Fantastic NY Times Magazine NY Times Magazine piece about the lack of planning the adminisration had for a post-war Iraq. I give it four replies before one of the neo-cons here dismisses it without reading it.
Wow. Even though hindsight is twenty-twenty, some of the mis-steps seem to be the products of ego and political infighting. Some things I noticed: 1) The complete freezing out of the State Departments comes across as completely petty. 2) Chalabi's influence wasn't a suprise to me, but I don't recall where I acquired this information. 3) The devaluation of peach-keeping and nation-building experience and expertise is pretty much par for course. The administration's distaste for peace-keeping and nation-building is well known, to the point of dismantling schools dedicated to the above. 4) The lack of fluent Arabic speakers, or experts on Arab culture, society, and culture is also not suprising. 5) The lack of swift and decisive response to the looting due to resource constraints, confusion, lack of planning, lack of guidance, etc. is understandable, but... The most telling is that ministry buildings surrounding the oil ministry were looted, except the oil ministry which was being guarded by the US troops. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, but it's a major public relations disaster from which the US hasn't recovered from. 6) What concerns me the most is the relationship to the Shi'ites. Remember, we're occupying Shi'ite holy sites. Not to mention that many are of martyrs. Not that anything imminent is going to happen, but it's something to keep in mind. Personally, I don't know what to make of the progress of Iraqi nation-building. I don't matter anyway (at least until the next president election). The people the administration has to prove itself to every week, every day, every hour are the Iraqi people(s).
I did. It's good. We've made mistakes, sometimes doozies. But the past tense "botched" also implies a continued and ongoing state of affairs that will not get better. It will get better. But then again, I am an optimist, not an alarmist.
What I want to know, is how this reporter was able to read the minds of other people. Can someone please point to me a quote from anyone in the DoD prior to the war saying that all of this was definitely going to happen within a year? So not only is there no specific quotes to support his assertions about what DoD believed, he hasn't even interviewed the major players in his article to get their side of the story. How can you claim the State Department was frozen out, when one of the major decisions went for them, and against defense. No government in exile was set up, and the lack of a strong leader in Iraq now, may be part of the reason there is such resistance. It sounds to me like there were differences of opinion between DoD and State, and State got their way on some things and DoD got their way on others. In the long run the path we are taking might be the best. It is easy to say in hindsite we should have done more to stop the looting, but what if the looters had started to fight back? Did the The U.S really want to start arresting and shooting civilians? How well do you think that would have played? That might have given even more fodder for the Hussein loyalists and foreign terrorists, and we might be seeing even larger anti-american sentiment now.