In today’s “I didn’t need you to tell me that” section, we find this article about a USA Today piece examining the Iraq War from the beginning. Most importantly in the article, it shows the folly of the blame-shifting that seems to be going on:

To blame administration bungling exclusively for the Iraq debacle, however, is to learn the wrong lesson. It’s true that the occupation of Iraq was mismanaged from the outset. By failing to guard massive munitions stockpiles, the administration helped arm the insurgency. And by disbanding the Iraqi army, it gave the insurgency men to use those arms. But the mistakes began with the decision to go war itself, a naive and arrogant exercise in wishful thinking that the nation can’t afford to repeat.

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U.S. policymakers would have benefited from more time reading history and less concocting rosy scenarios. In the 1920s, the British similarly believed that democracy could be imposed on a tribal culture accustomed to rule by strongmen. After a few massacres, the British learned their lesson, installed a king and retreated.

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It’s important not to buy the new self-serving line from the neoconservatives, some of whom are already beating the drums for a pre-emptive attack on Iran’s nuclear program. Recovering the international goodwill squandered in Iraq, and dealing wisely with the threats from Iran and North Korea, requires facing the mistakes squarely.

I couldn’t agree more, and I apologize for the big excerpt.

What we’ve seen in Iraq and, to a lesser extent, the aftermath of the midterms is the tendency of far-right neocons to shift the blame elsewhere and ignore that it was they who caused the situation. Bush did not act alone in the war. He was staunchly supported by those far more to the right than he who also were more preoccupied with overly optimistic results than the path to them and the justification for getting started.

I’ve been saying it for almost as long as I’ve had this site: the Iraq War was based on the presumption that everything will go awesome because we want it to and once that happens all of the other problems will iron themselves out. That’s not reality, and unless people start acknowledging it we’re going to do it time and time again until the United States actually has a real threat to deal with.