"'Here You Go. Here's Iraq. Take It'"

[GreenPartyVoter]

BAGHDAD—Leaning in close, the mid-level American administrator speaks more in a hiss than a whisper. His tone is confessional, drenched in frustration.


"We didn't hand over power to the Iraqis. We threw it at them," he confides, casting a guilty glance toward the many eyes filling the chandelier-lit room. Nobody else heard him. Good. This kind of talk could cost him his job.

"There was no orderly transition. Nothing gradual. Just, `Here you go. Here's Iraq. Take it'."

"None of us had any idea sovereignty was going to switch two days early," he continues, speaking on the promise of anonymity. "So we didn't even get the last contracts finished. It was chaos. More than a billion dollars in plans never went through. Huge appropriations were just left on the table, undone."

It is dinner hour at the Great Hall of Saddam Hussein's presidential palace, deep within Baghdad's hermetically sealed Green Zone. Barely two weeks earlier, America's presence here was downsized, on paper, from occupational power to invited guest, by decree of the United Nations and the interim Iraqi regime taking its place.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0717-01.htm

[acmavm]

1. Sounds like a screaming success, doesn't it? All those lives, all that

money, and the dumbasses ended up jumping ship like a bunch of freakin' rats.

This epitomizes the who bush* experience.

[Kanary]

2. If they *WOULD* just go ahead and "jump ship"

maybe, just maybe, something would be salvaged.

Like the adults they are, they dropped responsibility, but stay to continue the bullying.

What a farce.

Kanary