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" FORMER CHAIRMAN OF THE DEFENSE POLICY BOARD ADVISORY COMMITTEE RICHARD PERLE THEN: &amp;quot;I believe, and I think there&amp;#039;s a lotof evidence to suggest, that most Iraqis will regard us as liberators, and it will not take anything like that number of troops [several hundred thousand] to maintain peace and order in Iraq. &amp;quot; . . . It may not go as smoothly as we all hope it will, but I don&amp;#039;t believe you will get civil war. There is no indication from the people we talked to who are coming out of Iraq all the time and people who are talking to Iraqis. There are hundreds, thousands of such conversations. There are differences, to be sure, among these groups, but it&amp;#039;s not like Bosnia. It&amp;#039;s not as if they have been destroying each other for many years. They haven&amp;#039;t, and I don&amp;#039;t believe they will.&amp;quot; --Hannity and Colmes, February 28, 2003 IN HINDSIGHT: &amp;quot;The military campaign and its political aftermath were both passionately debated within the Bush administration. It got the war right and the aftermath wrong. We should have understood that we needed Iraqi partners to go with us into Iraq and to guide us when Saddamfell. A Western-educated, secular democrat, Ahmad Chalabi, had organized the opposition to Saddam, bringing together Sunni, Kurdish, and Shia leaders who had spent their lives working to rescue Iraq from one of the most murderous tyrants of modern times. The Pentagon wanted to recruit among them, but the Department of State, General Tommy Franks, and, most of all, the CIA did not. So vehement was their opposition--much of it petty and personal--and so indecisive was the White House that we went in alone, and largely ignorant of the lethal politics of a traumatized Iraq. That is how a stunning liberation subsided into a debilitating occupation, manned, with the best intentions, by thousands of Americans who barricaded themselves in a protected &amp;#039;green zone&amp;#039; in Baghdad and squashed every initiative the hapless Iraqis conceived to put themselves on a path to a civil society. The idea that we erred in having too few troops to maintain security there simply misses the point: Our job in Iraq was never to substitute for Iraqi security forces. Toppling Saddam and building a democratic Iraq were never the same thing. &amp;quot;Free Iraqis have demonstrated heroically at the polls that they are determined to choose their own leaders and establish their own constitutional structure--and at last we have accepted that they alone can build a decent representative government to replace a quarter century of totalitarian rule. Now our job must be to help them defeat the remnant of Saddam&amp;#039;s regime and the terrorists and holy warriors who have joined them in Iraq. If we are clear about that, we will succeed. Winston Churchill could well have been describing our Iraqi experience when he said, &amp;#039;You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they&amp;#039;ve tried everything else.&amp;#039; &amp;quot;  --To Esquire, January 4, 2006  NEW YORK TIMES COLUMNIST THOMAS FRIEDMAN THEN: &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s start with one simple fact: Iraq is a black box that has been sealed shut since Saddam came to dominate Iraqi politics in the late 1960s. Therefore, one needs to have a great deal of humility when it comes to predicting what sorts of bats and demons may fly out if the U. S. and its allies remove the lid. Think of it this way: If and when we take the lid off Iraq, we will find an envelope inside. It will tell us what we have won, and it will say one of two things.  &amp;quot;It could say, &amp;#039;Congratulations! You&amp;#039;ve just won the Arab Germany--a country with enormous human talent, enormous natural resources, but with an evil dictator, whom you&amp;#039;ve just removed.&amp;#039; &amp;quot;Or the envelope could say, &amp;#039;You&amp;#039;ve just won the Arab Yugoslavia--an artificial country congenitally divided among Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis, Nasserites, leftists, and a host of tribes and clans that can only be held together with a Saddam-like iron fist. Congratulations, you&amp;#039;re the new Saddam.&amp;#039; &amp;quot;In the first scenario, Iraq is the way it is today because Saddam is the way he is. In the second scenario, Saddam is the way he is because Iraq is what it is. Those are two very different problems. And we will know which we&amp;#039;ve won only when we take off the lid. The conservatives and neocons, who have been pounding the table for war, should be a lot more humble about this question, because they don&amp;#039;t know, either.&amp;quot; --The New York Times, January 26, 2003 IN HINDSIGHT: &amp;quot;To me, the real intelligence failure was how broken Iraqi society was. It was so much more decimated than the CIA understood or the exiles either understood or were telling the U. S. government. Those guys had memories of an Iraq of the fifties and sixties, not the Iraq that had been battered by eight years of Iran--Iraq war, Gulf war I, ten years of sanctions, and then an invasion.  &amp;quot;I knew this was going to be hard. Believe me, it didn&amp;#039;t take any genius to know that. You just needed to have a basic acquaintance with the Middle East and the history of Iraq to know that. And that&amp;#039;s always been my issue with the Bush administration. My issue is not that this isn&amp;#039;t important. No, I think it is important. It&amp;#039;s that I thought it was important and hard, and they thought that it was important and easy.&amp;quot;  --To Esquire, December 13, 2005 POLITICAL COLUMNIST AND BLOGGER ANDREW SULLIVAN THEN: &amp;quot;The real effect of the current diplomatic train wreck preceding the war against Saddam is not to derail America from meeting its responsibilities in enforcing vital United Nations resolutions; it is to isolate America in the post-Saddam settlement. It means that not only will the war be paid for almost entirely by Americans, but reconstruction too will come out of the pay packets of average Americans. &amp;quot;Nobody believes the cost will be much short of crippling. Any attempt to use Iraqi oil revenues to defray the cost will not only be politically difficult but also depends on Saddam not doing all he can to sabotage the oil fields. Besides, the kind of commitment we&amp;#039;re talking about might only last a few years in Iraq, but it will engage America in that part of the world for at least a generation.&amp;quot; --Sunday Times of London, February 16, 2003 IN HINDSIGHT: &amp;quot;Hindsight is everything, but this prediction holds up pretty well. I always believed that the Iraq project would be at least a decade in the execution. But I also believed we&amp;#039;d send enough troops to fill the post-Saddam power vacuum, we&amp;#039;d follow the Geneva Conventions (we&amp;#039;re America, right?), and we&amp;#039;d pour reconstruction money to buy support in the short term and build momentum for democratic change. None of that happened, and so my prediction is now a function of grim reality rather than optimism. I&amp;#039;m still a believer in the project, just slack-jawed by the ineptitude of the administration tasked to carry it out.&amp;quot; --To Esquire, January 3, 2006 FORMER DEPUTY SECRETARY OF DEFENSE PAUL WOLFOWITZ &amp;quot;The oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years. Now, there are a lot of claims on that money, but . . . we are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.&amp;quot; --Testimony to the U. S. House Appropriations Committee, March 27, 2003 FORMER ARMY CHIEF OF STAFF GENERAL ERIC K. SHINSEKI &amp;quot;I would say that what&amp;#039;s been mobilized to this point--something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers are probably, you know, a figure that would be required. We&amp;#039;re talking about post-hostilities control over a piece of geography that&amp;#039;s fairly significant, with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems. And so it takes a significant ground-force presence to maintain a safe and secure environment, to ensure that people are fed, that water is distributed, all the normal responsibilities that go along with administering a situation like this.&amp;quot; --Hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, February 25, 2003 VICE-PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY &amp;quot;. . . We need, obviously, a large force, and we&amp;#039;ve deployed a large force. To prevail, from a military standpoint, to achieve our objectives, we will need a significant presence there until such time as we can turn things over to the Iraqis themselves. But to suggest that we need several hundred thousand troops there after military operations cease, after the conflict ends, I don&amp;#039;t think is accurate. I think that&amp;#039;s an overstatement. &amp;quot;. . . [I]f you look at the opposition, they&amp;#039;ve come together, I think, very effectively, with representatives from Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish elements in the population. They understand the importance of preserving and building on an Iraqi national identity. They don&amp;#039;t like to have the U. S., for example, come in and insist on dealing with people sort of on a hyphenated basis--the Iraqi-Shia, Iraqi-Sunni--but rather to focus on Iraq as a nation and all that it can accomplish as a nation, and we try to be sensible to those concerns. I think the prospects of being able to achieve this kind of success, if you will, from a political standpoint, are probably better than they would be for virtually any other country and under similar circumstances in that part of the world.&amp;quot; --Meet the Press, March 16, 2003 "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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