FOOTNOTES

Quote:

One conclusion to draw from the unlovely spectacle of democratic governance in Iraq is that the two dominant American views of the war were both wrong. Iraq is a far less modern, less united, and less friendly place than the fondest hopes of the war’s architects would have had the American public believe. At the same time, the ability of those architects to control the outcome for their own purposes is close to zero. Some war boosters, in and out of the Administration, have nonetheless been quietly declaring mission accomplished redux, with a shrug: they never thought Iraq would be perfect, and everything from here on out is just footnotes. In public, they seem to want Americans to forget all about Iraq.