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3/20/13

Middle East: Iraq war a decade on: prophets and apologizers- by Douglas Herbert

They say hindsight is 20-20, and that visual acuity seems especially sharp when it comes to the US invasion of Iraq, 10 years after the fact.

An ABC News-Washington Post poll on the eve of the anniversary showed that 58 percent of Americans, looking back now, don't believe the war was worth the fight

In a similar vein, a YouGov survey of British adults, conducted March 10-11, found that 53 percent thought Tony Blair's decision to send 45,000 troops to Iraq to fight alongside American forces was just plain wrong.

Skeptics will counter that it's all too easy to get up on one's moral high horse and fulminate against the folly of the Iraq incursion, knowing what we do today: namely, that it was a war based on faulty intelligence and patriotic hubris, and was waged without an international mandate.

James Dobbins, the director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND corporation, told me this week that US policymakers clearly underestimated the challenges of an Iraq invasion, given the relative ease of the Afghan invasion - at least in its early going - about 18 months earlier.

Read more: Iraq war a decade on: prophets and apologizers - ON THE BLOGS - FRANCE 24

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