Juan Cole: Bush's Top Ten Mistakes in Iraq during the Past 4 Years

[babylonsister]

http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/1211/81/

Bush's Top Ten Mistakes in Iraq during the Past 4 Years
Tuesday, 20 March 2007
by Juan Cole

10. Refusing to fire Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld when his incompetence and maliciousness became apparent in the growing guerrilla war and the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.

9. Declining to intervene in the collapsed economy or help put Iraqi state industries back on a good footing, on the grounds that the "market" would magically produce prosperity effortlessly.

8. Invading and destroying the Sunni Arab city of Fallujah in November, 2004, thus pushing the Sunni Arabs into the arms of the insurgency in protest and ensuring that they would boycott the January, 2005, parliamentary elections, a boycott that excluded them from power and from a significant voice in crafting the new constitution, which they then rejected.

7. Suddenly announcing that the US would "kill or capture" young nationalist Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in spring, 2004, throwing the country into massive turmoil for months.

6. Replying to Baathist guerrilla provocations with harsh search and destroy missions that humiliated and angered ever more Sunni Arab clans, driving them to support or join the budding guerrilla movement.

more...

[soothsayer]

1. 11. Taunting the enemy with 'bring it on', 12. failing to guard the

ammo dumps...

[Briar]

2. 13. Refusing to allow Saddam to be tried in an international court

and letting that whole ghastly charade of an execution to be staged in public. Stripped of right wing and religious sophistry, executions are always about revenge, not justice. These were designed to show the Sunnis who was boss and what they could expect. They showed the world how barbaric the US client government really was.

[liberal renegade]

3. We need to

De-Bushificate!