BF2S Forums The Balkans - The pinnacle of US Foreign Policy effectiveness

I2elik wrote:

I'd like to direct your attention to http://davidbrin.com/balkans.html

This guy raises up points, when was the last time the Balkans was mentioned in the news compared to Iraq? Wouldn't it be a good converse to the current state of the country, considering both were an attempt to remove dictators and instate democracy in some sense. Albeit, the results were markedley different to eachother, perhaps the Coalition should've taken some pointers from the past?

Well, Gen. Shinseki, who was chief of staff of the US army at the time of the Iraq invasion, had previously been the commander of the NATO stabilization force in Bosnia-Herzegovina and commander of allied land forces in Central Europe.

His estimates on what would be needed for Iraq were famously (and publicly) derided by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. It wasn't like they didn't have individuals with expertise in these areas. They just didn't want to plan for anything other than their narrowly defined "total victory".