Who Is Their Dealer?

If the report on Free Market News Network and Wired Blog http://blog.wired.com is correct, everything the Geek has suspected about the "planning" capacities of the Bush Pentagon and White House concerning the day after defeating the conventional forces in Iraq is true.

The gripless group in the Defense Department ranging from SecDef Rumsfield through his toadies such as Wolfewitz and Doug Feith (my personal favorite for Stupid Guy of the Century award) and apparently including the uniformed service chiefs really, really, but really believed that once we had "taken down" the regime, all we would have to do is a little bit of tidying up before withdrawing a few months later.

What in hell was wrong with these people??

Were they really that terminally out to lunch? Hadn't they read the intelligence estimates? If not; why not? Did they get calluses on their lips from reading something longer than a press release? Didn't understand the big words like "insurgency?"

Whatever the reason, including untreated megalomania, the "commander guy" and his merry crew of willfully gripless associates took the US, the Iraqis and the world over the edge of the wrong war in the wrong place with the wrong enemy at the wrong time.

As the great survivor and diplomat, Talleyrand, once said to Napoleon, "It is worse than a crime. It is a blunder." The Geek seconds that sentiment.

It was a blunder for two reasons.

Number one: It was avoidable. Nobody needed to read one of those Burn Before Reading high security documents. All anyone had to do was glance, that's right, glance at a basic text of Iraqi history. Just the last century or two would be enough. You don't have to go back to Ur, although that wouldn't have hurt. (Shame on the Geek. He should remember the problem with blistered lips from too much reading.)

It would have helped to go back over the news files for the period of the economic sanctions and the Oil For Food program. The journalists at least got a grip on the pervasive corruption and internal fractionation which infested Iraq after the First Gulf War.

Putting the looted empty shell reality of Iraq into the context of the lack of social or political coherence would have shown anyone with an IQ in more than single digits that "taking down" the regime would be an open invitation for armed political unrest. That's the polite term for the multi-party insurgency we have on our collective hands right now.

The second reason the Geek calls the decision to invade Iraq without adequate consideration of its aftermath both a crime and a blunder is simply this. Now that we are in the US cannot, repeat cannot afford the consequences both short and long term of leaving before we and our Iraqi clients have secured a better state of peace.

Simply satisfying our emotions as Bill Richardson, Governor of my home state and Democratic Presidential wannabe, would have us do by quickly packing up and departing being sure to "leave no troops behind" is a self-destructive answer for reasons previously outlined.

Staying without a good, useful, historically rooted plan isn't the answer either. That will result in more deaths, more physical casualties and far more psychiatric casualties in this, the most dangerous and stressful war ever fought by Americans.

There are some answers. Some solutions for the mess handed us by the gripless, brain dead worthies the Geek has mentioned. Some are being worked out in the field right now by Americans with both brains and guts.

More on that later.