Ex-Commander Says Iraq Effort Is ‘a Nightmare’

The former commander of American Forces in Iraq has said that Bush's handling of the war was “incompetent” and said the result was “a nightmare with no end in sight.”

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, who retired in 2006 after being replaced in Iraq after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, blamed the Bush administration for a “catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan” and denounced the current addition of American forces as a “desperate” move that would not achieve long-term stability.

“After more than four years of fighting, America continues its desperate struggle in Iraq without any concerted effort to devise a strategy that will achieve victory in that war-torn country or in the greater conflict against extremism,” General Sanchez said at a gathering of military reporters and editors in Arlington, Va.

He is the most senior war commander of a string of retired officers who have harshly criticized the administration’s conduct of the war. While much of the previous condemnation has been focused on the role of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, General Sanchez’s was an unusually broad attack on the overall course of the war.

We can now sit back and wait for the inevitable line of critics to pounce on Sanchez for daring to attack The Great Leader and say that, were it not for him personally, The Great Leaders plans would have worked earlier.

General Sanchez said he was convinced that the American effort in Iraq was failing the day after he took command, in June 2003. Asked why he waited until nearly a year after his retirement to voice his concerns publicly, he responded that it was not the place of active-duty officers to challenge lawful orders from the civilian authorities.

“There has been a glaring and unfortunate display of incompetent strategic leadership within our national leaders,” he said, adding that civilian officials have been “derelict in their duties” and guilty of a “lust for power.”

Of course, the same people who question why it has taken Sanchez so long to speak publicly are the very same people who accuse anyone who dares to say the war is not going well as traitors.

I remember in the very earliest days of the Bush administration reading about how Bush operated:

''This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,'' Bartlett went on to say. ''He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.''

And that, by and large, has continued to be the way the Bush regime operates, especially towards the Iraq war. For four years - FOUR YEARS - we have constantly been told that victory is just around the next corner, that progress is being made, and anyone who has expressed any form of doubt is instantly deemed a traitor who wants the other side to win.

It's the purest expression of a deeply held belief explained by a Bush loyalist in this administration's earliest days:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

And that, by and large, is what the Bush regime has been about. Creating their own reality. And it is a reality which asks you to believe in things - and call them "facts" - for which there is no empirical evidence.

White House officials would not comment directly on General Sanchez’s remarks. “We appreciate his service to the country,” said Kate Starr, a White House spokeswoman.

She noted that Gen. David H. Petraeus, the current top commander in Iraq, and Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador to Baghdad, said in their testimony to Congress last month that “there’s more work to be done, but progress is being made in Iraq. And that’s what we’re focused on now.”

It's simply astonishing. The White House line up Patreaus and Crocker to testify to Congress that "progress is being made in Iraq" and then quote them back at you as proof that progress is being made in Iraq. We are succeeding because we say we are succeeding. Reality is what we say it is.

Progress is always being made in Iraq. As long as you BELIEVE and don't rely on pesky things like "facts on the ground" or "statistics".

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Tags: Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, Iraq war, Bush, Bush regime, reality based community