The arrogance and ideology-driven blindness of the main players (Secretary Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney, Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz, Paul Bremmer, etc, etc) is exceeded only by their abysmal ignorance of Iraq, of the realities of warfare, and of the Arab world. President Bush is simply missing in action -- he apparently didn't even bother to keep up with what his advisers were doing. This movie takes Iraq up to about 2006, and now in hindsight we can see just how terrible their mistakes were. Indeed, as of today, Iraq appears to once again be descending into chaos and sectarian war.
The point is not to bash the Bush administration yet again - we have done that enough now. They are history. The point is to learn from these mistakes, because otherwise current and future politicians are and will make them again and again.
Rumsfeld's replacement as Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, was much wiser and much more realistic and pragmatic, and his replacement, Leon Penetta, appears thus far to be pretty good. But the Obama administration hasn't yet shown itself to be any more competent in Iraq than the Bush administration was. It's true we are now (mostly) out of Iraq, but only because the Iraqis threw us out, not because we were smart enough to get out.
The main message is that the Washington power elites are too often completely out of touch with the realities on the ground - in Iraq then as they are with the economy now. That ought to worry the voters a lot more than it seems to.
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