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re: And just who is Jane Galt?
TB — (archived)

At the risk of committing hindsight bias myself, and stipulating that I don't have time to dig into the archives to verify it, I remember the specific objections raised against the war to be: 1) Lack of planning for the post-invasion period; 2) Skepticism toward Cheney's vision of showers of flowers; and 3) Skepticism of the rosy confidence that the job could be accomplished with one-half to one-quarter the number of troops that analysts such as Shinseki estimated. Those three objections bear directly upon the situation in which we now find ourselves; luck had absolutely nothing to do with it.

I remember nothing about complaints on lack of planning for the post war period.

We were, in fact, welcomed by many Iraqis in the early days. I posted photos.

If you can find one reference to "not enough troops" back in spring of 2003, I'd like to see it. I doubt most people knew Shinseki from the pizza guy. What I remember were predictions of being tied down in urban warfare for months, and that the major combat would go on for a long time. This changed quite suddenly a while later to the idea that they "always knew" we'd beat the Iraqi Army in a matter of days.

Nobody I remember said, "Hey, what if the Sunnis and Shiites start a civil war?"

Nobody predicted that almost all of our casualties would come not from actual battles, or street-to-street fighting, but bombs buried at night in roads, and random sniper shots.

Predictions of casualties were dire. If I had predicted the war would last more than four years, the conservatives would have hooted me down. If I had predicted that in four years of war, only 3,000 American military would be killed, a number similar to the casualty rate of some single battles in WWII, or less than a month in Vietnam, the liberals would have hooted me down. Predictions of tens of thousands of Americans killed, and hundreds of thousands or even millions of Iraqis, were routine.

I remember people confidently warning us (not here, I don't think) that our troops would be slaughtered by Saddam's WMD, or that he would unleash them on Israel.

Kevin Drum is having some problems with the "memory hole," too. I have found that a lot of my old archives, particularly to newspaper articles, have vanished (nothing sinister, just old stuff tends to disappear).

Not sure how productive this "hindsight" argument is. I just posted that article to show a different perspective on it.

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