Former Iraqi Commander: "Bush Administration Grossly Incompetent"

More bad news and publicity for Bush and his cronies on their handling of the Iraq debacle, and from one of their former top men there, Ricardo Sanchez, a three-star general who commanded the US military in Iraq from 2003-2004.

From Rawstory:

In a new memoir set to be published May 6, the former commander of US forces in Iraq provides new intimate details of the goings-on at high levels of the Bush Administration in the first year of the Iraq war.

His sharp tongued conclusion: "Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were unnecessarily spent, and worse yet, too many of our most precious military resource, our American soldiers, were unnecessarily wounded, maimed, and killed as a result. In my mind, this action by the Bush administration amounts to gross incompetence and dereliction of duty."

Where is the outrage?!!

Another article on what he said about the Iraq war last fall and now:

Lt. Gen. (ret.) Ricardo Sanchez, who commanded coalition forces in Iraq in 2003-04, made headlines last fall when he described the Iraq War as having been “catastrophically flawed” from the start and called it “a nightmare with no end in sight.”
[...]
Sanchez writes, “It was now crystal clear that a major success had to occur in Iraq before the presidential elections. Critical decisions affecting Iraq would be tied directly to ensuring the success of President Bush’s reelection campaign.”

In an interview on CNN, Sanchez noted that one very obvious effect of this need for a major success was that “we stopped the Fallujah attack because it would have a detrimental effect on the transfer of sovereignty. It would probably have collapsed.”

“Every American has to understand that wars are fought based on political objectives,” Sanchez explained. “What I describe in the book is that I’m fighting two different wars. I’m fighting the actual war on the ground, and I’m also fighting the war back in the United States, where the administration is attempting to get re-elected. … What I am faced with in the end is a situation where it is impossible for me to continue.”

Is that another nail in the coffin of Bush's legacy that I hear?

Sweet.

At the end of the day, even if in 50 or 100 years the Middle East is more civil and democratic, Bush took the path of whatever means to his end, and that's just wrong when the lives of hundreds of thousands of people are either lost or ruined in the process, no matter how much his neo-con friends tried to convince him of the contrary.

End of story.