re: #321 Fozzie Bear

We just should never have gone there in the first place, for all the reasons predicted before the war. For all the reasons Bush was warned it would be a quagmire. For all the reasons Bush Sr. and Cheney knew before the war.

There’s a reason we didn’t invade Baghdad in Desert Storm. There’s a reason Dick Cheney said during the elder Bush administration that an occupation in Iraq would take a decade or more and cost many thousands of lives.

There’s also a reason that Cheney said it would take “months, not years” in 2003. He was fucking lying.

Do you have a link to that Cheney quote? I was looking for it the other day and couldn’t find it. Actually, I thought it was “…weeks, not months.” This was the closest I could find:

A senior administration official who briefed reporters Monday on condition of anonymity said Rumsfeld “has right along said that he thought that fighting was likely to last weeks, not months.” Rumsfeld told troops last month that “it could last, you know, six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.” Rumsfeld also contradicted the Army chief of staff, who told the Senate that “several hundred thousand” troops would be needed to occupy Iraq. “Far off the mark,” Rumsfeld said.

Some officials’ predictions may yet be realized, even if early signs have not been encouraging. For example, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz said in a speech earlier this month that “the Iraqi people understand what this crisis is about. Like the people of France in the 1940s, they view us as their hoped-for liberator.” Wolfowitz said yesterday that “we probably did underestimate the willingness of this regime to commit war crimes,” but he said other forecasts were on course.

This is the kind of incompetence that folks are trying to excuse by holding up present day Iraq as a shining example?