Going Into Iraq
This is a followup on my recent post about Bush’s press conference: I argued that, prior to the Iraq invasion, Bush was holding back on discussing what he must have known would be a tough situation in Iraq, post-Saddam. But maybe he wasn’t. Middle East History Professor Juan Cole was just interviewed on NPR, and he made the statement that the Bush administration has some bright people in it, but when it came to understanding what we’d encounter in Iraq, they were “completely ignorant.” He pointed to an interview with Paul Wolfowitz before the invasion, in which he stated we wouldn’t have trouble with the Shiites in Iraq, because Iraq didn’t have holy cities like in Saudi Arabia (!), and that the Iraqi Shiites were mostly secular (!). He also pointed out that it looks like the Bush administration chose to get much of its information from a small group of exiled Iraqis who were eager to return to Iraq and gain power. Not exactly a source for unbiased information. So maybe Bush wasn’t holding back, maybe he surrounded himself with yes-men and really did believe post-invasion Iraq would be a cakewalk.
It’s a sad state of affairs when you’re trying to determine whether your leaders are either assiduously Machiavellian, or just blinded by ideology.
