An unwillingness to confront certain hard realities has been evident in the upper reaches of the Bush administration for quite some time.

Rather than face the fact that allies like Turkey would need to be extensively consulted and courted before they would allow us to base troops for the Iraq invasion on their soil, the Bush administration convinced itself that we didn’t need the support of much of anybody.  The result was that we were left without a way to position the larger force that would have been needed to prevent civil chaos, and we created the environment that bred the insurgency

As for their talk of establishing a vibrant democracy on Iraqi soil, it is now painfully obvious that the administration failed to consider much of anything about the actual underlying nature of the society it was proposing to transform.

If there was background music playing when they were talking about what they thought they were going to accomplish in Iraq, it must have been The Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.”