Bob Woodward’s latest book on the Bush administration is being serialised by the Washington Post this week and is a grim reminder of just how badly Iraq strategy was run for so long. This exchange between Condoleezza Rice and General George Casey in Iraq in, presumably, November 2005 illustrates the almost total lack of policy co-ordination:
“Excuse me, ma’am, what’s ‘clear, hold, build’?”
Rice looked a little surprised. “George, that’s your strategy.”
“Ma’am, if it’s my strategy, don’t you think someone should have had the courtesy to talk to me about it before you went public with it?” To be sure, President Bush deserves credit for deciding on and pushing for the surge—click here for a charting of how much it has achieved in terms of reducing violence—when the politically expedient thing to do would have been to embrace the Baker-Hamilton commission report. But he also deserves a ton of criticism for how badly the war was managed for two and a half years.
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