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Originally Posted by BleedBurgundy
I don't think it's having my head in the sand to say "right or wrong, we're already over there so we need to finish this before we lose focus among all of the investigation and woulda, coulda, shoulda." It's realistic, simply a matter of focusing on the task at hand. There will be all eternity for the hindsight crowd.
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I posted that about one quote from response not your entire argument with which I am inclined to agree on many points.
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I think it's very presumptious to say that the administration's idea was that we would be welcomed by adoring crowds. I think that was clearly the public's perception, but I know that we in the military were never given that impression. Our commanders were telling us that this was going to be a real difficult situation from the start. I think if the average american had realistic, non-idealized expectations of war then you wouldn't see so much hand-wringing now.
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I agree. Don't you think it was a failure of Administration to properly frame this entire deal? My biggest problem with the whole thing even from the beginning before it ever turned bad was that this wasn't about WMDs or Saddam. It was about establishing a democracy in the Middle East from which we hoped more democracy could bloom. The Administration though, sold it in simpler terms, relying on fear to convince Americans this was the right way to go rather than explaining that this was a long term proposition with somewhat less concrete goals than simply eradicating a tyrant and removing danegrous WMDs.
You seem to view the Administration and the military as one cohesive unit thinking in the same ways and tracking on the same course. Nothing could be farther from the truth. While the military commanders may have understood what they were up against in Iraq I don't think there is one shred of evidence to show that the Administration did. And the Administration, through Rumsfeld and his cohorts, were responsible for the "plan". My quibble isn't with the military in any way.
Finally, I would say that ignoring what went wrong just to focus our efforts on winning seems pretty simple to me. I'd like to think that we are smart enough as a society to do both at the same time. I feel like that point is made to simply put off thinking about how much we screwed this up because it will be hard and embarrassing.