Tales of chaos, by our man in Basra

[go west young man]

Source: London Times

As the title suggests this is no gentle portrayal. The harrumphs of this seasoned diplomat are audible throughout – and he even admits now that he was tempted to call the book Bugger Basra. “It was more than two years after I came back before I could sit down and write it,” he explains. “I couldn’t have written it before because I was just in such a blind fury.”

The lack of any structure to his mission was anathema to a bureaucrat, while the lack of facilities epitomised the shambolic nature of the postwar planning.

“The biggest mistake was the fundamental one of going in to run a country, having believed people who were telling lies, and base it all on hope rather than on a plan,” he says. “Everything else arose from that.”



Read more: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3465815.ece

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This really should be front page news as it exposes the lack of planning for the war in it's full light. There wasn't any planning.

[freefall]

1. Unlikely that it will ever be front page news in US. Too bad it can't be required reading

for every legislature who voted for and continues to support the war.

Peace,

freefall

K&R
:kick:

[UpInArms]

2. that should be engraved somewhere

“The biggest mistake was the fundamental one of going in to run a country, having believed people who were telling lies, and base it all on hope rather than on a plan,” he says. “Everything else arose from that.”

[bluerum]

3. It should be prominently posted over in GDP as well,,,,

[Ghost Dog]

4. Also this:

Bremer’s early decisions to disband the Iraqi army and implement a deBa’athification programme that in effect eliminated the top four levels of management in all state-owned enterprises were, says Synnott, “profound mistakes, absolutely profound”. Instead, the country had “an infant bureaucracy, set up from nothing, attempting to run an entire country of more than 25m people – so it was chaotic”.

Synnott was also horrified by the CPA itself, which he called “the Bubble” because it was cut off from Iraqis and mainly staffed by “US political animals who were young, naive, pushy people issuing orders that were quite inappropriate and therefore counterproductive”.

As an example, he cites “the view from Baghdad that an essential part of democracy included a free-market economy – which meant privatising all state industries, which were the main providers of industrial labour, and doing away with sub-sidised food baskets”.

His arguments against these plans fell on deaf ears and he was left to deal with the consequences. “Not only were these policies a waste of time and money but, more than that, they meant that the state-owned enterprises collapsed.

“Here you had an infrastruc-ture which was on its last legs anyway – held together by chew-ing-gum and chicken wire, as one general said – and to let it go meant tremendous knock-on consequences that no one was thinking about. All the result of misguided western conceptions that Iraq could be turned into some prosperous Midwest state – or even Camberley.”

[formercia]

5. Chaos was the plan

designed to initiate perpetual War.

[bhikkhu]

6. The bland face of institutionalized mismanagement

and a million ordinary citizens are dead, millions more refugees.

I would settle for: how about if we don't spend the rest of our lives distracted in blame and angst, but how about if we just determine not do do this again?