Newsweek: The Unbuilding of Iraq

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.msnbc.com/news/972362.asp?0cv=KB10

The Iraq war had yet to begin, but some nasty fighting was already going on back in Washington between the Department of Defense and the Department of State. Last February, retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner was trying to put together a team of experts to rebuild Iraq after the war was over, and his list included 20 State Department officials. The day before he was supposed to leave for the region, Garner got a call from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who ordered him to cut 16 of the 20 State officials from his roster. It seems that the State Department people were deemed to be Arabist apologists, or squishy about the United Nations, or in some way politically incorrect to the right-wing ideologues at the White House or the neocons in the office of the Secretary of Defense. The vetting process “got so bad that even doctors sent to restore medical services had to be anti-abortion,” recalled one of Garner’s team. Finally, Secretary of State Colin Powell tried to stand up for his troops and stop Rumsfeld’s meddling. “I can take hostages, too,” Powell warned the secretary of Defense. “How hard do you want to play this thing?”

<snip>

How did we get in this mess? NEWSWEEK interviews with top government officials involved in the planning and execution of the reconstruction of Iraq point to a “perfect storm” of mistakes and bad luck: wrongheaded assumptions, ideological blinders, weak intelligence and poor coordination by White House national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Much of the damage was done at the outset—in the first days after the war, when political infighting and wishful thinking prevented the United States from taking control of a bad situation that was turning worse.

<snip>

Armitage was convinced that the Defense neocons had spies at the State Department. “Bats, we call them. Bats,” said Armitage, in a colorful private harangue reported to NEWSWEEK. “Because they hang upside down all day, with their wings over their eyes, pretending they don’t see anything. But at night they spread their wings and fly off to whisper, whisper, whisper.”

[Francis]

1. excellent article n/t

[Fenris]

2. Newsweek's borrowing lines from the Daily Show

"In 2000, candidate Bush told the press that the U.S. military should not be used for nation building. And that is an idea he's stuck to in Iraq, a country that is currently being un-built."

Paraphrased, of course.

[Barrett808]

3. Be sure to rate it

at the very bottom on the page. It's currently not in the top ten.

I like this paragraph:

On the ground, the Coalition Provisional Authority, charged with actually running Iraq until the Iraqis can take over, is the source of increasing ridicule. "CPA stands for the Condescending and Patronizing Americans," a Baghdad diplomat told a NEWSWEEK reporter. "So there they are, sitting in their palace: 800 people, 17 of whom speak Arabic, one is an expert on Iraq. Living in this cocoon. Writing papers. It's absurd," says one dissident Pentagon official.