The New Road

Much of the rest of the world's intelligence community believed that Saddam was up to something re: WMDs. They couldn't state to what degree though. The administration's big kafuffle on that front was to claim they knew more than they actually did. Of course, they made these claims because the rest of the world, not really sure of what was true and what wasn't, was not ready to go in on what little it knew. The world's mistake was believing that the coalition wouldn't go it alone - as if real evidence mattered. Hopefully, they know better now.

I am still amused to see "finishing the job in Afghanistan" and "entering Iraq" in the same sentence - as if these really play off each other. I see no evidence, none, anywhere, that had we not gone into Iraq, Afghanistan would be a done deal. The history of the region suggests otherwise. Not even the administration claimed the Afghanistan would be over in "a couple of days." - and even if you can show they did - the real question is why you would have believed it anyways. I consider tying the two together with any intent of the two ideas playing off of each other in support of swaying an argument one way or another as not much more than a red herring. If we're going to learn any truths out of all of this, we need to deconstruct linkages that really don't exist and examine the pieces separately.

Writers of all persuasion are beginning to talk about this thing called "The Long War". I've been interested in watching where this debate goes; not so much the implementation of action, but what if any agreement can be had with regard to how real it is or not.

The right action in Afghanistan would have been to send in a black ops team to just take Bin Ladin out the day after the attack. The administration didn't go that way because a black op would have been a CIA deal. And Cheney didn't want Tenet doing the work. He wanted Rumsfeld to do the job. Which meant a big army operation which took a month to spin up and basically did almost nothing.

Were we not in Iraq I believe it's reasonable that we would have more than the 20,000 troops we current have in Afghanistan there. Afghanistan doesn't have the same sectarian divides that Iraq does. Though I question the strategy of eliminating the Taliban when our real target was Bin Laden, I do believe that Afghanistan could be stabilized if more soldiers were added.

That being said, you are right, Afghanistan is still the complex war that nobody seems to care about. People are always surprised when they find out that Afghanistan is a bigger country than Iraq.

As to the intelligence. Which countries are you talking about when you say 'every country' agreed with the assessment. That's not true. Britain, France and Germany all had serious issues with our conclusions. And the Italian intelligence service was complicit in the deception by supplying the forged Niger uranium documents.