I don't see a scenario where the Iraqis would NOT have wanted us to leave faster. No one likes to be an occupied country. The only questions were under what conditions would we leave and how soon we would be able to. The two are not the same. Still things seem to have broken very well with us even with mistakes and mishaps.

Did you see Frontline last night?

No, I didn't.

You're right that I put it inartfully. It is not surprising that Iraqis are eager for us to go; it is good that the Shia are eager for us to go.

Is that go or troops leave go?

Chris - Was Frontline a negative story on Iraq? I've noticed the major media (i.e Nightline) are still running the "Iraq/Afghanistan are a mess" stories.

I had not realized until last week that Sistani is not an Iraqi.

Guess what. An Iranian mullah giving marching orders to an incipient Iraqi democracy.

Why do I feel less cheery about this than Orrin does?

I agree with your analysis: It's much easier to get people to do what you want if you're willing to take all of the blame and give away all of the credit.
Bush was known to be a gifted deal-maker before entering politics. His success since then, with the Democratic-dominated Texas legislature, as well as with the US Congress, reinforce that image with me.

He's also been very lucky these past three years, beginning with winning the election in '00.

Nobody knew that defeating the Iraqi military would be a cakewalk; Some estimates were that 50,000 US troops would die.
It doesn't get any luckier than the reality of what happened, at least from the viewpoint of the highest leadership.

Who estimated 50,000 troops would die? That's nearly as many as were lost during all of Vietnam. The highest number I ever saw was on CNN in the early days of the war they said that if casualty ratios were the same as in every other recent major war there would be something like 17000 casualties (killed and wounded). The fact is that if anyone from the administration would have said the war would cost ~500 lives in the first year, they would have been called a liar and/or a hopeless optimist.

On this, and on so many other issues which this administration decided to attack after years of (others') punting( most dealing with national security, but I would also include, say, immigration reform, e.g.), the point is NOT that there are costs and that there are risks. There is no free lunch. The point is that the costs have been lower than the Cassandras postulated, and the risks are more than being offset by hope. For God sake, if doing all we have done was supposed to have been easy or likely to have worked flawlessly, those who did not act previously (and their advisors) were not just risk-averse, they were criminally negligent.

Typical of Frontline it was very, very good. It dealt mainly with the actual invasion and immediate aftermath and not the actual occupation. It didn't go into the politics leading to the war, nor the politics afterward.

It concentrated on the actual war itself militarily. It did state what mistakes were made by the invasion planners: faulty intelligence, the overestimation of the Bush admin that the Shi'as would stage an immediate uprising against Saddam, the ignorance about the Fedayeen, and the failure to plan appropriately for the post war occupation over objections of senior Pentagon staff. It was based on interviews with various people inside the US, UK, and Iraqi (!) military and the typical analyst/pundit types.

This does not mean it was a hatchet job. It showed the incredible skill and firepower of the US and UK military. Nor did it present the situation in Iraq as doom and gloom. It presented the facts very dispassionately. I did not feel the producers had a political agenda either pro- or anti-war. If anything I would say that it showed how the war was won, but also that things could have been done better.

This type of program was very good as the issues it raised were precisely the debate we should be having. What went wrong? And therefore how can we fix it so we do better next time? I'd be much happier if the current political debate approached the situation like Frontline did. The left would be offering constructive criticism and pointing out how the Bush administration failed at certain policy points instead of failing to explaintheir agenda for victory is, and the right would be fixing what went wrong instead of denying it.

The show certainly wasn't congratulatory, but this is a news documentary, not propaganda. It's job is to help explain what happened and point out failures so they can be fixed. There are legitimate problems in Iraq that might have been lessened. The show pointed out what they were.

Chris -

I having seen the show, but if the definition of news documentary is to point out only failures they are either (a) not going to be reporting the totality of any event (which surely must also have succeses, in many cases the trade-offs of the so called failures) or (b) they will define failures so anally such as to become "gotchas", no? I am not sure this is what insightful documentaries should be all about.

I would prefer, and have made this point before, that the documentary began with what the best and worst case expectations were (contemporaneously) at every stage of the campaign. Against those real world expectations where did we outperform, met expectations, and underperform. Where we underperformed, did we just miss the point or did we chose alternative strategies that achieved other objectives. (For example, were we really ignorant of the Fedayeen's potential for trouble-making, or were we simply prepared to pay the short-term price of fighting an asymetric battle instead of brutalizing the population? Among other examples.)

Unless we do all of this, we countinue to set decision-making benchmarks that are biased in favor of INACTION: we criticize the thought-processes behind actions that do not meet all expectations, but we rarely go back and review failed, competing doomsday prophecies, and measure the opportunity cost of having followed them. (What would have hapenned had the planners intelligence would have come from the "Baghdad will be the next Stalingrad crowd" and they had decided to sit outside and erect a siege? Victor Davis Hanson could really have a field day on this issue, and we would all learn at least as much as analyzing the so-called failures.)