If Bush designed mousetraps...

(cross posted at appletree)

Official history of Iraq reconstruction reveals incompetence on a Mugabean scale

(click to embiggen)

From the New York Times:

An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.

The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag — particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army — the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.

In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’

Mr. Powell’s assertion that the Pentagon inflated the number of competent Iraqi security forces is backed up by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former commander of ground troops in Iraq, and L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator until an Iraqi government took over in June 2004.”

Those phony numbers would help Bush win a narrow victory in 2004. Just as the Department of Homeland Security would issue a new terror alert whenever the president's poll numbers began to sag, so the Department of Defense would issue a rosy new progress report whenever events in Iraq indicated that the situation was spiraling out of control. In fact, it appears that from the beginning of the occupation, the White House saw the appearance of progress in Iraq as a means to an end, the end being the re-election of President Bush:
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US General Ricardo Sanchez: US Politicians Corrupt & Incompetent

So, we've had some (semblance of), sleep.

So, we're not quite too tired to type up something as special as this.

US general damns Iraq 'nightmare'

Lt Gen Ricardo Sanchez said the US currently was only delaying defeat

A former US military chief in Iraq has condemned the current strategy in the conflict, which he warned was "a nightmare with no end in sight".

Retired Lt Gen Ricardo Sanchez also labelled US political leaders as "incompetent" and "corrupted".

He said they would have faced courts martial for dereliction of duty had they been in the military.

Read the rest of this related BBC report.



Good for you general.

(And btw, we're glad you got that third star).

Though you should have said something even stronger - even sooner.

That way, you may possibly have saved lots of lives; lives of soldiers and civilians.

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