For those asleep for the past two years, the _New York Times Magazine_ has a long article by David Rieff, “Blueprint for a Mess”:www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/magazine/02iraq.html, that looks at ongoing problems with the U.S. occupation of iraq:
bq. Historically, it is rare that a warm welcome is extended to an occupying military force for very long, unless, that is, the postwar goes very smoothly. And in iraq, the postwar occupation has not gone smoothly.
The article looks at the ideological roots of the post-war plan of occupation. A number of key decisions were made in the Pentagon’s war room with little input from the State Department. Much of the planning revolved around Ahmad Chalabi, the two-bit, self-proclaimed iraqi opposition party leader during the last decade of Saddam Hussein’s reign. Chalabi spent most of the 90s in London and Washington, where he became the darling of the Republican policy hawks who were also sidelined from political power. Together Chalabi and Washington figures like Donald Rumsfeld spent the 90s hatching up war plans if they ever took power again. Unfortunately Rumsfeld’s plans didn’t have the widespread support of the U.S. diplomatic and military establishment and Chalabi has had virtually no support inside iraq. But the conversations and decisions between the token iraqi opposition and the out-of-power Republican hawks has driven the occupation:
bq. The lack of security and order on the ground in iraq today is in large measure a result of decisions made and not made in Washington before the war started, and of the specific approaches toward coping with postwar iraq undertaken by American civilian officials and military commanders in the immediate aftermath of the war.
Rieff is pessimistic but he backs up his claims. The article is long but it’s a must-read. The postwar occupations of iraq and Afghanistan will almost certainly be the defining foreign policy issue of this generation, and pacifists must look beyond ideology and rhetoric to understand what’s happening in iraq.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ donald rumsfeld
“The president is pleased that the director of central intelligence acknowledged what needed to be acknowledged. The president has moved on…”
July 13, 2003
Oh good for him.
But wait. The President also defends CIA director Tenet who gave him bad information. So Tenet covered Bush’s bottom and now Bush is covering Tenet’s so now we can move on. How convenient.
In a TV studio a few blocks away Donald Rumsfeld has the balls to continue defending the inclusion of the obvious forgery in the State of the Union address. On a political talk show, he said the Niger uranium claim was “technically correct” since the President just said British Intelligence thought it was true. Of course, the Brits have said they said it because American intelligence had told them it was true. Again, how convenient. I almost expect someone to say the inclusion of the forgery was okay because the President had his fingers crossed behind his back as he read that part of the speech.
I think we could go too far in the who-said-what department with this speech. It was one speech, granted the most important of the year, but still the big issue is that Bush repeatedly fed the American people dubious claims about Iraq’s programs to build weapons of mass destruction. Whenever a reporter asked a hard question about these claims, the Bush Administration essentially told us there was more intelligence that they couldn’t share and that we should all trust them. Well it’s turned out the Administration was wrong. This is a colossal failure and this is the big scandal of the Bush Administration and the biggest source of shame for the American and British peoples.
“Not that stupid piece of garbage”
July 10, 2003
“My thought was, how did that get into the speech?“This choice quote comes from Greg Thielmann, an intelligence expert in the US State Department (now retired). In today’s papers this Bush Administration insider has come right out and said that the White House “lied about Saddam threat”.
Meanwhile the happy-go-lucky Donald Rumsfeld has said the occupation is costing the US $3.9 billion per month (see sidebar) and General Tommy Franks predicts high troop levels will be needed “for the foreseeable future.”