McDermott explains WHY we are in Iraq and what went wrong - great read!

[AutumnMist]

Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again
and Expecting a Different Result in Iraq


....clip

Now, I recently was in Jordan, and I was confronted by many of the Iraqis who have fled from Baghdad and other parts of Iraq. There are about a million Iraqis of middle class and above all living in Amman. The prices of real estate have gone up. It is very hard to find a hotel room. They have left.

I sat at dinner with a number of them, and the question that many of them asked me was, why is the United States in Iraq? And I sort of dismissed the ideas that have been advanced at various times in this Hall, that we are there for weapons of mass destruction, or we are there because of al Qaeda. Many people say we are there for oil. I think that is way too simplistic an explanation for what is going on.

Are we there to stop terrorism? Well, it is very hard to look at what is going on in Iraq and say that what we have done is to end terror. Rather, it seems like we have become a breeding ground and a training ground for terrorists.

After I had exhausted my ideas about what it might be about, I asked the Iraqis to tell me what they thought this was about. And they said, well, it is pretty clear that what your goal was, and you succeeded almost at this point, in dividing Iraq into three pieces and destroying Iraq as ever being an Arab nation. That was your goal from the start; and you have, by every decision you have made, you have worked in that direction.

Now, it was not a design that was clear. People have not understood this, in large measure because it was never enunciated in a public way by public figures saying we are going into Iraq to destroy it. We have talked about liberty, we have talked about democracy, we have talked about every other thing under the sun except the fact that the effect of our actions have been to destroy Iraq.

Now I will take you back to the appointment of the first governor of Iraq. Most people, if you ask them who that was, they cannot remember the name. It was a retired army general by the name of Jay Garner. He was appointed and he went over there, and he had the idea that perhaps the Iraqis should begin to take their own existence, now that Baghdad had fallen and with the Americans in control militarily, let the Iraqis put their country back together.

What happened to him? Anybody know? Well, I will tell you what happened to him. He was immediately relieved. He was taken out of the situation and Paul Bremer was brought in because Garner was not following the script, and they knew that Bremer would.

Now, just take a couple of things very early that Bremer did and you understand why the Iraqis feel the way they do about the situation today. The first thing he did was to dismantle an army. He disbanded an army of 500,000 people or so, all of whom had families, had homes, had children, had grandparents, had all the responsibilities of citizens of Iraq. They had salaries. They could pay for their families' food. They could pay for their families' housing. All of this was what they had been accustomed to.

Surely they had worked for Saddam Hussein. But to think that they all were bad and, therefore, should be disbanded and thrown to the winds was a terrible miscalculation about the attitude of the average soldier in the Iraqi Army. And what that action did was to send 500,000 Iraqis underground with a rifle and a grudge. We created 500,000 insurgents instantly by that action.

Now, why would you do that? Why would you want to go into a country that has an army that is functioning and not take off just the top layer, no, no, no; not take off the first couple of layers, maybe down to the sergeants or something, but to fire everyone and take away their income, their whole existence, if you thought that was in the best interest of the Iraqis?

But if you want chaos, put 500,000 people out on the street with guns and a grudge.

The second thing that we did, equally disruptive and equally destabilizing, was the decision to de-Baathize the government. Now, the Baath Party, the party of Saddam Hussein, which is secular, not religious, but a secular party of Arab nationalism, basically, and the decision to say that everybody in Iraq who belonged to the Baath Party was suddenly out of a job and out of government took another hundreds of thousands of people who were simply public servants who ran the utilities, ran the electric company, ran the sewage system, taught in the schools, did the marriage licenses, recorded land deeds, and whatever public servants in a society do. We suddenly said, if you are a member of the Baath Party, you are out of here.

We absolutely denuded this country of any government whatsoever. Now, you would not have to be older than about a seventh grade kid in this country to realize if you take away the Army and take away the government, you have chaos. If you go into the schools and you take away the teacher, take away the principal, the hall monitors, the kids are not going to run a very reasonable operation. That is what the educational system is about. Well, we did that to a whole society.

You can say we know, and you are standing down there in the well talking about this, but you never wanted to go to war in the first place.

http://www.house.gov/mcdermott/sp050922.shtml

[MadMaddie]

1. McDermott nails it.....this administration wanted chaos...

and the architect of that chaos got out (Paul Bremmer) because he knew it was a cluster fuck......he knew they had made the blunder of the century.....

[Rose Siding]

2. That's MY Congressman

:thumbsup:

[EFerrari]

4. He was Andy's congressman and he helped us. I will always be

on his side and in his back pocket.

[lumpy]

3. Jim McDermott, a Congressman who can stand tall.

A rarety indeed. We need more of his caliber running our country.