Text 12887, 129 rader
Skriven 2005-05-25 18:14:05 av Ed Connell (1:379/1.6)
     Kommentar till en text av Alan Hess
Ärende: Re: Cannes
==================
Hey, Alan.

 EC>> Here's a column by Ann Coulter.  I'm really getting to like her
 EC>> work.  Just the right amount of jocularity as Father Mukahee used
 EC>> to say. ==========================================

 EC>> EVER HAVE ONE OF THOSE MILLENNIA?
 EC>> by Ann Coulter
 EC>> May 11, 2005

 EC>> It's always important to get liberals to stop complaining long
 EC>> enough to make a hard prediction. This week we will review
 EC>> liberal predictions on bringing democracy to Iraq.
 EC>> When they weren't claiming the Iraq elections would not take
 EC>> place at all - and, even if they did, the people wouldn't
 EC>> participate - liberals were telling us that if we let those crazy
 EC>> Arabs vote, the Iraqi people would elect extremist Islamic
 EC>> mullahs hostile to the United States. Well, the Iraq National
 EC>> Assembly completed filling out the cabinet this week, and it can
 EC>> now be said that this was liberals' laughably wrong prediction
 EC>> No. 9,856. (Or No. 9,857 if you count their predictions of
 EC>> ruinous global cooling back in the 1970s, which I don't because
 EC>> that could still happen.)

 AH> And here's a column from Trudy Rubin, who sees things differently than
 AH> Ms. Coulter:

 AH> http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.rubin20may20,1,849
 AH> 924.sto ry?coll=bal-oped-headlines Analyze mistakes that led to Iraq
 AH> mess

 AH> By Trudy Rubin

 AH> May 20, 2005

 AH> PHILADELPHIA - If you want to understand why things are going so badly
 AH> in Iraq, read the profile of Douglas Feith, the No. 3 man at the
 AH> Pentagon, in the May 9 issue of The New Yorker.

 AH> Mr. Feith, who will soon step down as undersecretary of defense for
 AH> policy, was the Pentagon's man in charge of planning for postwar Iraq.
 AH> He disagrees that the bitter Iraqi insurgency might have been
 AH> preventable and denies the administration thought the postwar would be
 AH> easy. He insists that the Pentagon foresaw the "chilling contingencies"
 AH> that could follow the war.

 AH> OK. Never mind that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told me in
 AH> November 2002 that he would be "astonished" if there were instability
 AH> in postwar Iraq and said the operable historical analogy would be
 AH> post-World War II France.

 AH> Never mind that the State Department's useful Future of Iraq project
 AH> was shunted aside and the Pentagon's plan for administrating the
 AH> postwar started only weeks before the invasion.

 AH> Never mind that Maj. Isaiah Wilson III, the official Army historian of
 AH> the Iraq campaign, has written that the U.S. military invaded Iraq
 AH> without a plan for occupying and stabilizing the country.

 AH> Never mind that a brutal insurgency is still killing Iraqis and tying
 AH> down 140,000 U.S. troops, even as it undermines the reconstruction of
 AH> the country and the newly elected Iraqi government.

 AH> If - despite all this - the Pentagon's chief planner for the postwar
 AH> thinks he was so farsighted, why is Iraq in such a mess?

 AH> The answer is crucial to understanding what can be done to improve the
 AH> situation. U.S. officials must analyze past mistakes to move forward.

 AH> Mr. Feith notes that "the Marshall Plan didn't get going until 1948"
 AH> and it's only two years since Baghdad fell, implying there is a
 AH> parallel to the U.S. occupation of Germany, where troops remain after
 AH> six decades.

 AH> The parallel is false: Nazi Germany was wholly defeated by the allies;
 AH> its prostrate people had to accept U.S. occupation. Iraq's Baathists
 AH> were not wholly defeated, and U.S. policies have fueled an insurgency
 AH> made up mostly of Baathists and other disaffected Sunnis, along with
 AH> radical Arab Islamists.

 AH> So what are the errors that must be corrected to stabilize Iraq and
 AH> avoid making the same mistakes elsewhere?

 AH> The original sin was the lack of U.S. preparedness to secure the
 AH> country postwar. The massive plague of postwar looting set the stage
 AH> for the insurgency: Former Baathists and Islamists saw this as the
 AH> signal that the Americans were unprepared to restore law and order.

 AH> Nation-building takes mega-manpower. There weren't enough U.S. troops
 AH> then; it's impossible to send more now.

 AH> The second major U.S. mistake was the lack of a Sunni strategy. Top
 AH> U.S. officials disbanded Iraqi security forces without pensions and
 AH> pursued large-scale de-Baathification. This alienated many Sunnis who
 AH> had committed no crimes and might have been wooed had they not lost
 AH> jobs and hope.

 AH> The Bush administration belatedly recognizes this error. Secretary of
 AH> State Condoleezza Rice just went to Baghdad to urge the new Shiite-led
 AH> government to reach out to Sunnis. Shiite officials and religious
 AH> leaders are willing, but it is harder now to heal the breach. The worst
 AH> insurgents, Arab terrorists who deliberately blow up civilians, are
 AH> trying to provoke Shiite-Sunni civil war.

 AH> The third mistake was to misunderstand how little time they had before
 AH> Iraqis came to resent the U.S. presence. For now, Shiite leaders want
 AH> U.S. troops to stay because they have no viable army and fear a
 AH> Baathist comeback. But the U.S. presence also angers many ordinary
 AH> Iraqis - killing and wounding innocents while pursuing insurgents.

 AH> There is a limited time for U.S. troops to stabilize the country and
 AH> draw down, before they become more of a problem than an asset. While
 AH> Mr. Feith writes his memoirs, the current Bush team has to compensate
 AH> for Pentagon errors. Will we ever read about that?

Ms Rubin is a blatent example of Ms Couter's theme.  She probably got the 
fall of the Soviet Union wrong too and what were her predictions about the 
outcome of elections in Nicaragua?  It is strange that you try to counter 
the Coulter piece about the inaccuracy of the doom and gloom crowd with 
another example of doom and gloom preditions.  Not just strange, but 
astonishing.






--- Fidolook Lite FTN stub 
 * Origin: Procrastinate NOW, don't put it off for tomorro (1:379/1.6)