Iraq - this war demonstrates Bush's incompetency.

Richard Cohen gets it. Bush doesn't.

Bush repeats the mantra "9/11" as though that justifies the war in Iraq. The 9/11 Commission (which Bush resisted creating until he was forced to) clearly stated that there was no connection between Iraq and 9/11.

So Scott McClellan states that 9/11 merely caused a mind-shift in the administration. It made them realize that terrorism was a threat (after they had spent eight months downplaying it because Clinton and his people considered it a major problem) so that they had to take preemptive action.

So what preemptive action did they take? They attacked Iraq, as Bush had wanted to do since 1999. Iraq was a problem, but no threat. 9/11 was not the cause of our invasion of Iraq. It was the event that allowed Bush to do what he had previously wanted to do but knew that wiser heads would stop him. See also Why did Bush want war in Iraq?.

From an unreasonable and purposeless effort to demonstrate American military prowess, the Iraq War has been reduced to an international disaster. It has effectively destroyed the American military Reserve system, proven that the Volunteer Army cannot be depended on in wartime, placed severe and unnecessary strains on the American economy and isolated America from the rest of the world.

On the isolation of the U.S. take a look at what is happening in Italy. Kevin Drum describes the recent effort by an Italian Magistrate to arrest 13 U.S. CIA people, and expands on his description here. This is a reaction to the arrogance of the Bush Administration, and an example of how that arrogance works against our international efforts to deal with terrorists. Berlosconni has been one of Bush's staunchest allies, but he went against the Italian people. We are all paying the price for that arrogance.

All of this has shown that the Bush administration is ideologically-driven, in that facts are always subordinate to ideology, and unable to govern effectively.

The timing of the attack on Iraq was clearly based on using it to maintain the Republican control of both houses of Congress in 2002, so of course there was no time to fool with UN considerations. Why bother? America was The Superpower. The war in Iraq was to be a demonstration of that, a minor war in a small country that allowed America to flex it's military muscles and allowed Bush to gain the bump in the domestic polls that the Falklands War gave Margeret Thatcher.

Nor was there any time or need to be honest about why we were attacking Iraq. Every reason given to the public or to Congress before initiating war against Iraq has been proven wrong. As the Downing Street Memos have proven, both the U.S. and Blair had already decided to attack Iraq. Any reason given the public was just public relations to rope them into supporting the idiocy.

Listen to Bush's speech. Where Bush talks of fighting some imaginary monolithic threat called "Terrorism" in Iraq instead of in the U.S., LBJ spoke of fighting an imaginary monolith called "Communism" in Southeast Asia instead of in San Francisco. America came to realize that in Vietnam we were fighting a nationalistic movement that called itself Communist. That put us on the side of the French and Japanese as imperialist aggressors, so that for all three nations to cost of continuing the war was too high to be worth it. That's why the French quit Vietnam in 1954 and we quit it in 1974.

The insurgents in Iraq are a similar nationalistic movement. Because they face the most powerful conventional military in the world, they are practicing what is known as "asymmetric Warfare." Since al Qaida is well-trained in that form of warfare, the insurgents are happily taking training and Islamist volunteers to aid their cause, but the core of the Iraqi insurgency is nationalistic Sunnis who are attempting to force the invading and occupying U.S. military out of their nation.

In fact it is the American invasion of Iraq which created the mess that is today Iraq. Together with the unnecessary and unreasonable invasion, in which the Bush administration used too few troops for the post-invasion required actions, there is the utter incompetence with which the Bush administration had no plan for control of the cities and looting after the invasion and when advised they needed it by the CIA, State Department and Uniformed military refused to prepare such a plan, then they stupidly let Jerry Bremer of the CPA disband the military, police and border guards that would be required to stabilize the occupied Iraq since WE did not have to troops or skills to perform those tasks.

This litany of stupidity, arrogance, ideology and incompetence has turned Iraq from a nasty local despotic problem with no connections to international terrorism into the worlds' largest terrorist training camp. We are also stuck with maintaining 140,000 mostly Army and Marine Corps troops attempting to create some kind of stability while they also are so understaffed for the job that the insurgents cannot be defeated. At the same time, the presence of that foreign occupying force has become a massive recruiting tool for terrorists world-wide.

Richard Cohen also addresses the many things we are doing to rebuild Iraq.

"Bush sounded downright Johnsonian in talking about progress in Iraq. He cited rebuilt "roads and schools and health clinics," not to mention improvements in "sanitation, electricity and water." This, too, had a familiar ring. We got the same sort of statistics in Vietnam. Some of them were simply concocted, but most, I think, were sort of true. Roads were paved, schools were opened and village councils were elected -- and yet, somehow, it never mattered. The newly elected village council could meet in the newly opened school and get there on a newly paved road -- and spend the night planning an attack on U.S. forces. It is all so depressing."

For all that the American troops are doing for the Iraqi people, their standard of living this year is much worse than it was last year, and their health care system (which had previously been world class in many respects) is unable to provide basic medications. Just as Habitat for Humanity is little more than spitting into the wind of systemic poverty, the American efforts to rebuild "roads and schools and health clinics," not to mention improvements in "sanitation, electricity and water" are miniscule efforts in the face of the destruction caused by the insurgency and the American efforts to control it.

No. I don't have The Answer to Iraq. All I can say it that the current crew of arrogant, ideologically-driven incompetents who have created this mess out of a tin-horn dictatorship and their own desires for greatness have proven unfit to continue to lead the efforts in Iraq.