1/n Re-upping post, on two levels:
— James Fallows (@JamesFallows) June 30, 2020
-Back in 2004 I did Atlantic piece called “Blind Into Baghdad” https://t.co/rC3zwPeVgr
Its point was that risks, consequences, and blowback of US "victory" in Iraq were not just foreseeable but had been foreseen, in detail, by military planners
November 2002:
Over the past few months I interviewed several dozen people about what could be expected in Iraq after the United States dislodged Saddam Hussein. …
Merely itemizing the foreseeable effects of a war with Iraq suggests reverberations that would be felt for decades. If we can judge from past wars, the effects we can't imagine when the fighting begins will prove to be the ones that matter most.
—James Fallows, archived*
tweet links to an article published nearly a year after the invasion, also archived*
text of unrolled thread:
1/n Re-upping post, on two levels:
-Back in 2004 I did Atlantic piece called “Blind Into Baghdad”
Its point was that risks, consequences, and blowback of US "victory" in Iraq were not just foreseeable but had been foreseen, in detail, by military planners2/n
US Army War College, in particular, had laid out a detailed timeline of what was most likely to go wrong (eg, riots and looting as soon as Hussein was overthrown) and how to anticipate and minimize it. And biggest mistakes to avoid (eg, don't disband the Iraqi army.)3/n
Reading those pre-war assessments of what *not* to do, was eerily and nauseatingly parallel to reading post-war accounts of what US actually did, to disastrous effect.
US debacle in Iraq all the worse because US leaders had been warned...4/n
--but Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bremer, et al wouldn't bother to listen or learn. "Stuff happens!" in Rummy's deathless phrase.5/n
The new article I have in the Atlantic is essentially that same story about our current debacle, the pandemic.
fifth tweet in thread links to new article, also archived*
*a link – see a note on notes and links