It depends on your definition of anyone
The boy wonder Milliband popped up on GMTV to spout off about 5 years in Iraq and one of his pearls of wisdom struck me when he complained that the problems arose because the war was too easy and that the peace was harder then anyone had thought.
To me this exemplifies the way our government thinks. Prior to the war we essentially had two groups; one who said we'll wrap the war up in a few months, institute democracy to the cheering crowds and then leave; the other group said you'll be there for years fighting and then be there for even longer dealing with the 'peace'.
As events have shown the second group was wrong; the war itself went through quite quickly. So following the mindset that no-one who was right about the length of the war predicting the extent of time spent on the 'peace', we can state that therefore nobody predicted it would last this long.
More succinctly - the people who agreed with us didn't think it would last this long and everyone else doesn't count.
Apply that attitude at every decision made by the government and suddenly so much makes more sense.
2 comments:
Um, I'm not saying every prediction I made was right, I'm not even sure a full list of said predictions exist, but I'm sure on these two issues I was right.
I remember someone, trying to be patriotic during the first days of the war, said something like "I'm rooting for our troops!" and I said that would be like rooting for the NY Yankees against a Little League team. The war's conclusion obvious, the rest was guessing. I honestly had no earthly idea that the Bush administration would be as bad as it was during the CPA period, but I still expect we will never kill everyone who wants to kill us in retaliation for all the people we killed trying to stop the people killing us because, etc.
One thing I'll also note? The people who were generally much more right than wrong about the course of the war, the news media has not made any sort of effort to give them a whole bunch more time now, to give us even more perspective. Nope, if you were right about the war, then you make them look bad and that ABSOLUTELY cuts into their revenue. The only revenue-positive way for the corporate media to look at the run-up to the war is to declare that everyone thought Saddam had WMD.
We get enough mainstream news sources here in the UK who point out the flaws and inconsistency's, not that the majority will out-and-out tell you that their previous stories were a pack of lies; that's for the bloggers to note and remember.
We don't quite have the degree of corporate media you do. Sure the BBC is funded via the government, but that's a known association and if anything should mean that they come down harder on them just to prove there's no bias.
Saying that I heartily recommend the Channel 4 news over the BBC, they have a tendency to go into more detail, likewise their Despatches programme
This is why I found Milliband's remarks of interest - it wasn't that the aftermath lasted longer then 'we' thought; it lasted longer then anyone thought. Except for, you know, the experts and all the people who said we'd never get out; but they don't count.
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