Careless People

Looks like I am not the only one who has been thinking about this:

With regard to the debacle playing out in Iraq, for example, the White House and its die-hard supporters are still in denial, while most of their Democratic critics are stuck at anger. Policy wonks have moved on to the bargaining phase, debating how much of the original mission to sacrifice in return for a way out. Depression is likely to set in as the full extent of the calamity becomes clear; acceptance is a long way off.

That's from a WaPo review of a new book on the Iraq debacle, The Assassins' Gate by George Packer. Both the author and the reviewer were taken in by the various rationales for war, but then...

The military leadership under Gen. Tommy Franks abdicated any responsibility for seeing the war through to completion; the civilian leadership at the Pentagon and in the vice president's office kept their own mysterious counsel while blocking others from doing anything useful; a feckless president surrounded by sycophants and ideologues seemed barely to understand what was going on around him.

The reviewer is actually the WaPo's foreign affairs editor, Gideon Rose, who says Packer's reluctance to "tie the threads of his analysis together in a tidy bundle and settle accounts" is something of a cop-out:

It is not too soon, however, to return a judgment on those at the helm who took a difficult job and made it infinitely more so, dramatically undermining America's regional and global position in the process. They were "careless people," as Fitzgerald said of Tom and Daisy Buchanan, who "smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." That, if nothing else, can stand as a lesson for future tender souls contemplating the possible benefits of liberal imperialism and mulling attempts to do the right thing with the wrong partners.