Bush, Iraq, and the wisdom of youth

Writer David T. Roisen will graduate from the University of Virginia this May with a degree in Middle East Studies and Foreign Affairs. No doubt he could help the Bush administration ... if they'd only ask.

Mission impossible: The Iraq War—four years and counting

by David T. Roisen

By the time you read this, America will have entered its fifth year of occupation in Iraq. And for what?

In the last four years of occupation, Iraq has devolved into one of the most violent places on Earth. Some 3,000 or more Iraqi civilians die violent deaths every month, victims of the insurgency and Iraq’s ubiquitous crime. In the last six months alone, almost 1,000 Iraqi policemen have been murdered. At the time of this writing, the total number of American military fatalities stands at 3,210, and the number of America’s military wounded rests at 23, 924. Iraq is a nightmare.

The tragic state of Iraq today is a direct result of the unabashed arrogance and incompetence of this war’s planners. President Bush and his inner circle believed they could wage war on the cheap, and they did so by willfully denying reality. Thanks to documents revealed through the Freedom of Information Act, we now know that in August 2002, the U.S. Central Command’s war plans predicted that only 5,000 U.S. military personnel would be on the ground in Iraq as of last December. In the fact-based world, Iraq saw the presence of 140,000 U.S. troops in December 2006. The administration’s lack of planning has also hindered reconstruction and recovery efforts—the U.S. has yet to disburse several billion dollars already appropriated for aid, and millions and millions of reconstruction dollars have gone missing since the war’s start and remain unaccounted for.

The complete article is here.