What a serious mea culpa looks like
... It looks like this. (Thanks to Yankeedoodle for signaling it.)
This article is infuriating. As an example, Dilanian says:
"I just couldn't conceive, given how severely the lack of electricity undermines everything they are trying to achieve, that the Americans would publicly set a goal and then fail to meet it."
If this guy had been doing his homework all along, he would have known that from Day 1 after the invasion, looters had been systematically disassembling the electricity grid. There were quotes in news articles saying that there was simply no way to get the core infrastructure back up any time soon, and that engineers were looking at stop-gap measures. Maybe I missed something, but I never saw anything in the news addressing this fundamental issue.
And, somehow, we are supposed to look at this, and similar situations with equally poor prospects, and see improvement?
What an idiot. At least he corrected himself, which is better than most of the other idiots out there.
This war has been fought with lies from the beginning. The bigotry of our out-of-touch leaders has blinded them to the reality that is really occuring. Islamists are being tortured in order to get them to agree with us about the nature of the insurgency instead of getting them to really say the truth. This is pure folly fueled by classic American racism. Let's face it, we are fighting AlQuaeda in Iraq because they basically all have the same skin color. Now American bigotry has become a denial that will bite us with defeat if we don't start taking a look at Iraq without the lens of bullshit in the way. I personally think the Halliburtons and Bechtels are just milking the situration to take our tax dollars in exchange for nothing accomplished. Even if Iraqi's can't rebuild their country any better then Halliburton, at least they would fail at a fraction of the cost. Who could have forseen that we couldn't win over the hearts and minds of Iraqi's by looting their country, treating them like dogs, and unemploying them?
Didn't anyone catch the part about how critical the possible loss of cell phone service is to Iraqi liberty,just-us,and the persuit of on-line dating services.How can the enemy set off their roadside explosive devices remotely.How ironic.The first thing we do in Iraq is make sure they have DSL service & cell phones.The revolutionaries in Iraq can now,not only keep up with what their organizations in other cities are up to,but can also use their new phones as remote detonators to kill us with.I was in VietNam & this is no VietNam.It is worse!!!!!!
Ken Dilanian had credentials as a "safe" pro-war reporter to get this article in print, perhaps under the ultra-senior editors' radar. Don't expect the broadcast or cable TV networks to issue similar self-revisions. The news will remain up-beat, or it will quietly retreat to tier 3 news. Mr. Murdoch need not risk any scandals or negative reports that might harm the desired November election results.
The queer thing is that the Max Boot and David Frum types will claim that the entire quagmire was the fault of "lack of nerve" attributable to liberal bleeding hearts the the perfidious press, which sapped America's courage to shoot and aided the enemy. Astonishingly, however, they will also argue that the Iraq adventure is a wonderful display of US force projection that should be applied next year to de-nuke and liberate Iran. The initial battlefield events will be trumpeted as the neo-con triumph; the botched follow-up will be the blamed on others.
Americans usually buy in to the notion that "the politicians" goof up what the men in uniform would otherwise do right. Example: that we'd have won in Korea, if only we'd let McArthur nuke and invade China, or in Vietnam, if only we'd let LeMay "bomb Hanoi into the Stone Age." They don't actually explore whether high officers might be just as prone to delusions of grandeur or nonsense.
The only real mea culpa will be the day that someone like Tommy Franks stands up and says, "We got it all wrong: intelligence, strategy, follow-up, the whole darn Krispy Kreme. And it ain't true that 'hearts and minds' is a bunch a hooey. Hearts and minds do matter, and we got it plug wrong in Iraq from the get-go." Even then, though, I can imagine that Boot, Frum, and JHU's Eliot Cohen will simply say that generals, too, lose there marbles, and so we need sturdy civilian leaders of undaunted vision--like W.