The former British cabinet member blasts the "arrogant" Pentagon for its bungled postwar planning and calls Tony Blair's decision to prop up Bush's war "tragic."
On a day when the Bush administration was talking about dropping its halfhearted attempt to enlist the United Nations to help create order in Iraq, Clare Short, a former member of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's cabinet and one of Britain's most popular politicians, was in Washington to implore America to work with the world.
"The Middle East is more unstable and dangerous than ever it was," says Short, who resigned her job as Britain's secretary of international development in May, furious at the way America and Britain had let civil society in Iraq implode after the war. "There's a deeper sense of anger, injustice and the likelihood that young people in that region are joining terrorist organizations in bigger numbers than ever before."
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Though she's no longer in Blair's cabinet, she's continuing her campaign to try to secure U.N. authority over Iraq's rebuilding. This week, she's in the United States to brief Congress about the reconstruction of Iraq and the need for internationalization. Her message is that money alone can't fix Iraq -- to do that, she says, America needs to learn that it needs other countries. She spoke to Salon by phone from Washington, D.C.
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http://salon.com/news/feature/2003/10/09/short/index.html