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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ann Corrigan who wrote (10234)	4/3/2007 4:50:45 PM
From: Richnorth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224744

the honeymoon with that market will abruptly end. Oh, really? BTW, there were American racists who were convinced China would "self-destruct" many times over. Funny, it hasn't happened yet, eh? I understand China is not concerned by the US action as many countries welcome China as a trading partner. As for the occurrence of the melamine contaminant in the pet food, oh well, stuff happens. Or, to be more exact, "SHIT happens sooner or later, or sooner than later!!!" So, what's the big deal there? .

To: Ann Corrigan who wrote (10234)	4/10/2007 2:22:43 AM
From: Richnorth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224744

Ex-Iraqi official's book lambastes U.S. 'occupation' By Charles J. Hanley ASSOCIATED PRESS April 9, 2007 signonsandiego.com NEW YORK – In a rueful reflection on what might have been, an Iraqi government insider details in 500 pages the U.S. occupation's “shocking” mismanagement of his country – a performance so bad, he writes, that by 2007 Iraqis had “turned their backs on their would-be liberators. The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order,” Ali A. Allawi concludes in “The Occupation of Iraq,” newly published by Yale University Press. Allawi writes with authority as a member of that “new order,” having served as Iraq's trade, defense and finance ministers at various times since 2003. As a former academic, at Oxford University before the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, he also writes with unusual detachment. The U.S.-and British-educated engineer and financier is the first senior Iraqi official to look back at book length on his country's four-year ordeal. It's an unsparing look at failures both American and Iraqi, an account in which the word “ignorance” crops up repeatedly. First came the “monumental ignorance” of those in Washington pushing for war in 2002 without “the faintest idea” of Iraq's realities. “More perceptive people knew instinctively that the invasion of Iraq would open up the great fissures in Iraqi society,” he writes. What followed was the “rank amateurism and swaggering arrogance” of the occupation, under L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which took big steps with little consultation with Iraqis, steps Allawi and others see as blunders: The Americans disbanded Iraq's army, which Allawi said could have helped quell a rising insurgency in 2003. Instead, hundreds of thousands became a recruiting pool for the resistance. Purging tens of thousands of members of toppled President Saddam Hussein's Baath party left Iraq short on experienced hands at a crucial time. An order consolidating decentralized bank accounts at the Finance Ministry bogged down operations of many state-owned enterprises. The CPA's focus on private enterprise allowed the “commercial gangs” of Hussein's day to monopolize business. Its free-trade policy allowed looted Iraqi capital equipment to be spirited across borders. The CPA perpetuated Hussein's fuel subsidies, selling gas at giveaway prices and draining the budget. In his 2006 memoir of the occupation, Bremer wrote that senior U.S. generals wanted to recall elements of the old Iraqi army in 2003, but were rebuffed by the Bush administration. Bremer complained generally that his authority was undermined by Washington's “micromanagement.” On U.S. reconstruction failures – in electricity, health care and other areas documented by Washington's own auditors – Allawi writes that the Americans' “insipid retelling of 'success' stories” merely hid “the huge black hole that lay underneath.” For their part, U.S. officials have often largely blamed Iraq's explosive violence for the failures of reconstruction and poor governance.