Let's go back, shall we...to before the Iraq War. There's been a trend lately to try and rewrite history, and somehow place the blame for the failure of Iraq on President Obama.
“I’m not sure which planet they live on”
Hawks in the Bush administration may be making deadly miscalculations on Iraq, says Gen. Anthony Zinni, Bush's Middle East envoy.
ERIC BOEHLERT
President Bush continues to encounter war critics in the unlikeliest of places — the United States military, for example. Last summer, retired Gen. Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security advisor to Bush’s father during the Gulf War, bluntly expressed his doubt about a unilateral war against Iraq. A few weeks later, a trio of four-star generals appeared before Congress to echo that concern.
One of them was Gen. Wesley Clark, a former NATO military commander. “If we go in unilaterally, or without the full weight of international organizations behind us, if we go in with a very sparse number of allies, if we go in without an effective information operation … we’re liable to supercharge recruiting for al-Qaida,” Clark said.
Now comes retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, former head of Central Command for U.S. forces in the Middle East, who has worked recently as the State Department’s envoy to the region with a mission to encourage talks between Palestinians and Israelis. Zinni, a Purple Heart recipient who served in Vietnam and helped command forces in the Gulf War and in Somalia, spoke last Thursday in Washington at the Middle East Institute’s annual conference and laid out his own reservations about a potential war with Iraq.
In a keynote address striking for its critical assessment of the Bush administration, Zinni stressed the need to get the Israeli-Palestinian peace process back on track, build a broad coalition against Iraq, create trust among allies in the region — and put Saddam Hussein’s threat in perspective.
He also took issue with hawks in and around the administration who downplay the importance of Arab sentiment in the region. “I’m not sure which planet they live on,” Zinni said, “because it isn’t the one that I travel.” And he challenged their suggestion that installing a new Iraqi government will not be especially difficult. “God help us,” he said, “if we think this transition will occur easily.”
etc etc etc
Have all of you forgotten how this went down, or are you willfully ignorant?
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