I liked this bit:
Our Iraq strategy needs an emergency policy lobotomy. President Bush needs to shift to a more U.N.-friendly approach, with more emphasis on the Iraqi Army (the only force that can effectively protect religious sites in Iraq and separate the parties), and with more input from Secretary of State Colin Powell and less from the "we know everything and everyone else is stupid" civilian team running the Pentagon.
The "everything and everyone else is stupid" line has a familiar ring to it, wrt the local environment and the administration flack auxiliary. The "lobotomy" metaphor seems a little mixed up to me, though, my personal understanding is that US foreign policy on Iraq got lobotomized when Rumsfeld and the PNAC people decided 9/11 was the perfect opportunity to implement their half-baked plans. Unbaking or baking the fruition of those plans is going to be an ongoing problem for a while. I will repeat my modest proposal that they oughta put Wolfowitz or somebody equivalent from the PNAC brain trust officially in charge of Iraq, so they can't fob off responsibility on somebody else.
Somewhat in contrast to both my modest proposal and the locally current "generational commitment", we got the Prince of Darkness aka he-who-must-not-be-named himself from a couple days ago:
Richard Perle, a leading Pentagon adviser and architect of the U.S. war to topple Saddam Hussein, said the United States had made mistakes in Iraq and that power should be handed over to the Iraqis as fast as possible. . . .
"Our principal mistake, in my opinion, was that we didn't manage to work closely with the Iraqis before the war, so that there was an Iraqi opposition capable of taking charge immediately," he said.
"Today, the answer is to hand over power to the Iraqis as soon as possible," he added. abcnews.go.com
Um. Some might say our principal mistake was when W handed foreign policy over to Rumsfeld and the PNAC hotheads, but that goes back to the lobotomy issue. Anyway, Perle doesn't seem too anxious to take responsibility, I guess he's not a likely candidate for Bremer's job. |
