The idea to invade Iraq was a good one. It would drive a wooden stake deep into the heart of the Islamofascist world, and it would have created a pro-American, pro-democracy state there in a nation that was already highly secularized and inclined to go that way anyway. We would have a military base on the border of almost every middle eastern nation and a viable, benign alternative to radical Islam available for everyone to see and envy.

The people were fed up with Saddam's brutality and even his neighbors would have welcomed his downfall. Iran would find itself isolated from the rest of the middle east and surrounded by US troops, and Iraqi oil would have financed the whole operation and lessened American dependence on other foreign crude producers. And Iraq could put up no meaningful military resistance.

The only problem was that civilized, peaceful nations do not invade their enemies, it is an unforgiveable sin and deserves international condemnation. However, we had a great excuse, Weapons of Mass Destruction and an Al-Quaeda connection. If I had been President, and IF AND ONLY IF I was convinced of these two preliminary conditions, I would have taken the chance. Here was an opportunity to deflate the entire Jihadist and terrorist movement in one quick surgical procedure. The strategy promised great returns, but also had great risks. It was worth taking the chance. If it had succeeded, Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld would have gone down in history as geniuses.

The problem was not the strategy, it was the execution. Not only did we fail to do our initial homework, we went in unprepared, we failed to adjust to changing conditions, and we persisted in making the same mistakes over and over again in order to save face and preserve the ideological purity of the White House vision. We refused advice, and worse, we did everything we could to discredit and humiliate our critics. And when it was clear that we had lost the initiative, we persisted in our error for no good reason other than to prove we were right, and with no plan other than the hope that things would change in our favor. To put it in the business terms they so love to bandy about, they ran a good company into the ground through total mismanagement.

The Bush team will go down in history, not only as fools, but as killers on a vast scale, and they will be remembered for aggravating the initial problem rather than correcting it. They will recieve the condemnation of the world, which they will deserve, but thousands of Americans have already paid the ultimate price, and the rest of the us will have to continue to pay a heavy price for a long, long time.