Oopsy

Before going to war with Iraq, the Bush Administration said we had to make the world safe for Democracy. Oops, sorry, wrong war.

They told us that if we didn't go to war with Iraq "we was all gonna die".

Well, it is true that in the wake of the war we have not died yet. Of course, it turns out we were not going to die if we didn't invade.

Specifically 1,461 Americans though did Die.
About 10,000 have been seriously injured.
Perhaps in excess of 100,000, but certainly tens of thousands of Iraqis are dead.
Misplaced Idealism, has been replaced by hypocritical idealism.

Now, the PNAC can begin the official gnashing of teeth, while much of the broadcast media continues to be painfully inaccurate in reporting. But at least some in the print media get what is actually happening. Robin Wright at the Washington Post is one of them.

When the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq two years ago, it envisioned a quick handover to handpicked allies in a secular government that would be the antithesis of Iran's theocracy -- potentially even a foil to Tehran's regional ambitions.

But, in one of the greatest ironies of the U.S. intervention, Iraqis instead went to the polls and elected a government with a strong religious base -- and very close ties to the Islamic republic next door. It is the last thing the administration expected from its costly Iraq policy -- $300 billion and counting, U.S. and regional analysts say.

...the top two winning parties -- which together won more than 70 percent of the vote and are expected to name Iraq's new prime minister and president -- are Iran's closest allies in Iraq.

Thousands of members of the United Iraqi Alliance, a Shiite-dominated slate that won almost half of the 8.5 million votes and will name the prime minister, spent decades in exile in Iran. Most of the militia members in its largest faction were trained in Shiite-dominated Iran.

...

Conversely, the Iraqi secular democrats backed most strongly by the Bush administration lost big. During his State of the Union address last year, Bush invited Adnan Pachachi, a longtime Sunni politician and then-president of the Iraqi Governing Council, to sit with first lady Laura Bush. Pachachi's party fared so poorly in the election that it won no seats in the national assembly.

And current Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, backed by the CIA during his years in exile and handpicked by U.S. and U.N. officials to lead the interim government, came in third. He addressed a joint session of Congress in September, a rare honor reserved for heads of state of the closest U.S. allies. But now, U.S. hopes that Allawi will tally enough votes to vie as a compromise candidate and continue his leadership are unrealistic, analysts say.

"The big losers in this election are the liberals," said Stanford University's Larry Diamond, who was an adviser to the U.S. occupation government. "The fact that three-quarters of the national assembly seats have gone to just two [out of 111] slates is a worrisome trend. Unless the ruling coalition reaches out to broaden itself to include all groups, the insurgency will continue -- and may gain ground."

Good job, "Inarticulate Napoleon".