Very much the same thing happened in Afghanistan as in Iraq except the assault on the former was justified to crush the Taliban and Al-Quaeda, while the latter was a geopolitical gambit to create a self-financing puppet state to threaten all Arab nations that bordered it, and to provide an anvil on which to hammer Iran with Afghanistan. WMDs, AL-Quaeda connections and Saddam's brutality were not reasons, they were excuses.

Whether this is morally justified or not is a matter of debate and I will not get into it right now. But if we evaluate this policy strictly from a point of view of effectiveness, not morality, it has been a catastrophe even from the perspective of those who engineered it.

The invasion of Afghanistan was hamstrung by the premature removal of assets to serve in Iraq, and by Rumsfeld's desire to substitute Pentagon involvement for the original CIA incursion into the area. This was strictly inter-agency rivalry, CIA was doing just fine.

In both countries, but Iraq in particular, sufficient forces were assembled to defeat local opposition, but not enough to seal the borders, restore public order, provide security, rebuild infrastructure, i.e., run a proper military occupation of a conquered nation, something the USA is very good and experienced at. The reason for this is because the Bush team felt it would be too expensive, take too long, and generate domestic opposition. For the same reasons, the overcommitment of reserves and the brutal rotation of troops, which will have irrevocable negative long term-effects on our armed forces, was instituted.

The Bush team failed to anticipate public unrest, crime, organized insurgency, foreign infiltration, and sectarian violence, even though it was repeatedly warned of these possibilities by domestic critics, our allies, and the military commanders responsible for carrying out the occupation, way before the invasion began.

Instead, the Bush team felt that the Iraqi people's love of liberal democracy and consumer capitalism would magically create a pro-American state in a country which had just been humiliated and crushed by American military power. You didn't have to be an expert on Arab affairs to predict how this was going to work out. Not since Kennedy convinced himself an 1100 man Bay of Pigs invasion force would precipitate a Cuban popular uprising which would defeat a modern army of 100,000 has such an preposterous plan been approved by an American president.

While this tangled web unraveled, the administration responded with the usual tactics peculiar to its ideological bent: arrogance, ignorance, denial, flag-waving, and general pious humbuggery, and a reliance on its domestic allies to accuse its critics of cowardice, lack of patriotism and appeasement. Multiple opportunities to cut its losses and withdraw from the quagmire were ignored, and the situation deteriorated.

The American adventure in Iraq will be remembered as a devastating failure of foreign policy and the high water mark of American power, the end of the American century and the beginning of its decline. The disaster will come not so much because our leaders were wrong, but because they were imbeciles.