>Obviously the administration made plenty of mistakes. Large scale, long time frame operations like this always suffer from them. That won't change, regardless of the Presidential figurehead "in charge." That's why I focus on what the goal was/is/should be... giving the Iraqi people a real shot at the freedom to control their own country.

That's too 'easy' a dismissal though, Jason, at least in my opinion.
The country has a history that was entirely discounted.
The fact that 3 large separate groups inhabit the country and the Kurds had already been making noise about a separate state was also ignored.
The rampage of looting that followed the demise of Saddam made whatever infrastructure was left unuseable.

It's also gotta be awfully hard to concentrate on "my shot at freedom and democracy" when bombs are blasting everywhere and people are being gathered up and shot/beheaded and you have no running water and electricity is sparse at best and you can't find work and your family is starving and the price of everything is way up.

Then there's the oil situation. I still can't fathom how it was that Saddam was able to ship a few million barrels a day with the supposedly antiquated facilities that were found yet virtually no oil is coming from Iraq today.
Has the smell of a get-richer-quicker scheme by Halliburton to me, 'modernizing' the oil processing facilities.

My view is that the Iraqis **could** have had a reasonable shot at freedom and democracy but the mission was botched so badly that they have no chance now.

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>>The problem is the good things that have happened in Iraq are in spite of the administration, not because. Yes, there are instances of successes. There are some military leaders stationed in Iraq who know you must get to know the people. From statistics I've seen there's maybe 25% successes, 75% failures.