>I have a pretty good sense when I'm in over my head and have no problem soliciting opinions from others
>
>In the interests of fairness, the French offered some 100% accurate advice at the very start and got hammered all across the US... I was there and couldn't believe it. They were called "retreat monkies", french fries were relabelled "freedom fries", senior diplomats were routinely libelled and slandered, champagne was boycotted, on and on it goes... if you check the archives you'll see that even posters on UT were taunted and abused for being French...
>
>You can't pin all that on GWB.


You can pin a lot of it on him and others in his administration. They were the ones who rushed to judgment and wanted to go to war. They were the ones who willfully misled the American people about the "threat" from Iraq. They were the ones who couldn't be bothered to wait for the UN investigators to find proof that WMD were being developed by Iraq, leading to a UN resolution authorizing the use of force (as was the case in the first Gulf War). They were the ones who painted everyone who didn't agree with them not as cautious but as appeasers, weaklings, etc. As you say, the countries like France and Germany who advocated a go-slow approach were the wise ones.