The Longest War: A final summary of the horrible Bush record

[fiorello]

For the 10th anniversary of DU: here is the final word on the Bush administration. Don't forget that Bush slacker negligence was a major factor in 911! From a review of "The Longest War", by Peter Bergen - a CNN reporter (and it doesn't get any more official and mainstream than that). Here's what it says:

“The Longest War,” a new book by Peter L. Bergen, CNN’s national security analyst...

The sections of this book dealing with 9/11, the war in Iraq and the prosecution of the war on terror retrace a lot of ground covered by the important work of other journalists, most notably Thomas Ricks, author of the book “Fiasco”; Bob Woodward of The Washington Post; and Jane Mayer, Seymour M. Hersh and George Packer of The New Yorker.

These chapters by Mr. Bergen provide an utterly devastating indictment of the Bush administration on all levels — from its failure to heed warnings about a terrorist threat, to its determination to conduct the war in Afghanistan on the cheap, to its costly, unnecessary and thoroughly misguided invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Mr. Bergen gives us a sampling of the ominous threat reporting distributed to Bush officials in 2001 (not just the famous Aug. 6 brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”) and concludes that the problem “was not a lack of information about Al Qaeda’s intentions and capabilities, but the Bush administration’s inability to comprehend that an attack by Al Qaeda on the United States was a real possibility.” This failure, he says, came about partly because the thinking of the Bush White House was “frozen in a cold war mind-set” and partly because it saw Iraq as the No. 1 danger and “bin Laden and Al Qaeda were politically and ideologically inconvenient to square” with its worldview.

...None of the (Iraq) war goals articulated by the Bush administration were achieved: “An alliance between Saddam and Al Qaeda wasn’t interrupted because there wasn’t one, according to any number of studies including one by the Institute for Defense Analyses, the Pentagon’s own internal think tank. There was no democratic domino effect around the Middle East; quite the opposite: the authoritarian regimes became more firmly entrenched.” And the war did not pay for itself as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz had predicted, but instead turned Iraq into “a giant money sink for the American economy.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/books/18book.html?pagewanted=all

[Uncle Joe]

1. The longest war is the so called "War on Drugs" and it's a total failure costing far more lives and

treasure than Iraq and Afghanistan combined many times over.

Thanks for the thread, fiorello.

[The Doctor.]

2. It's hard to believe that such a level of incompetence even exists.

The other possibility is too frightening for most to consider.

As for the war, any book without a reference to the PNAC is not adequate.