Told you so

The consensus seems to be now that the war was mismanaged even if it was a reasonable decision. The big mistake the Bush administration is supposed to have made is that they didn’t have enough troops to stabilize the situation after winning.

Two things that must be said to the 'I told you so' crowd.

1) You only get to say I told you so if you give the right reasons. The people saying I told you so have to have said it was because of the aftermath that more troops would be needed. All I remember is that people were saying we would have house to house fighting against the Iraqi army like in Europe in WWII. That never happened. What is happening now is not, to my knowledge, what people that wanted more troops were warning about. They were warning about protecting supply lines and the drive to take over Baghdad. Since none of that was a problem the administration made the right decision from among the options they were presented with. What is happening now is random terrorism. It is not clear that having more troops on the ground would decrease random terrorism or not. It might prevent some incidents but it would offer targets for more. It would also offer more opportunities to incur resentment. If 500,000 troops had been sent the same people would be arguing that the huge amount of American troops is what is causing the problem.
2) Random terrorism. The people that are giving us trouble in the Sunni triangle are Sunni’s that want to bring back a Sunni regime and are willing to kill children to do it. They are trying to prevent an election because they know they have no chance to win it. It is true the Administration underestimated how vile were the means that the enemy was willing to employ, but the anti-war people can hardly take an ‘I told you so,’ here. The people protesting war with Iraq weren’t saying, “leave them in the hands of the terrorists because if you try to free them the old regime will just start randomly murdering civilians till we are forced to leave.” All of the horror in Iraq is being caused by people that want to go back to a Sunni military dictatorship. Can the monstrous things those people who want the old regime back really be used as an argument for having left the old regime in place?

Disaster? Americans have a really low threshold for using this word. We have lost 1,000 troops. That slow day in WWII. We have taken over the seat of the Caliphate and are about to set up a democracy, the first ever, in the Arab world. A man that people describe as an American puppet has a 67% approval rating—and that is with bus loads of kids getting blown up in the streets. Imagine what it could be if we can get the terrorists. A prosperous, pro-American democracy in the middle-east? That is worth almost anything.