'Told you so' and 'What now?'

By Molly Ivins

Creators Syndicate

AUSTIN - Iraq. What. A. Mess.

As Cousin Eddie Faulk used to say during Vietnam, "If those folks don't
like what we're doin' for 'em, why don't they just go back where they come
from?"

Columnist Eric Alterman sums up the position of the "We told you so" crowd
thusly:

• The invasion of Iraq will cause, not prevent, terrorism.

• The Bush administration was not to be trusted when it warned of the WMD
threat.

• Going in without the United Nations is worse than not going in at all.

• They were asleep at the switch before 9-11 and have been trying to cover
this up ever since.

• They manipulated 9-11 as a pretext for a long-planned invasion of Iraq.

• Any occupation by a foreign power, particularly one as incompetently
planned as this one, probably will create more enemies than friends and put
the United States in a situation similar at times to the Vietnam War and at
other times similar to Israel's occupation of Lebanon. Both were disasters.

• An invasion of Iraq will draw resources and attention away from the
genuine perpetrators of the attack on us and allow them to regroup for
further attacks.

OK, that's the bad news. What www.talkingpointsmemo.com's Josh Marshall
calls "the hunky-dory crowd" is still telling us that the electricity is
back on and things are almost back up to where they were under Saddam
Hussein. There's a mark to aim for.

Look, I never root for bad things to happen, and maybe Moqtada al-Sadr has
set off merely a spasm of violence and not a real Shiite insurrection.
Maybe the Shiite outburst is just a reaction to Paul Bremer's incredibly
dumb move in shutting down their newspaper. If that's the case, why wasn't
al-Sadr invited to the table and given a stake in the transition?

The "We told you so" crowd often points out that we'd be a lot better off
if anyone in the administration read history, usually citing the British
occupation of Iraq.

I like to think of myself as part of the "So what do we do now?" crowd, but
it is like drinking gall. We could try what we clearly should have done
from the beginning: putting more boots on the ground. We've got about
135,000 troops there now. Gen. Eric Shinseki's "several hundred thousand"
prediction looks more prescient all the time.

The trouble with that scenario is that it violates the First Rule of Holes.
(When you're in one, quit digging.) Second, it may be too late.

Then there's the old reliable "Bug out now." Yep, it could be time to
declare victory and go home. That seems to be President Bush's plan. He can
just say, "Well, we took care of the weapons of mass destruction, so we're
outta here."

As many others have pointed out, June 30 is just a ridiculous deadline.
Even though we're not planning to withdraw on June 30, I can't see how
we're going to hang onto what was supposed to be the great strategic
advantage of this war.

Those of you who follow neo-con thinking know that this never was about
weapons of mass destruction. It was supposed to give us a place to plunk
ourselves down so we could restructure the entire region.

I suspect what we'll wind up doing is the inevitable "muddle along" until
our leaders can lie us out more or less gracefully.

If I were John Kerry, I would be having horrible nightmares about winning
the election and actually having to ask an American soldier to be the last
man to die for a mistake.




--
Jim