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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PROLIFE who wrote (737737)	4/24/2006 3:09:54 PM
From: pompsander	Respond to of 769670

Perhaps the question is what will be in place if we are out of there by 2009? We all hope for a stable government and the steps over the weekend are more hopeful. At least the power vacuum seems to be closed off and there will be a government that can speak to issues. I think that many people did foresee that the Sunnis would not take their fall from power gracefully in the new Iraq. No one really knew what would occur when the Sunni army went home with their weapons and the baathists went underground agains the new, Shia majority political system. A lot of the violence Sunni on Shia and vice-versa was foreseen by many as a real risk of removing the Saddam "stopper" from the highly charged Iraq. Not unlike Yugoslavia after Tito....old prejudices die hard. Here is one example that speaks to the view before the war. Google has many: "Top analysts in the Central Intelligence Agency and State Department, as well as large numbers of Middle East experts, warned that a US invasion of Iraq could result in a violent ethnic and sectarian conflict. Even some of the war's intellectual architects acknowledged as much: in a 1997 paper, prior to becoming major figures in the Bush foreign policy team, David Wurmser, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith predicted that a post-Saddam Iraq would likely be "ripped apart" by sectarianism and other cleavages but called on the US to "expedite" such a collapse anyway. As a result, the tendency in the US to blame "sectarian conflict" and "long-simmering hatreds" for the Sunni-Shiite violence in Iraq is, in effect, blaming the victim." atimes.com

To: PROLIFE who wrote (737737)	4/24/2006 3:18:09 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

Re: "No one can predict the future 100% I don't think many people thought that the terrorists would just start blowing up...." I don't know for sure how many people are that smart and experienced in foreign affairs, and political and military and regional imperatives.... But, the first President Bush and his military advisor Scowcroft certainly belong on the list (considering they actually PUBLISHED such predictions WELL IN ADVANCE of the second US/Iraq War), and, I'd argue that the collected weight of the Pentagon's best planners, and the C.I.A.'s and State Department's best Arabist and Middle Eastern experts also belong on that list --- since the extremely detailed Plan for the Occupation of Iraq after the war that they spent over two years and several millions of dollars in drawing up certainly referenced all of these possibilities... along with giving some very specific advice for how to avoid most of the problems our botched occupation has engendered.... Too bad these experts were ignored.