How could anyone have thought that BushCo would do anything well?

I thought that I had quoted this the first time Brad DeLong posted it some time ago but apparently (if Blogger's search feature is to be trusted) I had not. And it's worth repeating. I'm with Brad, I didn't predict that BushCo would be this bad. But I froze my ass protesting the war in early 2003 because I saw the probability of the invasion making the world a better place to be effectively zero. Succeeding in achieving that goal would have been really hard even if there had been a legitmate reason for invading a sovereign country and you were doing it legitimately and technically well. The placard I carried asked: Why Iraq? Why War? Why Now? The fact that there were no good answers to any of these questions told me back then that hopes of success were doomed.

Here's Brad:

I would certainly agree that the Bush administration has been a much greater disaster than even I imagined. But what warrant did anybody have in the spring of 2003 for ignoring the fact that the Bush administration had already proven to be a disaster? I return again and again to Daniel Davies's pre-Iraq war question:

D-squared Digest -- FOR bigger pies and shorter hours and AGAINST more or less everything else: I find myself with a few spare minutes and make the mistake of reading Thomas Friedman again. His conclusion after a long, dull and witless ramble about the introduction of "democracy" to Iraq (just what the Gulf region needs, more puppet states) reads "If [it is] done right, the Middle East will never be the same. If done wrong, the world will never be the same". There's not much you can say to that except "shut up you silly man". But it does inspire in me the desire for a competition; can anyone, particularly the rather more Bush-friendly recent arrivals to the board, give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:

1. It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration
2. It was significant enough in scale that I'd have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
3. It wasn't in some important way completely fucked up during the execution.

It's just that I literally can't think what possible evidence Friedman might be going on in his tacit assumption that the introduction of democracy to Iraq (if it is attempted at all) will be executed well rather than badly. Worst piece of counterfactual speculation by Friedman since the day he pondered the question "If I grew a moustache well, I would look distinguished and stylish; if I grew one badly, I'd look like a pillock".

I would genuinely like to understand Norm Geras's thinking: what had the Bush administration done between its inauguration and March 2003 to give him such confidence in its competence?