here’s a fun statistic about the war in iraq:
of the 800 people who were sent to run ‘post-war'(i use that term facetiously) iraq, only 3% knew how to speak arabic.
just imagine if a french company bought an american company and sent 800 french managers to america to run the american company but only 15 of the 800 french managers knew how to speak any english.
wouldn’t you say that the french company had made a collosal mistake?
this whole war is a disaster. from the lies that produced it, to the ineptitude that informed the post-war planning, to the hubris that has kept american troops understaffed and poorly equipped, etc.
americans are still painfully ill-informed and naive in their belief that things will work out well in iraq. the iraqi insurgency(by the way, of the first 8,000 insurgents arrested in iraq only 127 had foreign issued passports)won’t rest until foreigners have left iraq. that’s not the line that our leaders are telling us.
but that’s the truth. and then once the foreign troops and administrators leave iraq, the iraqi’s will have a huge civil war between the shiites and the sunni’s and, to a lesser extent, the kurds.
so america is looking at a choice between either permanent, and disastrously expensive, occupation
where thousands of american troops die annually, or civil war where iraq falls apart the oil supply is shut down.
it’s a disastrous ‘lose-lose’ scenario.
that’s the sad and true story of iraq, and the administration and the military know this.
but they can’t admit it, because then they would have to say to the citizens of the u.s, ‘in order to protect the oil supply in iraq we are going to have to spend at least $250 billion dollars a year in taxpayers money. and this will go on for ever, or at least until the oil runs out in 2075.’
it certainly is a far cry from cheney and rumsfeld’s line of ‘they will accept us as liberators’ and ‘iraq will be self-governing and autonomous within a years time’.
iraq will prove to be the biggest foreign policy mistake/blunder in the history of the united states.
-moby