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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Suma who wrote (28138)	9/7/2006 11:12:18 AM
From: JohnM	Respond to of 543153

I am currently Reading the book Squandered Victory by Larry Diamond. .. the bungled effort to to bring Democracy to Iraq... Who is he...One of America's leading experts on democracy who taught at Stanford with C.Rice.. It was she who enlisted his RELUCTANT AID to go to Iraq and help the US implement Democracy. Diamond's an interesting guy and the book is interesting, largely because of his relationship to Condi Rice, going in. It's been a while since I read it and I've read far too many other books on Iraq so the sources of thoughts get jumbled. But as I recall, Rice asked Diamond to go both to help and to be her sort of observor on the spot. Apparently, she was having a hard time getting solid information from Bremer. Diamond winds up appalled by the inept character of the occupation. The image that remains the most vivid is the odd mixture of competent folk working long, long hours, getting nowhere because of increasing isolation from the rest of Iraq. And terribly incompetent people, working very long hours, whose only competence for the job was an ideological one. The mixture clearly didn't work. My present best book on Iraq is Thomas Ricks' Fiasco, though I have two books on reserve at the local library. One on the large amount of private contractor corruption which calls into question the strategy of going private with so much of the work. And the other is the Isikoff/Corn book, yet another one on the intelligence failures. However, if I were to recommend two books on the Iraq mess right now it would be, as I said above, Ricks' book and the second would be George Packer's The Assassin's Gate. How are you doing?