Just got through reading Rich Lowry’s piece “What Went Wrong?” in the
current NRODT. Brilliant, boss — and a very useful corrective to a lot of
the glib theories that have been flying around this past few months.
There was a mass of big decisions to make about the Iraq war & its
aftermath, and wellnigh every one of them had a good upside and a terrible
downside (i.e. if the decision turned out to have been the wrong one). Rich
doesn’t spare the administration, but left me thinking that, on balance, by
comparison with other projects on this colossal scale & of this complexity,
they didn’t do at all badly.