The "biggest mistake"...

Mind you, I don't disagree with Ryan... the Bush Administration allowed too much ground to be lost to the left by not making a clear, rational defense of its foreign policy actions from day ONE, right through to the end. I just don't think that was the BIGGEST mistake made.

I think that clearly, the biggest failure of the Administration was to fail to plan for an adequate means to secure the "peace" once Saddam was out of power in Iraq. This is a direct result of the "smaller, smarter, faster" military that Rumsfeld had planned for America's future, and is a direct reflection on the error of that planning. I am convinced that Rummy saw the success that was the '91 "Desert Storm" campaign, coupled with the disaster that was the last four years of the Vietnam War (remember, he was Ford's Secretary of Defense, too), and wanted to redraw the organizational charts of the US Military in ways that simply didn't work.

When we beat Saddam's Iraqi Army (call it May of '03), evidence shows that Rummy and the DoD pushed harder and harder for an "end" to the conflict from the State Department. They wanted a civilian government in place, ready to take over within 100 days of the end of major military operations... and this simply was not possible in the real world. There is no better example of this than the manner in which Rummy and the DoD handled General J Garner, whom they had placed at the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). When he wanted to hold elections early on, they said no... they would only support an appointed Iraqi civilian governing council, and not a general election. DoD then wanted the process of "de-Ba'athification" to begin, and Garner refused to comply. They fired him immediately, and replaced him with Paul Bremer... who really screwed things up.

I am convinced that there was no greater incentive to join the insurgency in Iraq than the de-Ba'athification of Iraq and the dissolution of the Iraqi Army. What little infrastructure there was in Iraq ceased to function completely, and you had (literally) hundreds of thousands of Iraqis without means or livelihood because of the Americans in charge in Iraq. Army conscripts were paid off with a $50 severance, which (even in Iraq) lasted no more than a month for a family of three. No jobs, no income, no means of support or care... but all the guns and ammo you could hope to use to try and make the bad "Americans" go home. Great planning, huh?

If Bush's legacy is going to be haunted by the specters of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, then much of that blame goes to Rumsfeld... end of story.