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10/29/2004: Thought for the Day:
When the histories are written about the occupation of Iraq, several chapters should be devoted to solving this mystery: Were the Bush administration's fatal mistakes due to bad thinking or to the sheer absence of thinking? The political scientists could follow up with a symposium on which trait—wrongheadedness or mindlessness—is worse in a wartime presidency.
Michael Gordon has recently been trying to unravel some aspects of this mystery in the New York Times, and his account of what may be the administration's most catastrophic mistake—the decision to disband the Iraqi army in May 2003—suggests mindlessness was the culprit.
--Fred Kaplan
Len on 10.29.04 @ 06:23 AM CST
