Post #122

Subject: Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, as somebody once said. Pt. II

Lieutenant General Robert Gard signed a letter to President George W. Bush critical of foreign policy last year – see my Post #14. On “Hardball,” then, Chris Matthews asked, “Is there anything that‘s happened in Iraq since 2003, when we invaded, that we couldn‘t have foreseen?”

And Gard answered, “I don‘t think so. The problem is that there was an assumption that there would not be an insurgency. We would be greeted with sweets and flowers. There was no preparation for what to do after Baghdad fell.”

In my Post #112, retired Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, coalition commander in 2003 and 2004, said the Iraq war plan from the start was "catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic," and the administration has not provided the resources necessary for victory, which he said the military could never achieve on its own.

Simply, History would have told us what to expect – even the History of predictions! ;p

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, from 1994)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So you think the U.S. or U.N. forces should have moved into Baghdad?

DICK CHENEY, FUTURE VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: No.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Why not?

CHENEY: Because if we had gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn’t have been anybody else with us. It would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. And under the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq. Once you got to Iraq and took it over, and took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place?

That’s a very volatile part of the world. And if you take down the central government in Iraq, you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it the Syrians would like to have for the west. Part of eastern Iraq the Iranians would like to claim, fought over for eight years. In the north, you have got the Kurds. If the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.

The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact that we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action and for their families, it wasn’t a cheap war.

And the question for the president in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? And our judgment was, not very many,

(END VIDEO CLIP)

Life in Bush’s Washington goes on -- unencumbered by that burden of History! :p

White House press secretary Dana Perino at a White House briefing held on October 26 was asked, "Do you want to address the remarks by President Putin, who said the United States setting up a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe was like the Soviet Union putting missiles in Cuba, setting up a Cuban missile crisis?" "Well, I think that the historical comparison is not -- does not exactly work," Perino responded.

The Cuban Missile Crisis? She didn't know what it was. "I was panicked a bit because I really don't know about… the Cuban Missile Crisis," said Perino. "It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I'm pretty sure." "I came home and I asked my husband," she said. "I said, 'Wasn't that like the Bay of Pigs thing?' And he said, 'Oh, Dana.' "

Ya would think that the press secretary for the President of the United States would have at least a passing knowledge of the most important event of the second-half of the 20th century. But consider who she works for? :p