Delusion in Iraq and America

Via Talking Points Memo, an interesting contrast of how much we know about both sides of the Iraq invasion, noting that we know more about Hussein's strategies (or lack thereof) than we do of Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld's strategies (or lack thereof). In the New Yorker, "Deluded":

After the fall of Baghdad, three years ago, the United States military began a secret investigation of the decision-making within Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. The study, carried out by the U.S. Joint Forces Command, drew on captured documents and interviews with former Baath Party officials and Iraqi military officers, and when it was completed, last year, it was delivered to President Bush. The full work remains classified... it is easy to imagine why the Administration might resist publication of the full study. The extracts describe how the Iraq invasion, more than any other war in American history, was a construct of delusion.

...extensive interviews with the Army and Marine generals and colonels who commanded the invasion show that they had almost as little faith in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his aides as their Iraqi counterparts had in Saddam and his sons.

The whole article is fascinating, and not long; read all, I entreat you. Back on TPM, Josh Marshall goes on to point out the ongoing craziness:

The president, his key advisors and their public defenders keep looking over the horizon to history's more positive verdict on their gamble. But there's little reason -- either from what we know of this war or the evolving view of past wars -- to think this adventure will be remembered as anything but a disaster.

And yet, only last month the country was knocked off the rails into a dingbat debate about whether things were actually bad in Iraq or whether the media was just telling America things were going badly and hiding all the good news.