The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace
April 10th, 2007In case anyone is still keeping track…
Via: Yahoo / AP:
In a rueful reflection on what might have been, an Iraqi government insider details in 500 pages the U.S. occupation’s “shocking” mismanagement of his country — a performance so bad, he writes, that by 2007 Iraqis had “turned their backs on their would-be liberators.”
“The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order,” Ali A. Allawi concludes in “The Occupation of Iraq,” newly published by Yale University Press.
Allawi writes with authority as a member of that “new order,” having served as Iraq’s trade, defense and finance minister at various times since 2003. As a former academic, at Oxford University before the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, he also writes with unusual detachment.
The U.S.- and British-educated engineer and financier is the first senior Iraqi official to look back at book length on his country’s four-year ordeal. It’s an unsparing look at failures both American and Iraqi, an account in which the word “ignorance” crops up repeatedly.
First came the “monumental ignorance” of those in Washington pushing for war in 2002 without “the faintest idea” of Iraq’s realities. “More perceptive people knew instinctively that the invasion of Iraq would open up the great fissures in Iraqi society,” he writes.
What followed was the “rank amateurism and swaggering arrogance” of the occupation, under L. Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which took big steps with little consultation with Iraqis, steps Allawi and many others see as blunders…
I NEVER thought I would recommend something spoken by The Donald, but this CNN interview is INCREDIBLE.
http://www.silverbearcafe.com/private/trump.html
“Everything in Washington is a lie.”
“Iraq is a disaster.” How do you get out? “Declare victory and get out.”