>But the second; I'd suggest the US is in this war for the benefit of >several corporations, and that they still can and will benefit. There was >never any possibility these wars would benefit the country, anyway; it >always has been about providing opportunity for Halliburton, et al. >Such wars also will continue as long as government thinks they need to help >corporations instead of citizens (as long as they think the two are >synonymous).
OK, what about the first Gulf War, what about the war in the Balkins? With all due respect, there were folks who were strongly against the war who wrote about the decision making process. The mistakes made were obvious, and we don't have to come up with unfalsifiable conspiracy theories to explain them. The two biggest mistakes made were the idea that shock and awe would change the ground rules so much that we wouldn't have to worry about what happened after the war was won. It took about 1 year of incompetence so bad that Bin Laden couldn't have done better ruining the US's chances of rebuilding Iraq than Cheney and company. For example, having the former manager of a day care center running the Iraq economy? Second, they took the 3 sigma value of the likely risk Hussein presented and took it as the likely value. Any intelligence data that contradicted them was tossed. Still, the intelligence data had big error bars. Few, even in the command structure in Iraq, knew what was there. Interviews with Hussein stated that he lied to hide the fact that he didn't have WMD, because he thought the idea that he had WMD was the only thing stopping an Iranian invasion. No-one from any country's intelligence service thought that. I read extensively before the war, and that wasn't offered as an option. But still, anyone with experience in IR knew of the inherent problems in Afghanistan, and that COIN takes over a decade to succeed. After trying every other possibility, Bush fired Rumsfeld, put in Gates and let the man who wrote the book on COIN (literally) run the war. And, given what _the US military though was possible, Petreus (sp) performed near miracles to get Iraq to where it is today. They probably won't take advantage of the opportunity, but if he had control in '03, we'd have been spared a lot of grief. So, to mix adages, never postulate secret conspiracies to explain something when mere incompetence will do...and the arrogance of incompetence at that. Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
