They thought it would be a nonviolent war

Spoken like a man who doesn't know what he's talking about.

Vice President Dick Cheney said that while the administration underestimated the strength of anti- American violence in Iraq, he still believes the insurgency is in its ``last throes,'' as he asserted last year.

``I don't think anybody anticipated the level of violence we encountered,'' Cheney said in a question-and-answer session following a speech today at the National Press Club in Washington.

Let's be clear: When Cheney says "anybody," he means anybody in George Bush's inner circle who was involved in the decision to invade Iraq. He doesn't mean the experienced military people who told them that they needed a much larger force than they were committing to the invasion and predicted a prolonged insurgency, Mideast experts who predicted the deep ethnic divisions, the intelligence community that provided so much information that the administration ignored, or the millions of people around the world who opposed and continue to oppose the Iraq war.

His comments beg the question: What level of violence did they anticipate in response to invading a soverign nation?

These are the words of a man who spent his youth avoiding military service. Perhaps if Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice and/or Wolfowitz had served in some meaningful fashion, they would have had realistic expectations instead of the delusional belief that this would be one of those nonviolent wars just because that's they want it to be.