Blame the Turks

Two years after we invaded Iraq we finally have an answer to help explain why our forces continue to meet with resistance to this day.

I thought that a major insurgency was inevitable—after all we’re messing with the internal affairs of a sovereign country, creating general chaos with no clear plan for rebuilding, and we’re not really well liked in the Arab world to begin with.

But apparently it didn’t have to be so major. Donald Rumsfeld announced yesterday that if Turkey let us invade via their border, then “a considerably smaller number of the Baathists and the regime elements would have escaped.”

There’s some logic to the argument: a lot of intelligence and military personal escaped to the north when the US invaded from Kuwait. But isn’t it likely that they did this because we weren’t invading from Turkey and if we did, they would have simply disappeared elsewhere. Iraq isn’t the largest country in the world but it’s still pretty big and the personal certainly knew it better than we did.

There’s simply no way Rumsfeld could know that the difference is “considerable” and it’s just another pathetic attempt of the administration to cover up the fact that they had virtually no post-war plan. When’s someone going to be held accountable for this screw up? Oh well. At least now we can be sure that the Turks hate us.