From the Sunday Times’ news story on the civil-war-ness of things in Iraq comes this quotation:
“I don’t think we moved too quickly, General [William B.] Caldwell said of putting the Iraqis in charge of Baghdad. “I don’t think anyone could have anticipated the sectarian violence.”
I am no doubt showing my age here, but each time the Bush administration and its related entities (Caldwell is the U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, so technically he’s not part of the administration, but that line is pretty blurry today) trot out this particular line, all I can hear is the mad voice of Monty Python cackling, “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!”
No one expected the looting in Iraq. No one expected the insurgency. No one expected that we would never find the weapons of mass destruction. No one expected that Iraq would be so hard to rebuild. No one expected the Sunnis and the Shiites to not get along. No one “could have anticipated the sectarian violence.”
It is time for the Bush administration and its people to retire this excuse, which played out so infamously with Hurricane Katrina as well — not simply because it represents a species of buck-passing that ought to be beneath the people who run our government and our military, but also because in every case it is untrue, and, at this late stage in the unfolding Iraq fiasco, it serves as an egregiously self-incriminating lie.
The prospect of Iraq descending into civil war is one that has loomed over Bush’s invasion from well before its start. The “anticipation” of such a conflict has been a constant theme among observers on the scene and armchair commentators alike. For a U.S. general on the ground in Iraq today to claim that nobody anticipated “sectarian violence” is a sign of delusional incompetence — and an indication that reality continues to be alien terrain for the people leading our war effort.
[tags]Iraq[/tags]
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