Now, the question of Iraq is far more difficult. Ambassador Khalilzad is threatening to take away funding from the Shiite led government because they are too sectarian. He’s right. They are committing atrocities against the Sunnis and deepening the sectarian conflict in Iraq. If the Iraqi government blindly supports one sect over another, it will inevitably lead to a civil war.
But he is also wrong. If we cut off funding to the Shiite government in Iraq, we will be in the preposterous situation of training an army we refuse to fund. We will have lost the support of the Shiites. We are already in a war against the Sunnis. We will be stuck in no man’s land.
I don’t like to just criticize. I prefer to at least attempt offering constructive suggestions (see above). But I have to admit the Bush administration has me stumped on this one. We have put ourselves into such an untenable situation, I am not sure there’s any effective answer.
How the neoconservatives thought Iraq was going to be different.
My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.
Dick Cheney
As I told the President on January 10th, I think they will be greeted with sweets and flowers in the first months and simply have very, very little doubts that that is the case.
Kanan Makiya
One of the brains behind the Iraq war was Richard Perle. He wanted to invade with only 40,000 troops. Perle also pushed (the hysterically codenamed) Curve Ball as a vital source of intelligance on the debunked mobile weapons labs. Curve Ball showed up for his only meeting with a U.S. official hungover. Perle was outraged that no one in the CIA would take his defectors seriously.
The hostility by the hard-liners against what they see as the CIA's myopia on Iraq at least matches any of those earlier fights. Perle, who said recently that the CIA's analysis of Iraq "isn't worth the paper it's written on," adds that the CIA is afraid of rocking the ark in the Middle East. "The CIA is status-quo oriented," he told me. "They don't want to take risks. They don't like the INC because they only like to work with people they can control."
Like any great singer, Perle could change his tune. A good example is his testimony to the House Committee on Armed Services in 2005.
The third lesson is, by now, generally accepted: our intelligence is sometimes, dangerously inadequate. That was certainly the case as we went into Iraq. The appalling incompetence at the CIA and elsewhere in the intelligence community left us largely ignorant of such basic information as the state of Iraq's infrastructure (and therefore the pace at which basic services could be established when the fighting ceased) and the size, organization and tactics of elements of Saddam's regime, which later emerged as the core of the insurgency. There is reason to believe that we were sucked into an ill conceived initial attack aimed at Saddam himself by double agents planted by the regime. And as we now know the estimates of Saddam's stockpile of weapons of mass destruction was substantially wrong.
The question is how is the administration going to stop a civil war between the Shiites and Sunnis? The National Intelligence Estimate stated the possibility of civil war, back in 2004. The administration downplayed the report. It might be because no one by the name of Curve Ball wrote it.
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