Well No Screamin' Eagleshit! It's what a lot of us in the Reality Based Community have been saying for some time now!
Unfortunately, those on the Right have chosen to have their opinions spoon fed to them by shills like Limbaugh, Coulter, and Hannity. Instead of listening to the facts or doing their own research to determine the truth, they have instead, sat on their collective asses and opened their minds to the sewage being poured out by hate groups like the Swiftboat Veterans For Truth and The Patriot Warriors. It is so much easier to hate brown people and Muslims then it is to apply rational thought to a situation and come to a logical conclusion. It requires no thought on their part whatsoever to answer any argument with overused cliches, (like "flip-flop" or "cut & run"), fed to them from "Talking Points", supplied by the likes of Cheney and Rove.
Even now, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Cheney insists that Bin Laden and the 9/11 attackers were connected to Saddam and Iraq. Can someone tell me how many of the hijackers were Iraqi? Correct me if I'm wrong, Mr. Cheney, but weren't most of the hijackers Saudis? Isn't Bin Laden a Saudi? Didn't your administration fly the Bin Laden family out of the United States the day after 9/11? Do you wonder why some Americans believe your Administration was complicit in the attacks? You have done nothing to allay these fears. You opposed any real investigation, declared lower Manhatten environmentaly safe when it wasn't, ignored the advice of your Generals and the will of the American Public and ignored the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group. You attempt to discourage or dismember any attempts at any oversight of your Administration's activities. In, short, you have proven yourselves to be untrustworthy liars as well as incompetent buffoons who thought the Iraqi War would be just like the John Wayne movies you love to watch as you fantasize about being a "Great Hero". Fantasize because few of you had the balls to actually suit up when it was your turn to answer your Nation's call.
Well, I have railed enough. Who am I to convince? Those on the Left are well aware of everything I just said and those still drinking the Right-wing Kool-Aid will dismiss me as just another Lib'rul Moonbat. But what can you say when your faults and failures are eloquently described by one who really knows?
d.
(I have reprinted the entire article below because this is just too important to miss)
Insider: Missteps Soured Iraqis on U.S.
By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent
Mon Apr 9, 2:08 AM
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 minister 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 many 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 of demobilized, angry men became a recruiting pool for the resistance.
_ Purging tens of thousands of members of toppled President Saddam Hussein's Baath party _ from government, school faculties and elsewhere _ left Iraq short on experienced hands at a crucial time.
_ An order consolidating decentralized bank accounts at the Finance Ministry bogged down operations of Iraq's many state-owned enterprises.
_ The CPA's focus on private enterprise allowed the "commercial gangs" of Saddam's day to monopolize business.
_ Its free-trade policy allowed looted Iraqi capital equipment to be spirited away across borders.
_ The CPA perpetuated Saddam's fuel subsidies, selling gasoline 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."
Although Allawi, a cousin of Ayad Allawi, Iraq's prime minister in 2004, is a member of a secularist Shiite Muslim political grouping, his well-researched book betrays little partisanship.
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.
The author has been instrumental since 2005 in publicizing extensive corruption within Iraq's "new order," including an $800-million Defense Ministry scandal. Under Saddam, he writes, the secret police kept would-be plunderers in check better than the U.S. occupiers have done.
As 2007 began, Allawi concludes, "America's only allies in Iraq were those who sought to manipulate the great power to their narrow advantage. It might have been otherwise."
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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