History will not be kind

To Bush.

But also not to the amazing number of morons that voted for this guy when it was self-evident by November 2004 that he deserved termination over any number of his policies particularly Iraq. Let me tell you, trapped as I am in Arizona how hard it is not to look at my parents across the table and ask them...

WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING?

Not very Christmakkakwanza-ie though is it?

Yesterday the Washington Post had something that summed it up:

The U.S. military invaded Iraq without a formal plan for occupying and stabilizing the country and this high-level failure continues to undercut what has been a "mediocre" Army effort there, an Army historian and strategist has concluded.

"There was no Phase IV plan" for occupying Iraq after the combat phase, writes Maj. Isaiah Wilson III, who served as an official historian of the campaign and later as a war planner in Iraq. While a variety of government offices had considered the possible situations that would follow a U.S. victory, Wilson writes, no one produced an actual document laying out a strategy to consolidate the victory after major combat operations ended.

THAT is goddamned unforgivable!!! Frankly, in my opinion if it is possible to impeach someone for incompetence, let the hearings begin.

But we've known this for goddamned months, it was not quite a year ago that James Fallow's "Blind into Baghdad" came out describing the complete lack of post-war planning. Now we find out there was NO post-war plan from a military insider, and chief historian of the operation? How the hell can we allow them to get away with this?

It was only in November 2003, seven months after the fall of Baghdad, that U.S. occupation authorities produced a formal "Phase IV" plan for stability operations, Wilson reports. Phase I covers preparation for combat, followed by initial operations, Phase II, and combat, Phase III. Post-combat operations are called Phase IV.

Many in the Army have blamed Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon civilians for the unexpectedly difficult occupation of Iraq, but Wilson reserves his toughest criticism for Army commanders who, he concludes, failed to grasp the strategic situation in Iraq and so not did not plan properly for victory. He concludes that those who planned the war suffered from "stunted learning and a reluctance to adapt."

...

"Reluctance in even defining the situation . . . is perhaps the most telling indicator of a collective cognitive dissidence on part of the U.S. Army to recognize a war of rebellion, a people's war, even when they were fighting it," he comments.

Because of this failure, Wilson concludes, the U.S. military remains "perhaps in peril of losing the 'war,' even after supposedly winning it."

Overall, he grades the U.S. military performance in Iraq as "mediocre."

Wilson's essay amounts to an indictment of the education and performance of senior U.S. officials involved in the war. "U.S. war planners, practitioners and the civilian leadership conceived of the war far too narrowly" and tended to think of operations after the invasion "as someone else's mission," he says. In fact, Wilson says, those later operations were critical because they were needed to win the war rather than just decapitate Saddam Hussein's government.

But, but, the FoxNews Zoo Crew & Rummy say we are ignoring all the good stuff we are doing!

...

In his analysis of U.S. military operations in 2003 in northern Iraq, Wilson also touches on another continuing criticism of the Bush administration's handling of Iraq -- the number of troops there. "The scarcity of available 'combat power' . . . greatly complicated the situation," he states.

Wilson contends that a lack of sufficient troops was a consequence of the earlier, larger problem of failing to understand that prevailing in Iraq involved more than just removing Hussein. "This overly simplistic conception of the 'war' led to a cascading undercutting of the war effort: too few troops, too little coordination with civilian and governmental/non-governmental agencies . . . and too little allotted time to achieve 'success,' " he writes.

Gee, an Administration that has as its highlight, a staged landing and a stuffed flightsuit proclaiming "Mission Accomplished" being simplistic. Who'd have thunk that except virtually every Democrat not named Zell?