Some interesting remembrances from FOB Greg Mitchell. Yeah, the toppling of the statue was a real grass roots effort, yep. Go read the whole thing, but here are some highlights-
NEW YORK Six years ago today the U.S. media and administration officials who plotted the invasion of Iraq celebrated the fall of Baghdad while expressing few fears about the future. "We're all neo-cons now!" crowed Chris Matthews on MSNBC. Joe Scarborough, also on MSNBC, declared, "I'm waiting to hear the words, 'I was wrong' from some of the world's most elite journalists, politicians, and Hollywood types."
Vice President Cheney dismissed critics of the war as ''retired military officers embedded in T.V. studios'' (consider the irony of that given later revelations). Donald Rumsfeld compared the end of Saddam Hussein's government to the fall of the Berlin Wall - a tragically premature judgment, as we would soon learn.
Dick Morris at Fox News said, "Over the next couple of weeks when we find the chemical weapons this guy was amassing, the fact that this war was attacked by the left and so the right was so vindicated, I think, really means that the left is going to have to hang its head for three or four more years."
(snip)
Fred Barnes, the former newspaper reporter now at Fox News, said, "The war was the hard part. The hard part was putting together a coalition, getting 300,000 troops over there and all their equipment and winning. And it gets easier. I mean, setting up a democracy is hard, but it is not as hard as winning a war."
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