Over By Christmas

Tacitus has an interesting article:

I truly never expected that the execution of the occupation would be this poor. It's salvageable yet, albeit via measures that I'm not sure the leadership will endorse, but the bottom line remains that had I had a crystal ball back in early '03, and seen this, I'd probably not have supported this war.

We've been seeing a lot of these articles recently, as erstwhile hawks realise that things aren't going great. What baffles me is that people ever believed that this would be a quick, clean war. There's no such thing. There are always casualties.

So how did these hawks justify their support before the war? Did they decide to support it up to 100 coalition deaths? Or 50 coalition deaths and 1 Shia uprising? Did they perform a cost-benefit analysis before taking their position? The problem is that those who wage war always claim that it'll be all over by Christmas, and too many are taken in.

The question that must be asked is not would you have supported the war if you knew how many casualties we would sustain, but how did it not occur to you that we would sustain them?