Good Friedman Article

Friedman does a good job today talking about the Iraq War and putting some of the pieces into context. If you're on the hard Right, you won't like it because it talks about facts on the WMDs. If you're hard Left you won't like it becuase it fails to indict the Administration for going to war based on it's faulty intelligence.

But if you're in the middle and trying to get an honest idea where we went wrong so it doesn't happen again, it's interesting (although not terribly original).

When the definitive history of the Iraq war is written, future historians will surely want to ask Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush each one big question. To Saddam, the question would be: What were you thinking? If you had no weapons of mass destruction, why did you keep acting as though you did?

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But I think Saddam knew how busted and bankrupt his country and army were. Therefore, he never wanted to completely erase the impression that he had W.M.D. Saddam lived in a den of wolves. The hint of W.M.D. was his only deterrent shield left against his neighbors, his enemies at home and the West. (This was alluded to in the Duelfer W.M.D. report.) So he tried to allow just enough U.N. inspections to clear him on W.M.D., while playing just enough cat and mouse with the U.N. to leave the impression that he still had something dangerous in the closet.

The Bush team, and the C.I.A., not only failed to learn that Saddam had no W.M.D., they failed to appreciate how devastated Iraqi society really was. The Bush team, listening largely to exiles who had not lived in Iraq for years, thought that there were much more of an Iraqi middle class and more institutions than actually existed. So Mr. Bush thought taking over Iraq would be easy. That is the only way I can explain his behavior.

This jives with what I've been told by friends of mine who lived or grew-up in Iraq, but had no vested interest in rebuilding, i.e. none of them has a shot at being a Prime Minister or other offical in a new Iraqi governement.