It Takes a Family

One interesting point made in Thomas Rick's book Fiasco - The American Military Adventure in Iraq is that, calamitous as the actions of George W. Bush have been, he is not soley responsible for the debacle. Some of the other big blunders were made by his father, George H. W. Bush.

The worst was that, after we failed to destroy Saddam's Imperial Guard divisions, he explicity encouraged the military and the cities to rebel against Saddam, and after they did, let American forces stand by while Saddam sent the Imperial Guards to destroy them. American airpower would almost certainly have been decisive if it had been used.

The Iraqi's took the obvious lesson from this, that America could not be trusted. Saddam similarly concluded that the Americans lacked follow through and a coherent plan.

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