Bush's Puppet-Master, Bush's War

UPDATE V:  "At the outset of the Iraq war, the Bush administration predicted that it would cost $50 billion to $60 billion to oust Saddam."  

Not even close.

Read the Washington Post, Iraq, Afghan wars will cost to $4 trillion to $6 trillion, Harvard study says.  

This estimate says nothing of the lives lost and shattered.

 

UPDATE IV:  There was another casualty of the Bush's war, a sort of poetic justice.

Read the Wall Street Journal, Can the Republican Party Recover From Iraq?  

UPDATE III:  "We got our war. More to the point, we got Bush’s war, which was, in the end, the only war on offer. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was little real planning for the occupation, which led to a huge and senseless loss of Iraqi life in a quasi-civil war that we did too little, at first, to stop, and arguably helped start through the misguided process of 'debaathification.'"

Read Bloomberg, Mistakes, Excuses and Painful Lessons From the Iraq War.  

UPDATE II:  "On Feb. 26, 2003, President George W. Bush gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, spelling out what he saw as the link between freedom and security in the Middle East. 'A liberated Iraq,' he said, 'can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region” by serving “as a dramatic and inspiring example … for other nations in the region.'

He invaded Iraq three weeks later. The spread of freedom wasn’t the war’s driving motive, but it was considered an enticing side effect, and not just by Bush. His deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, had mused the previous fall that the spark ignited by regime-change 'would be something quite significant for Iraq … It’s going to cast a very large shadow, starting with Syria and Iran, but across the whole Arab world.'

Ten years later, it’s clear that the Iraq war cast 'a very large shadow' indeed, but it was a much darker shadow than the fantasists who ran American foreign policy back then foresaw. Bush believed that freedom was humanity’s natural state: Blow away the manhole-cover that a tyrant pressed down on his people, and freedom would gush forth like a geyser. Yet when Saddam Hussein was toppled, the main thing liberated was the blood hatred that decades of dictatorship had suppressed beneath the surface.

Bush had been warned. . ."

Read Slate, The Coming Collapse of the Middle East?

UPDATE:  "Judgments rendered by history tend to be tentative, incomplete and reversible. More than occasionally, they arrive seasoned with irony. This is especially true when it comes to war, where battlefield outcomes thought to be conclusive often prove anything but.

Rather than yielding peace, victory frequently serves as a prelude to more war. Once opened, wounds fester. Things begun stubbornly refuse to end. As the renowned strategic analyst F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed, 'The victor belongs to the spoils.'"

Read the Washington Post, Ten years after the invasion, did we win the Iraq war?

He was "a misguided powermonger who, in a paranoid spasm, led this nation into an unthinkable calamity."

Read The New York Times, Repent, Dick Cheney. 

You might remember that Cheney 'leaked' a false classified intel report about so-called Iraqi WMDs, then used the leak in press appearances to promote the war.

BTW, today (March 20th) is the 10 year anniversary of that unnecessary war.