Unqualified Offerings

I found the Bastiat passage below while putting together an AOTP post on the crudeness and inadequacy of national accounting. I also found, as sure as summer, that Iraq is in the middle of yet another economic "boom." These declarations of Iraqi boom-times have been an annual feature of America’s suzerainty. Somehow, this boom takes [...]

Frederic Bastiat fails to support the troops:
I will tell you where the loss lies; and to simplify it, instead of speaking of a hundred thousand men and a million of money, it shall be of one man, and a thousand francs.
We will suppose that we are in the village of A. The recruiting sergeants [...]

Doug T in comments downblog points to an un-authenticated but authentic-sounding semi-insider account of the planning for post-war Iraq, by a guy who apparently had the guts to resign over the issue.
Three of us 0-6 functionaries in the Joint Staff resigned in late February 2002 rather than go ahead with what we knew was an [...]

By Thoreau
Greenwald observes that Democrats do quite well when they pledge to take on the lawlessness and insanity being perpetrated in the name of “fighting terror.” Nonetheless, significant numbers of Congressional Democrats, including people in leadership roles and people with safe seats impervious to GOP challenge, continue to roll over for the Bush White [...]

Oh by the way. To complain, as the Army War College study and numerous “responsible” critics of the Bush Administration have done, that US military and civilian planners failed to have a realistic plan for post-war success in Iraq is to complain that The United States government did not adequately prepare to militarily impose its [...]

Tim F. at Balloon Juice is all
The capsule summary is not entirely accurate in that Rumsfeld certainly did have a plan. He and the neocons planned to install a friendly strongman and leave.

but that’s not really accurate, unless you use "leave" in the bipartisan American-government sense of the word, as in "leave" a residual force [...]