According to chief propagandist Tony Snow, everything in Iraq has gone well.
Q Slides from a pre-war briefing show that by this point, the U.S. expected that the Iraqi army would be able to stabilize the country and there would be as few as 5,000 U.S. troops there. What went wrong?
MR. SNOW: I’m not sure anything went wrong. At the beginning of the Civil War, people thought it would all be over at Manassas. It is very difficult — no, Jessica, the fact is, a war is a big, complex thing. And what you’re talking about is a 2002 assessment. We’re now in the year 2007, and it is well-known by anybody who has studied any war that war plans immediately become moot upon the first contact with the enemy.
Of course, the White House hasn’t had any contact with the enemy but a few thousand of our soldiers have, and they didn’t come home alive.
They had a plan?
No, they had a slide show.
It seems to me that the war plan went swimmingly. As most people predicted, the Iraqi army sucked and rolled over. The problem, as most intelligent people also saw, was what to do ‘after’ the war. And the fact that Iraqi women didn’t become soccer moms and Iraqi men didn’t immediately join bowling leagues seemed genuinely surprising to the neocons.