Retiring Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Peter Pace:
Offering a blunt assessment of the decisions and recommendations he made back in early 2003, an introspective Pace told Pentagon reporters that with the aid of 20-20 hindsight, it’s clear he made “errors in assumption.”
“One of the mistakes I made in my assumptions going in was that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi army would welcome liberation, that the Iraqi army, given the opportunity, would stand together for the Iraqi people and be available to them to help serve the new nation,” said Pace, who will leave the chairman’s job on Oct. 1. “If I knew that the Iraqi army was not going to be available, then I probably would have made a different recommendation about the total size force going in.”
In retrospect, he said, “you say you wish you knew, but you didn’t know on the way in.”
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan:
In a withering critique of his fellow Republicans, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan says in his memoir that the party to which he has belonged all his life deserved to lose power last year for forsaking its small-government principles. . . .
Mr. Greenspan, who calls himself a “lifelong libertarian Republican,” writes that he advised the White House to veto some bills to curb “out-of-control” spending while the Republicans controlled Congress. He says President Bush’s failure to do so “was a major mistake.” Republicans in Congress, he writes, “swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose.”
