pragmatismo

A former U.S. commander for the Middle East who still consults for the State Department yesterday blasted the Bush administration's handling of postwar Iraq, saying it lacked a coherent strategy, a serious plan and sufficient resources. // "There is no strategy or mechanism for putting the pieces together," said retired Marine Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, and so, he said, "we're in danger of failing." [ Ex-Envoy Criticizes Bush's Postwar Policy Washington Post September 5, 2003]
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A former U.S. commander for the Middle East who still consults for the State Department yesterday blasted the Bush administration's handling of postwar Iraq, saying it lacked a coherent strategy, a serious plan and sufficient resources. // "There is no strategy or mechanism for putting the pieces together," said retired Marine Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, and so, he said, "we're in danger of failing." [ Ex-Envoy Criticizes Bush's Postwar Policy Washington Post September 5, 2003]

Take the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings in Washington on the eve of war. Assistant Under Secretary Douglas Feith, one of Rumsfeld's "neo-cons", revealed that an office for "post-war planning" had only been opened three weeks earlier. He and Under Secretary of State Marc Grossman conceded that the Pentagon had been "thinking" about post-war Iraq for 10 months. "There are enormous uncertainties," Feith said. "The most you can do in planning is develop concepts." (...) Ex-General Anthony Zinni, once the top man in US Central Command with "peacekeeping" experience in Kosovo, Somalia and (in 1991) northern Iraq, smelled a rat and said so in public. "Do we want to transform Iraq or just transition it out from under the unacceptable regime of Saddam Hussein into a reasonably stable nation? Transformation implies significant changes in forms of governance... Certainly there will not be a spontaneous democracy..." // Zinni spoke of the "long hard" journey towards reconstruction and added--with ironic prescience--that "It isn't going to be a handful of people that drive out of the Pentagon, catch a plane and fly in after the military peace to try to pull this thing together." // But incredibly, that's exactly what happened. First it was Jay "pull-your-stomach-in-and-say-you're-proud-to-be-an-American " Garner, and then the famous "anti-terrorism" expert Paul Bremer who washed up in Baghdad to hire and then re-hire the Iraqi army and then--faced with one dead American a day (and 250 US troops wounded in August alone)--to rehire the murderous thugs of Saddam's torture centres to help in the battle against "terrorism". Iraq, Bremer blandly admitted last week, will need "several tens of billions" of dollars next year alone. [September 5, 2003 The Arrogant Path to War - We Were Warned About This Chaos - By ROBERT FISK - The Independent]
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the administration's pervasive mendacity or what Barron's columnist Alan Abelson recently called their "regrettable aversion to the truth and reality when the truth and reality aren't lovely or convenient." -- Josh Marshall (Talking Points) 03/09/2003
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