re: #358 Sergey Romanov

Which everybody with even half a brain knew would happen. Which is exactly why you should have kept Saddam in place.

When I heard Bush talking about “liberating” Iraq, I cringed. You can’t just create a moderate secular state like you are planting a tree. Er… actually that’s the perfect metaphor for it. The environment has to be right for it, or it won’t work.

Toppling a state necessitates that there be a willingness to build a new state from the ground up afterward, or face utter chaos. It’s not like there isn’t an assload of historical precedent. It’s not like it wasn’t incredibly obvious to anyone with half a brain that you can’t just dissolve a state and expect everything to magically work itself out.

I have never screamed at a television so much as I did during the early years of the Iraq war. You know, the one Rumsfeld said would last “months, not years”.