Editor,
It has been said that President Bush is not intellectually curious. This is true, but even more important to consider is that he also lacks what can be called street smarts.
The end result is the mess we see today in Iraq.
It has been noted that Bush was not aware of the Sunni and Shiite dichotomy until six weeks before the invasion, and even then, he is reputed to have dismissed the importance of the matter.
Even more telling is the fact that his advisers of the period - Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle - were all actually very intelligent men, but they had no field knowledge when it came to the Middle East.
Wolfowitz earned a bachelor's in chemistry and mathematics from Cornell and a Ph.D in political
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science from the University of Chicago. He focused on the academic component of foreign policy and nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. Feith graduated from Harvard and earned a law degree at Georgetown. He's worked as a member of the National Security Council and done two stints at the Pentagon.
One can see neither Feith nor Wolfowitz are by any means stupid. But facts are facts, and they proved to be bookworms whose knowledge of the world was primarily
academic.
Iraq is the result of the bookworms thinking they knew more than people with experience in the real world. This is evident by the testimony to Congress by several ex-generals. Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni called Iraq the worst-planned mission he had ever observed. Paul Eaton, Eric Shinseki and John Batiste were very critical of Donald Rumsfeld's handling of the war. Former Army Col. Pat Lang was interviewed for a Pentagon job and denied by Feith.
The bookworms believed that once U.S. troops crossed into Iraq, the Shiites would rise up, and U.S. troops would simply provide cover. The other plan based on this theory was called the Bay of Pigs, President John F. Kennedy's failed invasion of Cuba.
The bookworms also dismissed any notion of postwar planning and occupation, believing that Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress would ride into Baghdad and install a new government. Three-and-a-half years later, we see that the government is simply the flavor of the month.
It is important to be intellectually curious, but Feith and Wolfowitz chose to use their intelligence to get in over their heads in Iraq for the sake of advancing personal agendas. Intellect without empathy and experience is useless.
Brandon Curtis
UNM alumnus
