Now He Tells Us

Arianna Huffington asked Colin Powell if we were ever going to get out of Iraq:
"We are," he told me, "but we're not going to leave behind anything we like because we are in the middle of a civil war."

Leaving aside the folly of getting into Iraq in the first place, for which Bush and Cheney bear most of the blame, the catastrophic mismanagement of the invasion by Rumsfeld seems most responsible for the current civil war. When Rumsfeld was briefed by the military on their (contingency) plans for an Iraqi invasion, they asked for 500,000 men. Rumsfeld pulled the number 125,000 out of the air and we went (more or less) with that. As a result, there have never been enough American troops to control the country and its borders, making anarchy all but inevitable. Further blunders created the present civil war between Sunni and Shia.

I suppose it's nice that Powell now acknowledges the fix we gotten ourselves into, but it would have been nice if he had spoken out early and forcefully.

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