Don't Blame Me For Your Failed War, Mr. President

Don't blame me for your failed war, Mr. President. It is not my fault that your administration made mistake after mistake after the invasion which allowed, and even fostered, the growth of the insurgency. It is not my fault that you entered into a war of choice.

Leaving aside the debate over pre war intelligence and the selling of the war, here are some examples of bad policies which led to the current situation in Iraq.

When Jay Garner was sitting in Bagdhad, shortly after the airport was secured, he was drawing up plans to hold Iraqi elections within ninety days. You relieved him from that responsibility. Then, you put Paul Bremer in his place. Paul Bremer, whose first priority, judging from the orders he issued in his first two weeks in charge, was not to instill democracy and order to Iraq, but instead to put in place neoliberal economic policies attempting to privatize public services, power, water, mobile phones, and of course, oil. At the time, some in your adminstration were expressing fears that such an early election might lead to a Shia dominated Islamic government.

It is not my fault, Mr. President that you allowed Paul Bremer to disband the Iraqi military and police forces. How could anyone possibly think that a society in such a state of chaos and deprivation, not to mention occupation, could be maintained in any sort of order without some sort of local authority?

And then there was Fallujah. Four Blackwater contractor/merceneries were killed, and their bodies were dragged through the streets. And your response was to be "tough" and attack Fallujah immediately, despite your top military representatives in Iraq telling you to wait until they could redeploy troops and establish a plan that would allow them to attack the insurgents with a much smaller impact on the innocent civilians of Fallujah. You rejected this, I can only assume for political reasons, and ordered the immediate attack on Fallujah. This was the insurgents' Alamo. Prior to Fallujah, the insurgency was a small group of ex-Saddam supporters who received only marginal support from the Iraqi populus, but after the complete levelling of Fallujah, the insurgency suddenly burst forth, growing rapidly, and more importantly, receiving support from a significant proportion of Iraqi society.

So, you see, it was your decisions to 1) delay a swift election, 2) remove any stabilizing forces, and 3) mainstream the insurgency by decimating Fallujah which led to Iraq being in the state it's in two and a half years after the invasion.

The morale of the troops in Iraq is being eroded by being shot at every day, by dodging IED's and mortar rounds fired by an insurgency which was made stronger by your administration's policy decisions. It's a very clever rhetorical device you are using, equating all criticism of your administration with criticism of the troops, but I don't stand by that.

In fact, I find the loyalty to the mission and the ability with which military men and women in Iraq are carrying out your policies, all the more amazing because of all this. I greatly respect what they're doing because they are still standing in and doing their duty in the face of increasing evidence that you lied about the reasons you gave for this war. I consider that devotion to duty pretty damned admirable.

So, don't tell me that it is my criticism of your policies that is undermining our war effort. Our war effort was undermined by the decisions your administration made when the war was still receiving majority report. It was your mistakes that allowed the insurgency to blossom and led us into the current situation.

And then you gave Paul Bremer the Presidential Medal of Freedom.