The Iraq War's #3 architect, former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith, that man who once stood behind only Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld and his right-hand-man, Paul Wolfowitz, can demonstrate a willingness to admit that major mistakes were made in Iraq War policy planning. "The lengthy U.S. occupation of Iraq," Feith stated very early in his talk, "was the biggest mistake of the war." For Feith to say that he himself was partially responsible for this apparent screw-up, well, that would be pushing one's luck.
But Feith did press forward in admitting gaffes, offering other failures of U.S. judgment, such as being inadequately prepared for "civil disorder" in a post-Saddam Iraq. Yet, was this a mistake that originated in Feith's Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy? Nope. The failure in this regard had an identifiable face: that of an intelligence community which both he and top military officers at Central Command, were relying upon heavily.
According to Feith, the occupation of Iraq came about because of an ill-prepared U.S. strategy for "reconstruction and stabilization." Unlike the military, which captures the lessons of wars past inside its institutional structures, embedding such lessons of military history into the curriculum of its military academies and in each branch's training manuals, reconstruction and stabilization is continually managed on an ad-hoc basis. There is simply no continuity from one war to the next, Feith intimated, and this was a major problem
|
|
THE WAR IN IRAQ
POLITICS AS USUAL
Some 200 climatologists and scientific experts gathered for a 11-day conference in Bali, sometimes called Kyoto II or Kyoto Plus, to urge negotiators from 180 nations to agree to a path to a new agreement that would be ready to take over when Kyoto expires in 2012.
