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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group
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To: KyrosL who wrote (98952)5/23/2003 5:18:31 PM
From: Nadine Carroll  Read Replies (3) of 281500
 
I saw Tom Friedman on the The Newshour last night. He had an interesting explanation. He said that the US had planned to decapitate the regime, remove the top bad guys, then rule Iraq via its existing institutions. But when the regime fell, the institutions all imploded too, and the Iraqis responded with a perfect orgy of looting. So now all the institutions don't have records, furniture, lights, electrical wiring, anything. Tom Friedman said, "the one thing that surprised me is how broken the Iraqi people are by Saddam's regime, and how desperate. They don't know each other. They haven't had a horizontal conversation in thirty years; they had a top-down monologue. We aren't starting from zero in Iraq. We're starting from below zero."

It's easy to sit in an armchair and say, "you should have forseen this". But show me anyone who did forsee it. The question is now, how fast can they adapt?
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