I knew from Powell’s UN speech it was going to be a clusterfuck. But for the first year of the war, I kept thinking, “well, at least the execute this fuck up okay, won’t they?” I was always surprised anew by just how incompetent they were.

This may sound weird, but I’ve actually never seen Powell’s speech.
I happened to be in Europe when it occurred, and too busy/no time to watch it.

But there were massive demonstrations in Paris, London, Berlin, and it was not pleasant traveling as an American, despite explaining to everyone how much many Americans detested GWBush.

By Feb 2003, the dollar was already dropping against the euro.
I distinctly remember one US ex-pat, a retired US biz exec exclaiming, “I can’t believe what I’m seeing — FIFTY YEARS of goodwill, shot to hell by GWBush in the space of six weeks!”. People were in shock.

France has a large Muslim population, although I’m not sure what proportion is from Iraq. The French have long term ties with the Near East and Africa (including Niger, which IIRC used to be a French colony). France does a ton of business with Muslim countries. Yet the French were trying to put the brakes on Bush, obviously to no avail. It didn’t require the IQ of a rocket scientist to figure out that something was amiss with Bush’s claimed rationale for the Iraq War if you were reading the international press. (Indeed, as far as I’m concerned, it only strengthens the argument that Cheney got punk’d by Iran; or perhaps by Russia, acting through Iranian intermediaries…?)

Then consider the Germans, who have a huge pharma and chemical industry. It’s probably a safe assumption that the Germans sold chemicals to Saddam, and the conjecture among my contacts was that the Germans probably knew what chemicals Saddam had. So their reasoning went like this: ‘If the Germans aren’t worried, and they know what Saddam has, then why should the rest of us get too hot and bothered?’

Among my contacts, the fact that Paul O’Neill left Treasury in Dec 02 was ominous, and signaled that something was very, very wrong in GWBush’s administration. Because although the Bushies ridiculed O’Neill for going to Africa with Bono, the people that I spoke with thought that kind of thing was a smart thing to do. (O’Neill had ‘resigned’ in Dec 2002, just before the final run-up to the Iraq War.)

Their contempt for GWBush is hard to describe, but these people have learned multiple languages, learned about other cultures in order to make good business relationships — so their assessment of GWBush was grim. Basically, they’d have made a point of learning more about Iraq culture before they considered marketing even a tube of lipstick to Iraq, yet GWBush was going to send thousands of people to invade a nation about which no one in the BushCheney administration seemed to have the most basic knowledge.

And consider that cities, administration, and writing all trace their origins to the Tigris-Euphrates; it’s not like the place didn’t have any history worth learning about.

So even though the war has been even a bigger disaster than I could have imagined, I’m not surprised that GWBush and Cheney fucked it up. If you don’t give a rat’s ass about people or their culture or their living conditions, what else would you expect?

We can’t be rid of the dead, suffocating weight of these depraved incompetents soon enough.
I predict record numbers of overseas Yankees voting Obama this year.