..But Shock and Awe blew the lid and the de-baathification campaign unleashed the furies.
Wish I'd said that! ... when seeking that sublime compression which Unix-speak demands of all command-line wanna-be acolytes.

{sigh} Methinks it's a fond remembrance of all those wistful reduxes ~~
"Of all sad words of tongue or pen
The saddest are these, it might have been."
The stuff of Red Pllenty, then. But it's still unicorn-land; Muricans never parse their reptile-brain enthusiasms as they are flowing out, over cigars and 100 yo Port.

And especially lacking amidst the Ronnie worshippers, The Kissinger and that litany of scrofulous neocons of the ilk of Wolfowitz, Kristol and clones (as they successfully targeted the marlowes of the disgruntled masses) was any sense at all of the bottomless-Hatred engendered in these young desert-Losers: 50ish% unemployed forever and living under the tyranny of a lethal religion, (should they even try to get laid! anywhere near their "country"/tribe.)

Anyway.. *MEGO at the full litany [20/20 hindsight] of the puerile utter absence of Murican foresight re most of the issues in this screed. I don't much care that the "econ guesses" are apt to be least accurate [simply because Econ-itself is a bogus pseudo-science and all.]

* noting that Karl Rove has a book now, comparing the McKinley election to the forthcoming.. (he's on C. Rose just now.) It's about the $$$, the tactics/strategies of a bloodless computer-game; just as it Will be played. Machiavelli R'us.. Ferenghi with smaller ears?

I gotta Love Stockman's concluding comments...

Needless to say, bombing wont stop them; it will just make more of them.

Ironically, what can stop them is the Assad government and the ground forces of its Hezbollah and the Iranian Republican Guard allies. Its time to let them settle an ancient quarrel that has never been any of America’s business anyway.

But Imperial Washington is so caught up in its myths, lies and hegemonic stupidity that it can not see the obvious.

And that is why a quarter century after the cold war ended peace still hasn’t been given a chance and the reason that horrific events like last week’s barbarism in Paris still keep happening.

If I stay far enough away from the 2016 daily-fog of Pre-Next-war I can catch up with a large cache of books ... as I tally-up how close/or not was any Stockman prescience of the Murican character then and still (does anyone see any improvement .. to speak of?)

Thanks for the romp. I think we'll be missing BHO earlier than I'd imagined.