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Wednesday, Sep 01, 2004
fallow the leader
"[T]he biggest question... whether [the Bush] response to 9/11 has made [America] safer or more vulnerable.... Over the past two years I have been talking with a group of people at the working level of America's anti-terrorism efforts... no partisan ax to grind with the Administration... they have so far been proved right. In the year before combat started in Iraq, they warned that occupying the country would be far harder than conquering it.... [A]mong national-security professionals there is surprisingly little controversy... America's response to 9/11 [was] a catastrophe. I have sat through arguments among soldiers and scholars about whether the invasion of Iraq should be considered the worst strategic error in American history—or only the worst since Vietnam.... "Let me tell you my gut feeling," a senior figure at one of America's military-sponsored think tanks told me recently, after we had talked for twenty minutes about details of the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. "If I can be blunt, the Administration is full of shit. In my view we are much, much worse off now than when we went into Iraq. That is not a partisan position. I voted for these guys. But I think they are incompetent, and I have had a very close perspective on what is happening. Certainly in the long run we have harmed ourselves. We are playing to the enemy's political advantage. Whatever tactical victories we may gain along the way, this will prove to be a strategic blunder.".."