hundreds of questions about the Iraq war, some of them pointed, some of them softballs.
But there was one question that Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, couldn’t, or wouldn’t, answer.
It was the question that Petraeus himself posed rhetorically back in 2003 when he led the Army’s 101st Airborne Division into Iraq: “Tell me how this ends.”
The Deseret News wrote on February 2, 2007 that candidate G.W. Bush in 1999 said: “If we are going to commit American troops, we must be certain they have a clear mission, an achievable goal and an exit strategy.”
Via Terry at Nitpicker we find that Andrew Sullivan has located an interesting quote from a PhD dissertation written in 1987 by David Petraeus that makes it clear we shouldn’t be in Iraq.
We spent almost 60,000 American lives learning not to get involved in situations like Iraq. The Shrubbery knew this in 1999; recent video shows that Dick Cheney knew this in 1994; George H.W. Bush knew this in 1991; General Petraeus knew this in 1987. This ends when leaders face reality and get the troops out of Iraq.
3 comments
Time to leave. Past time.
I’ve observed Bush for six years longer than most of you, while he was governor of Texas, and I can tell you we have a problem:
This man is incapable of admitting, ever, that he made a mistake.
He may insist it was not a mistake. He may insist it never happened He may blame it on someone else. He may “adjust” the historical facts. But Bush will do anything rather than admit to having made a mistake. As long as he sees leaving Iraq as an admission of personal failure on his part… and the evidence is pretty good that he does see it that way… he will keep us there. All the generals and ambassadors and veeps and historians in the world will not prevent him from “vindicating” his actions.
The absurdity is that the refusal to leave is what makes it a personal failure. If he had left a year ago, it could have been passed off as “bad intel”, incompetent subordinates, whatever, but it is the refusal to leave after everyone can see it’s a failure that makes it his, and his alone.