Think Progress has posted video of Tony Snow on Real Time blowing off the failures we had in Iraq.
MAHER: In fact, the smarter people in his administration said to do just that. “We need more boots on the ground. We need more security.†But because he’s stubborn and stupid, he said, “No, let’s do it Rumsfeld’s way. Let’s do it the light way.†So it took him five years to come around to what should have been done five years ago. And — and while he was learning on the job, people paid for that in blood. […]
SNOW: Well, wait a minute. Look, I don’t know where to start, but I’ll start at the beginning. Number one, when it comes to the war, everybody — it’s great to be a backseat general, and everybody gets it wrong at the beginning of a war. But there were plenty of — no, it’s true.
The problem is that it wasn’t the military that got it wrong – it was the civilians, like Rumsfeld. The generals who said what was needed were fired (see Shinseki).
So it’s easy to dismiss this as “just being wrong” for people like Snow, but what did being wrong cost? Thousands of lives! So no Tony – don’t sit there and try to minimize the failures unless you have a child that died in this war. Doing so just makes you a sick bastard.