The New Yorker occasionally runs a piece so perceptive it justifies the cost of persuing all its other content. (Out here in the Upper Left Coast, Wired has a similar reputation.) George Packer's Letter From Baghdad is such a piece, and well worth reading.
He brings to life the generally accepted read on the reason we are in a quagmire: The State Dept. spent a year understanding a post-war Iraq and laying out a detailed plan, which was promptly ignored by the Defense Dept. when it got the charter to manage the post-war environment. What clouded the DoD's vision were statements by the exiles in the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmad Chalabi, to the effect that the US forces would be greeted as liberators. What also clouded their vision was spin control, the fear of dampening the war effort by throwing too much premature realism into the picture. Of course, these two forces fed on each other.
A good friend, Rich Melmon, who has not yet joined the blogsphere, has this to say on the Packer piece, which I hope gets published as a letter to the editor:
George Packer has done us all an amazing service. There, on your pages, lie all the contradictions and confusions of this anguishing war. Many Democrats, who wished from a deep place to see an oppressed people liberated, have had their hearts broken by the incompetence of the post-war effort. Acts of war are not, in the end, about ideology. Once started, they are about doing well something that is very hard and very complicated. I maintain it is not wrong to have pursued this war. Allowing ideology to render the post-war effort incompetent is wrong. And the Democrats contesting the next election would better serve their interests, and the interests of our nation, focusing not on the rightness or not of the war itself, but on its incompetently handled aftermath.
For whichever of the nine Democrat contenders (who all seem to be drawn more and more into the Howard Dean antiwar orbit) who wishes to stand out from the crowd, claim the nomination and have a chance of winning the election, this is advice well worth taking.
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