1) If you google "Iraq" "warlords" you quickly learn that much of the media (including liberal) still don't accept this.

2) George Ward was a bit of a propagandist, himself. Okay, "a bit" may be understating it.

I would conclude he is still spinning, finding fault in others in order to minimize his own failings. It's what these people do.

Hekava job Bushie! Hekava job Georgie! Hekava job Dick! Hekava job Donnie! Hekava job Scooter! Hekava job Turd-Blossom! With all their hard work, no wonder they've made me feel tired and screwed! _Kevo

Highly relevant, first-person story in the Post about Afghanistan:

Instead, we gave power back to corrupt gunslingers who had been repudiated years before. If they helped us chase al-Qaeda, we didn't look too hard at their governing style. Often we helped them monopolize the new opportunities for gain. A friend of mine, one of the beneficiaries, was astounded at the blank check. "What are we warlords doing still in power?" police precinct captain Mahmad Anwar asked me in 2002. "I vowed on the Holy Koran that I would fight the Taliban in order to bring an educated, competent government to Afghanistan. And now people like me are running the place?" I had to laugh at his candor.

I'm with kevo. I hate these people. Bastards all of them.

He meant import Afghanistan's warlords. This is a global economy. ;)

Actually, in all seriousness, what is Blackwater if not a warlord army.

Maybe thinking there were warlords was another of those "failures of intelligence" that Shrub was regretting on TV recently.

They had a whole set of preconceptions about Iraq that bore no resemblance to reality. They still do.

They had no realistic plan for supporting humanitarian missions because they didn't think there needed to be any. Once they toppled Saddam, and installed Chalabi, democracy and civil society would instantly fill the vacuum, given a little help from KBR, Blackwater, and a crew of eager 20-somethings who could get their stock market running and so forth.

As their record has shown, they haven't a clue about how to even make an established industrial democracy like the United States work successfully. Their ignorance of what they needed to do in Iraq post-Saddam was colossal, and it was exceeded only by their arrogance.

We tend to forget how big and wrong it was, because the human mind has trouble truly grasping such immensity.

Maybe they could have called in the Mounties?

They didn't care. Starting the war was the aim, they would do and say anything to justify that. Saddam was a tiny threat to Israel, and (by a long long stretch) a tiny threat to the US.

Undoing the government was all that mattered, and chaos would be a perfectly acceptable outcome. It allows us to stay, "stabilizing" the region, and who pays for chaos? Just innocent Arabs. Their deaths didn't count as a cost, and for some, maybe even a benefit.

"fun" detail:
the "Saddam ruthless dictator willing to do anything including chemical weapons to hold on to power" and "influential warlords running their turf" views are kinda incompatible.

this is a test comment -- please ignore