An Insider's Troubling Account of the U.S. Role in Iraq

[swag]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/17/books/17book.html
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: June 17, 2005

The failures of the Bush administration to prepare adequately for the postwar period in Iraq are by now well known, underscored by the revelation this week that a briefing paper, prepared for Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain eight months before the invasion, warned that "a postwar occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise" and that "little thought" had been given by the United States to "the aftermath and how to shape it."It is a subject explicated in chilling - and often scathing - detail by "Squandered Victory," a new book by Larry Diamond, a former senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad and a leading American scholar on democracy and democratic movements. In this book, Mr. Diamond contends that the postwar troubles in Iraq - a bloody and unrelenting insurgency, the creation of a new breeding ground for terrorists and metastasizing ethnic and religious tensions - are the result of "gross negligence" on the part of a Bush administration that rushed to war. He asserts that "mistakes were made at virtually every turn" of the occupation, and that "every mistake the United States made in Iraq narrowed the scope and lengthened the odds for progress."

His book not only provides an unsettling account of the mind-boggling challenges involved in trying to bring democracy to Iraq (ranging from practical matters like setting up an infrastructure for the electoral process to political and philosophical issues dealing with the drafting of a constitution) but also lays out a thoughtful, pull-no-punches analysis of the missteps and misjudgments by the Bush White House and the Pentagon in the months before and after America's toppling of Saddam Hussein.

It is a book that should be read by anyone interested in understanding why the United States' quick military victory has given way to an increasingly virulent insurgency and nearly daily reports of car bombings and suicide attacks, why even post-election hopes have been shadowed by worries about the continuing violence spiraling into a Lebanon-style civil war.

. . .
As Mr. Diamond sees it, "blame for the early blunders" in Iraq "lies with the high officials of the Bush administration - including the president himself - who decided to go to war when we did, in the way we did, with the lack of preparation that has become brutally apparent." He reminds us that "the startling mismanagement of planning for the postwar did not result from a sudden emergency and a lack of time to plan": civilians at the Pentagon had begun pushing the case for war against Iraq almost immediately after 9/11, and a wide-ranging report known at the Future of Iraq Project had been started at the State Department in the spring of 2002. This report, says Mr. Diamond, was initially ignored by the Pentagon, which in its early certitude about "the inevitability and speed of America's triumph," swept "aside experts in the State Department and elsewhere who had described what the postwar realities in Iraq would require."

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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/17/books/17book.html

[Desertrose]

1. But according to the MSM now, "everybody knew he lied" to go to war...

so why should this come as a surprise.

I guess being on DU and knowing what was going to happen makes this old news .... But how could ANYONE think this "war" was gonna turn out any different than the bungled job it most obviously it??

[FloridaPat]

2. Or any different from the Afghanistan invasion! All the new gov't

there controlled was the capital and the pipeline route. The rest of the country has been a disaster.

And if everyone knew he was lying, why was the MSM supporting the war? Any links to those MSM "everyone knew" stories? I would sure like to tell them off again.

[swag]

3. Anyway, this really takes me back