WE Blog

Vice President Dick Cheney this week defended his statement a year ago that the Iraq insurgency was in its “last throes,” but he said the administration underestimated the strength of the insurgency. “I don’t think anybody anticipated the level of violence that we’ve encountered,” he said, adding that “we didn’t anticipate . . . the devastation that 30 years of Saddam’s rule had wrought, if you will, on the psychology of the Iraqi people.” But as The Washington Post noted, many defense and Middle East experts warned administration officials during the run-up to the war about potential obstacles ahead. For example, a group of specialists who met at the Army War College in December 2002, three months before the United States invaded Iraq, warned: “The possibility of the United States winning the war and losing the peace is real and serious,” and that “successful occupation will not occur unless the special circumstances of this unusual country” are heeded. Likewise, the Post reported, 70 national security experts and Middle East scholars issued a report before the invasion concluding that occupying Iraq “will be the most daunting and complex task the U.S. and the international community will have undertaken since the end of World War II.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee

The Wichita City Council released $11.4 million more for the WaterWalk development this week, including $1 million to help draw a major restaurant to the riverfront project. But developers won’t identify the restaurant being courted for a month and a half or so. Officials are probably trying to avoid another Bass Pro Shops bait-and-switch situation. But as we noted in an editorial Tuesday, saying only “that it’s a ‘destination restaurant’ with high entertainment value is asking taxpayers to take quite a leap of faith. (Yes, that description could fit, say, Rainforest Cafe, the ESPN Zone or the Hard Rock Cafe; but it also could fit Chuck E. Cheese.)”
Posted by Rhonda Holman