Lies and the lying liars, pt. MMCXVI

Another day, another left-wing talking point confirmed by the Pentagon.

See, I've always said that people who supported this war were idiots. Not misguided, not well-intentioned-but-wrong, just plain dumb. Especially Michael Ignatieff. The reasons are numerous, but one of the important ones was that it was clear before the war even started that the US would go in with too few troops and too few resources to adequately secure the country post-invasion. This really wasn't up for debate: anyone who had any knowledge of the history of successful occupations and peacekeeping knew that the so-called "coalition" would have too few troops on the ground to secure, well, anything.

Why was this the case? Again, simple. If you need to invest the kind of lives and resources that a proper occupation requires, you can't prepare the public for that kind of cost when the main reason people support your wars is because it's going to be cheap and easy. So the Bush administration lied about the threat, lied about the costs, and got itself and the whole world in a mess of trouble.

(This, btw, is the strongest evidence that Bush never learned the lessons of his addictions: addicts lie all the time, to everyone, to themselves, and they frequently don't even realize they're lying. And in some cases, the lying continues after the addiction has been controlled. I'm not the first to compare Bush to a Dry Drunk, but seriously -- go read these symptoms here, and tell me they don't fit to a T.)

Anyway, the NY Times reports today that those long-haired hippy weirdos at the Rand Corporation wrote a report in 2005 which said Iraq is a disaster and it's all Bush's fault. (More or less.) But I noticed this bit right away:

“Building public support for any pre-emptive or preventative war is inherently challenging, since by definition, action is being taken before the threat has fully manifested itself,” it said. “Any serious discussion of the costs and challenges of reconstruction might undermine efforts to build that support.”

Can't discuss costs or consequences before something like a war -- it might get in the way of the war!

This is a short must-read.