Hi all; Barak says Iraq going to hell:
The Unbuilding of Iraq
John Barry, Evan Thomas, Newsweek, October 6, 2003 issue
PERFECT STORM: Wrongheaded assumptions. Ideological blinders. Weak intelligence, missteps, poor coordination and bad luck. How Team Bush’s reconstruction efforts went off the rails from day one.
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How did we get in this mess? NEWSWEEK interviews with top government officials involved in the planning and execution of the reconstruction of Iraq point to a “perfect storm” of mistakes and bad luck: wrongheaded assumptions, ideological blinders, weak intelligence and poor coordination by White House national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Much of the damage was done at the outset—in the first days after the war, when political infighting and wishful thinking prevented the United States from taking control of a bad situation that was turning worse.
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Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak recently passed a message to Rumsfeld. It ran roughly: “There’s a 5 percent chance you get Saddam tomorrow, the energy goes out of the resistance and things get dramatically better. There’s a 5 percent chance a car bomb takes out the entire Governing Council, and things go to hell. In between those, it will get better over time, or worse over time. Right now, I say it’s twice as likely that it gets worse.” It’s not known how Rumsfeld responded.
msnbc.com
-- Carl |
