The Bush administration in Iraq: "lions led by donkeys"

A paragraph excerpted from a review by Anthony Cordesman of Jeffrey Record's Dark Victory: America’s Second War against Iraq (2005) in Naval War College Review Winter 2006 (scroll down to second review).

Record's analysis of the failures of both Bush administrations to deal with the aftermath of military victory [in Iraq] is remarkably insightful, but it is far from clear that the postwar situation in Iraq was in fact controllable or that a successful process of conflict termination and nation building could have been put in place. As Record points out in many other areas of his discussion, the fact that the United States is a superpower does not mean that severe limits do not exist on what it can and cannot do; the broader question that surrounds the current nation-building effort in Iraq is whether any such effort on this scale can work.

... this reviewer had a horrible feeling of déjà vu when reading through Record's discussion of the failures of the policy makers of the George W. Bush administration. The impact was strikingly similar to that of the conclusion of George Orwell's Animal Farm (originally published in 1945): The leaders of the Bush administration's war on Iraq became difficult to distinguish from the leaders of the Kennedy-Johnson administrations' war in Vietnam. It also became painfully clear that the aptness of the phrase "lions led by donkeys" has long outlived World War I. (my emphasis)

Although it's inconceivable in OxyContinLand, this is not from a Defeatist, an Isolationist, or whatever the other Rebublican bogey-men of the day are. It's a book review by one of the country's leading military analysts in an official publication of the US Navy's War College, intended to be read by naval officers and other specialists. Cordesman favored the Iraq War and (last I saw) supports Bush's "stay the course" approach.

I've read Record's book and I highly recommend it. Record and Cordesman are two of the military analysts I quote most often.

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