WP. “Experts” now negative on Iraq. Before the war, predictions
by even the most skeptical Bush administration critics did not include
scenarios of escalating violence this long after the invasion,
or of the U.S. military issuing a news release such as the one it sent
out Tuesday morning, headlined “Fighting Continues in Eastern Baghdad.”
In addition, several cities near Baghdad have slipped from U.S. control
in recent months and have become “no-go zones” for U.S. troops. “No one
that I know of, to include the most pessimistic experts, predicted a
full-scale insurgency would break out within a couple of months of the
overthrow of the old regime,” said Steven Metz, a guerrilla warfare
expert at the Army War College.
This demonstrates the bankruptcy of the analysis done by the current “experts” on the war. Analysts like Max Boot, Anthony Cordesman,
etc. are operating on assumptions years out of date (they are still
wrong about where this is going). Too bad that most of the media (from
NPR to the NYTimes), the DoD, the CIA, the Washington beltway
thinktanks, etc. continue to promote their flawed research. [John Robb's Weblog]