"Well, I think we're fucked" TPM's interview with Ambassador Joe Wilson

[trumad]

Great Interview....

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/sept0303.html#091803639pm

[Cha]

1. Why don't we have someone as smart and prescient as

Ambassador Joe Wilson ..leading us out of the Iraqi Quagmire?

" Well I think even before the bombing of the UN building and the Najaf mosque we should have been actively pursuing a new set of resolutions which would have shared the burden and shared the risk for this reconstruction effort with the international community write large. Rather than kind of lording it over these countries that did not participate in the war, that the war was far easier than anybody anticipated, we should have understood early on that making the peace was going to be as difficult as it's proven to be."

[punpirate]

2. It seems that it should be obvious by now...

... that the answer to your question is embodied in the two principal reasons for going into Iraq in the first place. All the purported reasons for going have been found to be grounded in manipulated intelligence data, so the real reasons must remain. If the US had, in the first place, invited the UN to take over, there would, first, be no opportunity to privatize the entire country, to the enrichment of US-based mulitnational corporations.

That is not just a matter of keeping control of the oil fields, but also involves the employment of privatization schemes (similar to those demanded by the IMF and World Bank) for health care, water and sewer services, electricity, social services, banking, education and recreation, all controlled by US corporations because they were able to get in on the ground floor with the military's assistance.

The second and equally obvious reason for invading Iraq is the perceived need to have a massive military presence based there from which to launch strikes on other countries in the Middle East and central Asia, ostensibly to "protect American interests," but mostly to threaten and intimidate other countries into adopting governments friendly to US interests. The secondary reason for such basing was to remove troops from Saudi Arabia. I suspect that this had less to do with appeasing al-Qaeda than it did with calming the fears of the Saudi royals. Our troops there were a constant irritation to the mullahs.

Neither of these programs could have been implemented had the UN controlled reconstruction and been used to set up the framework for free national and local elections. Therefore, the UN is relegated to a minor role, which the Iraqis perceive as assisting the US in its objectives--the most likely reason the UN compound was attacked.

Cheers.

[Cha]

3. Yeah! I know! I was just giving Joe Wilson Props for being

such an intelligent person who is on our side!

But I really found what you wrote interesting and even though I knew this ...I shall bookmark it and refer to it.

Just the reasons that we all went and Protested Feb. 15, 2003 and all the other days and nights! :kick:

[punpirate]

5. Sure...

... but the man in charge is there to carry out policy, and this administration's policy in Iraq is to make it into the perfect corporate world. (There's even some speculation that such is the reason why Jay Garner was removed--he'd planned on having elections 90 days from the cessation of hostilities.)

Wilson might have made an excellent administrator in Iraq had the US listened to the UN in the first place, but that was never this administration's intention, for the reasons given. *chagrined smile*

Wilson's intelligence is acknowledged, but his honesty is much more appreciated. He's one of the first people on the administrative side of government to have called the Bushies, in very diplomatic terms, what they are--liars.

Cheers.

[Stephanie]

4. Great interview - can't wait for Part II

I feel sure he will nail Rove in Part II, as he nails Cheney in this part:

WILSON: Well, I guess substantively speaking, the way I would respond is that, first of all, it marked the first time that the vice president himself acknowledged that he had asked the question at the CIA briefing, which is personal confirmation of the second part of the opinion piece that I wrote for The New York Times, the first part being that there was a report which said that this could really not have happened. The first part had been acknowledged by the White House within a day, day and a half of my article having appeared, when the White House said those sixteen words didn't rise to the level of conclusion in the State of the Union Address. The vice president now acknowledges that he asked the question.

TPM: And that means that he basically started the chain of events that got the CIA to send you on this trip.

WILSON: That's right, that's correct. And the argument that I repeatedly made was that if you are senior enough to ask a question of the CIA briefer or any other briefer of the U.S. government--it just happened to be the CIA because the CIA was the recipient of this bit of information that came over the transom, then you are senior enough to get a very specific response. And, irrespective of what the vice president had to say yesterday, which--he said the briefing got back to him a couple of days later and said that there was nothing more to this. If that system works that way now, that's a marked departure from the way that it worked when I was at the National Security Council.