Iraq looked like a snap, but we fumbled

WILLIAM RASPBERRY; The Washington Post

WASHINGTON - Think of a National Football League owner who knows less about pro football than, say, Dan Snyder. Then imagine him turning the decision-making over to a coach who is long on theory and lacking in actual professional experience - like Steve Spurrier, for instance. Now, toss in a series of embarrassing setbacks - with no realistic hope that things will get much better anytime soon - and what have you got?

What you've got is either the Washington Redskins or Iraq - the key difference being that only one of them involves destabilizing a good chunk of the world, wrecking the U.S. Treasury and an escalating number of body bags, discreetly hidden from TV cameras when they arrive at Dover, Del.

It'll probably sound like Bush-bashing, but it is becoming clearer every day - it became crystal, with David Rieff's piece in The New York Times Magazine of Nov. 2 - that we went into Iraq with no postwar plan save unfounded optimism. And now with so little going according to predictions, we don't know what to do next.

George Bush is not a dumb man. But before he decided to seek the presidency, he was willfully ignorant of international affairs - or at least strangely incurious. How many Americans of his age, opportunity, means and family connection hadn't visited even London, Rome or Paris? His mind became a blank slate for a set of neocon ideologues, whose audacious goal was to reshape the geography of the Middle East, and the Sept. 11 attacks gave them their opening.

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