Aside from being conned into the Iraq war, the British and American people may well be feeling more than a little "aggrieved" over the disgraceful waste of time and resources wrt "rebuilding" the wreck of that country.
The Iraq inquiry in London has heard from two senior Foreign and Commonwealth Office officials who said that there had been a lack of resources, and that when Blair visited Iraq two months after the invasion he found that the body set up to run Iraq was a "shambles".
Sir Peter Ricketts, the political director at the Foreign Office between 2001 and 2003, said:
"Perhaps most strikingly the Prime Minister when he visited in early June [actually May 30] came back with a forceful sense that Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) was a shambles."
Seemingly British attempts to improve the "dire" planning for the aftermath of the invasion were repeatedly ignored by the USA.
As both the US and UK struggle to fund their ballooning public sector debts, their hapless taxpayers have the right to ask some very pointed questions of their then "leaders" as to what happened to the vast sums of money expended on "rebuilding" Iraq, and why the entire enterprise has turned into such a shambles.
The ex "leaders" responsible for this disgrace should not be allowed to enjoy their well paid retirement from political office, without being made to undergo some heavy duty cross examination on this subject.
2 comments:
Earlier today I commented on how the mainstream media had effectively ignored a report released earlier this week that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld vetoed the deployment of extra special forces units to secure Tora Bora and cut off any possible escape route. His action, whether by stupidity or design, essentially allowed Osama Bin Laden to escape.
Many analysts opined that this "dramatic escape" added to the "mystique" and stature of Bin Laden in the eyes of his existing and would be followers.
Would al-Qaeda have folded without Bin Laden? Possibly not, but it would have been weakened. It would have lost its figurehead.
The question is, would a Bin Laden-less al-Qaeda have been able to rally in time for the organization to have been cited as one of the pillars of the argument to invade Iraq?
For the al-Qaeda-Iraq argument to carry any significant weight with the public, wasn't it conveniently useful that Bin Laden was still alive.
A colleague heaved a heavy sigh and said right now isn't the time to be pointing fingers and assigning blame. That can wait. Let's get this over with, and then start the investigations.
I fundamentally disagree. If young men and women are to be expected to continue to risk their lives they need the assurance that their leaders are also accountable. Now. Not at some undefined time in the future.
This is the very least we owe the families of the fallen, and those who are still in uniform.
The guy Gelken quotes above says this "isn't the time to be pointing fingers and assigning blame."
This is pretty much what everyone says right now. The attitude that Iraq is old news and we are "moving on" speaks to the crappy attention span of most people whose understanding of current events is shaped mostly by what comes out of the TV set.
Part of healing is recognizing when injustice has been done. We as a country desperately need this kind of healing, we must find out the details about 9/11, why WTC 7 fell down the way it did, and why Iraq was not involved and why killing those 500 thousand plus civilians is on our hands, because our government did this in our name.
Anyway, I agree that finger pointing isn't the main thing that should concern us---until by thorough investigation and public acknowledgement, we understand what happened, and why--then we can start to decide who were the villians and what they did that should not be done again.
I'm not holding my breath on that, though. ;)
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