Rumsfeld gave an interview to the BBC:
Asked if the security situation had improved [in Iraq], he admitted: “Statistically, no.”
“But clearly it has been getting better as we’ve gone along,” he added. “A lot of bad things that could have happened have not happened."
He’s right. All lot of bad things could have happened as a result of the Iraq invasion. We could have seen thousands of U.S. soldiers dead or critically wounded, the mass exodus of biological and chemical agents out of Iraq to God-knows-where, a veritable civil war in Iraq, a sharp decline in the U.S. esteem as a global leader and credible peacebroker, the mushrooming of the U.S. budget deficit, a brand new “Vietnam syndrome” that our fine military took great pains for 25 years to expunge, and the creation of on-the-job training ground for a new generation of would-be fanatical terrorists. Thank God we dodged those bullets.
Seriously, when you are in a situation and someone says “it could have been worse”, that’s a sure sign that things are, you know, bad.