just another government program

One of the things that conservatives seem to forget when it comes to foreign intervention is that wars are just another government program, no more likely to succeed or be well-managed than any other tax-payer financed, bureaucratically controlled project. So who should be surprised to read something like this:

"What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground," said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. "We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning."

It was never realistic. Thanks, senior official, for admitting what so many of us knew all along.

Imagine if the Bushies had tried to sell this war by saying that we would replace a brutal, but secular, dictator with an Islamic republic:

The goal now is to ensure a constitution that can be easily amended later so Iraq can grow into a democracy, U.S. officials say.

Yeah, I feel confident that whoever gets into power as a result of this mess will gladly turn it into a democracy. That is how it always happens, isn't it? The State freely relinquishes power back to the people. Uh-huh.