Georgie Anne Geyer, no liberal comsymp, has done a long series of pieces on the Iraq invasion run up, prosecution of said war, the machinations going on behind the scenes. yesterday's article details an interview with a "top level US administrator" (unfortunately nameless, for obvious reasons), who has some pretty astounding things to say about just how badly things are going, and what the future holds
"Now there's a new approach rising," he went on, "with huge bases created in part to keep up the morale of the troops. But this creates a large insulation between the Iraqis and the Americans; the Americans are living in their own artificial culture of DVDs, Pizza Huts and calls home. Hell, we have trailer parks housing 12,000 people. It is `force protection' above all.
"......American contractors and military will hire anybody--Palestinians--before they'll hire Iraqis. Now they're bringing in Bangladeshis to do the work. This is because there is simply no way to vet Iraqis, so they fall back on foreign workers. ..."
As to our Coalition Provisional Authority, which is half State Department and half Pentagon, he went on, "they only really handle small micro projects. No large ones. That's because there is no security to go out and work among the people.
"I go to the meetings of the military with the Iraqi Governing Council-- the supposed Iraqi government-in-waiting--and the Governing Council barely shows up. We're working on turning over the airport to them, but there are never any Iraqis in the meetings! ...http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/oped/chi-0402200306feb20,1,3444563.storythe above column will make you feel pretty angry (not too mention extremely sorry for the people of Iraq--not to mention our soldiers, consigned to a world of frustarted boredom, punctuated by bursts of terror), as does most of the news from this corner of the world
here's an archive of her writings. most of them are real eye-openers. what's most interesting about them is that she's a very hard-core conservative, cold-war hawk, and I used to dismiss her columns as largely paranoid, lunatic rants. however, she appears to be of that most rare breed: an honest right winger, who KNOWS the major players, is not fooled by the lies, and is honest enough to call them as she sees them, rather than fall into lockstep with the rest of the craven tools that permeate both politics (on both sides of the aisle) and the media
http://www.uexpress.com/georgieannegeyer/