Samarra was not "the turning point"

The Washington Post ran a story yesterday (and hat tip to Atrios and Sadly, No! who both covered it well) reporting on the increasing administration claims that Iraq was "moving in the right direction" until the Samarra mosque bombing on February 22, 2006. The piece, which is very solid, basically contrasts the administration claim with a number of experts, who have a variety of political leanings, virtually all of whom disagree with that assessment. And they're right: while the Samarra bombing accelerated the internal strife, it absolutely did not precipitate it, maintaining and accentuating a trend rather than reversing one.

The reason why this is important is because it shows a desperate attempt by the administration to blame a single event -- and an outside influence -- for the colossal failures in Iraq. In fact, the entire debacle was caused by myriad failures, many of them repeated over and over, primarily at the strategic and planning levels. Iraq was very clearly getting worse before the bombing and continued to get worse afterwards. The mistakes and the shame of Iraq belong squarely on the shoulders of this administration, not on a single incident, or the nebulous group casually (and misleadingly) referred to as "al Qaeda in Iraq", or, especially, on those who rightly recognized that going to war in Iraq was a horrific idea.

It is also vital to note the administration did not believe Samarra was a turning point when it happened. Military and administration officials claimed the event did not signal a civil war, and President Bush insisted that the event was caused by external actors who would not derail the process. So first officials claimed the event did not signal a civil war and would not throw the nation into one, and now they say it was the single event that turned Iraq from the right track to the disaster it is today.

But the consensus intelligence position, and the position of experts, was (and is) that the Samarra bombing simply took a bad situation and made it worse. Iraq experts in the intelligence community thought of the event as an "accelerant," as in, something that would continue the destruction. I know this because I was one of the intelligence officials saying so. We tried to tell our superiors that the bombing was indicative of the rapidly deteriorating situation. Instead we were told, "If this hasn't sent the country into civil war, nothing will." Now the administration says it turned everything around. They were wrong then and they're wrong now. More evidence that the architects of this war are either completely oblivious to the ground truth of the war, lying through their teeth, or both.