The blunders that the present Bush administration has delivered is most certainly NOT anyone's fault but it's own. Poor planning, poor execution, overly optimistic expectations; I have not changed my tune or my desire to see many in the Joint Chiefs given the boot and Rumsfeld flogged and I have mentioned this countless times...
The current problems we face in Iraq stand on their own and no amount of political rhetoric can change the fact that things have gotten MORE difficult and with little sign of letting up. Someone other than me once said something about "winning a war, but losing the peace" and this is precisely is what is on the brink of taking place. Not all is lost, but I do not have much hope that we will see a functional and relatively peaceful Iraq anytime soon, and by that I mean not before 5-10 years have passed. The Sunnis and Shi'ites are just too fractured by their localized differences that Hussein managed to magnify by the way he ran the country. Notice I'm not even touching how the Kurds are going to play into this...
No, I cannot and absolutely refuse to blame our present military situation in Iraq on the Clinton administration. However, I do completely throw the lion's share of the blame on our intel failures that did lead to a number of bad calls in the pre 9/11 and the early post 9/11 days of the Bush, Jr. administration on the abysmal way that intel was gathered and handled by the Clinton Administration. The '93 WTC bombing was a wake-up call that was more or less put on snooze for 8 years. I could blather on for hours, but suffice to say that wiser heads than mine have already put the screwups that William Christopher and Madeline Albright propagated under sctrutiny and they have even started pummeling on one of the few figures in the Clinton administration that I truly admired (and even had a chance to meet in college during a seminar), George Tenet. His story is damn-well near a Greek tragedy as he pretty much sunk his own ship with the following two words:
"slam dunk"
I guess I would say that the Clinton administration with the modest help of the Regan and Bush I administration help set the stage and provided most of the shoddy props in this drama, but the bad acting that has most of the crowd booing has been all due to poor planning and poor execution of the Bush II administration. Unfortunately, it's rare that the public get more than knee-jerk reviews of the show and few care about the scriptwriting or the choreography that has gone on during pre-production.
Then again, we did have Hussein selling tickets at the door, promising an unknowing audience and production crew a surprise nobody would have guessed...
Lots of blame and finger-pointing, but none of it changes the reason of why we went in. Again, Bush made the right decision based on what ultimately turned out to be the wrong reasons. If we knew then what we know now, I'm sure House and Congress authorization for military action would have NEVER been given and I highly doubt the Bush administration would have requested it.
