[y66]

This new series of articles appearing in the Washington Post describes the internal deliberations on the Iraq war by Bush administration officials.

The articles are drawn from Bob Woodward's "The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006-2008".

Excerpt

During the summer of 2006, from her office adjacent to the White House, deputy national security adviser Meghan O'Sullivan sent President Bush a daily top secret report cataloging the escalating bloodshed and chaos in Iraq. "Violence has acquired a momentum of its own and is now self-sustaining," she wrote July 20, quoting from an intelligence assessment.

Her dire evaluation contradicted the upbeat assurances that President Bush was hearing from Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the U.S. commander in Iraq. Casey and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were pushing to draw down American forces and speed the transfer of responsibility to the Iraqis. Despite months of skyrocketing violence, Casey insisted that within a year, Iraq would be mostly stable, with the bulk of American combat troops headed home.

Publicly, the president claimed the United States was winning the war, and he expressed unwavering faith in Casey, saying, "It's his judgment that I rely upon." Privately, he was losing confidence in the drawdown strategy. He questioned O'Sullivan that summer with increasing urgency: "What are you hearing from people in Baghdad? What are people's daily lives like?"

"It's hell, Mr. President," she answered, determined not to mislead or lie to him.

O'Sullivan was 36, with a PhD from Oxford and a year's experience in Iraq. As the violence had escalated, she began to feel that the strategy of drawing down had become indefensible. For months, she had urged her boss, national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, to begin a full strategy review.

That summer, with U.S. casualties eclipsing 2,500 deaths and nearly 20,000 wounded, Bush acknowledged to himself what he was not saying publicly: The war had taken a perilous turn for the worse, with 1,000 attacks a week, the equivalent of six an hour. "Underneath my hope was a sense of anxiety," Bush recalled in a May 2008 interview. The strategy was one "that everybody hoped would work. And it did not. And therefore the question is, when you're in my position: If it's not working, what do you do?"

This is the untold history of how the Bush administration wrestled with that question. Compiled from classified documents and interviews with more than 150 participants, it reveals that the administration's efforts to develop a new Iraq strategy were crippled by dissension among the president's advisers, delayed by political calculations and undermined by a widening and sometimes bitter rift in civilian-military relations.

No administration willingly puts its disagreements on display, but what happened in Washington during 2006 went beyond the usual give-and-take of government. The level of distrust became so severe that Bush eventually activated a back channel to Casey's replacement in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, circumventing the established chain of command. While the violence in Iraq skyrocketed to unnerving levels, a second front in the war raged at home, fought at the highest levels of the White House, the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department.

Rest of story

[PassedOut]

Thanks for the link -- a good read.

No matter the current level of violence in Iraq, the US cannot control the eventual outcome there. Once the US occupation stops -- and it will stop sometime -- the Iraqis will sort things out for themselves. And, however they do that, the result won't be favorable to the US.

Because this fact has been obvious to everyone with common sense since the summer of 2003, honest Americans have watched this slow-moving nightmare unfold for over five years and counting.

Of course the inevitable result will be characterized differently by the republicans depending upon whether Obama or McCain is elected.

If McCain becomes president, his party will say that the Iraqis failed to seize the opportunity that the US so generously provided. The democrats will say "we told you so."

If Obama becomes president, McCain and the republicans will say that Obama gave away the victory that he inherited. The democrats will say he got the best result possible.

[Al_U_Card]

Surely no one is surprised that what appeared to be happening then was actually happening no matter what the nattering nabobs of the Bush-league administration were braying at us?

[mycroft]

Nattering Nabobs? But these were positive! I think you have the wrong kooks here...

[Al_U_Card]

Ah yes, those would have been the "blathering boobs", right?