Bremer and the screwup from the beginning

Paul Bremer has been making the media rounds to try and salvage his reputation while promoting the book he authored on his experience in running Iraq.

This post has some information on what he is saying now in the contrast to what he said earlier, when it would have been useful for the public. The one thing I would add is that I listened to Bremer get interviewed on National Public Radio. He discussed how very early in the occupation, our military intelligence was not concentrating on fighting the initial insurgency but rather on trying to find the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.

Among the many reasons to despise our current president is that the administration magnified its mistake of invading Iraq by mishandling the crucial first weeks and months following the successful overthrow of the Iraqi government. To the extent that we invaded based on incompetence and lies over WMDs, Bremer's comment that we lost crucial time trying to validate the lie just supports the argument that the invasion was fatally flawed from the beginning.

UPDATE: forgot to add this link: total war costs could top $2 trillion, slightly more than the $50 billion estimated by people in the Bush administration prior to the war.