Imagine That? War Is Massive FAIL

I'm sure this report could have come out before the November 4 elections.

"An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.

The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag — particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army — the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures."

Do we need any more evidence to get Rumsfeld locked away?

Make sure all your conservative war monger friends get this message. They were the ones a few years back that said the liberal media only talked about the negative stories. Well, we were right. The positive stories, and the way the conservative blogs and media tried to spin it, were made up. They chose ideology over facts.

"The bitterest message of all for the reconstruction program may be the way the history ends. The hard figures on basic services and industrial production compiled for the report reveal that for all the money spent and promises made, the rebuilding effort never did much more than restore what was destroyed during the invasion and the convulsive looting that followed.

By mid-2008, the history says, $117 billion had been spent on the reconstruction of Iraq, including some $50 billion in United States taxpayer money."

That is about 4 auto industry bailouts but who's counting.

Does this sound like the Bush way of doing things, something he has done his whole life:

"Five years after the invasion of Iraq, the history concludes, 'the government as a whole has never developed a legislatively sanctioned doctrine or framework for planning, preparing and executing contingency operations in which diplomacy, development and military action all figure.'”

Please read the entire article. Should be mandatory reading for any pro-war "might-makes-right" flag-waving asshole out there. Should print it on the back of all the NASCAR tickets.

Source: NYT