Blunders, ignored warnings mire effort to rebuild Iraq

[seemslikeadream]

...

Gen. John Keane, the Army's vice chief of staff during the war, said some defense officials believed the exiles' promises.


"We did not see" the insurgency "coming. And we were not properly prepared and organized to deal with it. ... Many of us got seduced by the Iraqi exiles in terms of what the outcome would be," Keane told a House committee in July.


Douglas Feith, the Defense Department's No. 3 official, and former Pentagon consultant Richard Perle both acknowledged that their vision for post-Hussein Iraq included putting pro-Western exiles in power.


"We had a theme in our minds, a strategic idea, of liberation rather than occupation, giving" Iraqis "more authority even at the expense of having things done with greater efficiency" by coalition military forces, Feith told the Philadelphia Inquirer last month.


Perle said he and others had for years advocated "helping the Iraqis liberate themselves -- which was a completely different approach than we settled on."


"We'll never know how it would have come out if we did it the way we wanted to do it," he said.
more
http://www.freep.com/news/nw/war16e_20041016.htm


The Army War College report on postwar Iraq is available at www.carlisle.army.mil/ssi/pdffiles/PUB182.pdf.

[louis-t]

1. They're all coming forward now...

at least the ones that aren't afraid of being destroyed by * and co.

[FightingIrish]

2. Brent Scowcroft had made his strongest condemnation of *

The national security adviser under the first President Bush says the current president acted contemptuously toward NATO and Europe after Sept. 11 and is trying to cooperate now out of desperation to "rescue a failing venture" in Iraq and Afghanistan.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=171518

For the next two and a half weeks I'd like to hear a steady chorus of Richard Clark, Tony McPeak, Paul O'Neill and all of the other former supporters of * who have seen the light.

[bemildred]

3. What effort to rebuild Iraq?

There ain't been any serious effort to rebuild Iraq.
Nothing's been done, nothing.
You can't "mire" something that doesn't exist.

[Eloriel]

5. Right -- just stealing the money, that was the primary goal

and it's my understanding they did a bang-up job.

[George_S]

4. If only Bush had asked his dad and the Father n/t