Hard News: Inauspicious
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I feel good that Hamid Karzi is probably the most popular politician in the world; with a recent approval rating of 91%
Saddams approval ratings were consistently in the high 90's as well . . .
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The FT articulate the utter disaster that is US strategy in Iraq:
The contradiction at the heart of the US approach, however, is this: after casually overturning the Sunni order in Iraq and empowering the Shia in an Arab heartland country for the first time in nearly a millennium, Washington took fright at the way this had enlarged the power of the Shia Islamist regime in Iran. Now, while dependent on Tehran-aligned forces in Baghdad, and unable to dismantle the Sunni Jihadistan it has created in western Iraq, the US is trying to put together an Arab Sunni alliance against Iran. This is a fiasco with the fuel to combust into a region-wide conflagration.
Heck'va job, no? It's bad enough that President Bush decided that the best people to handle this delicate and fraught region of the world were Condi Rice, the most mediocre Secretary of State in living memory, and Rumsfeld, arguably the least competent Cabinet Secretary the Republic has ever known. It's even worse that they both despised each other and turned their bloody and botched occupation into a bureaucratic pissing contest, and a disaster that one of the principle architects of the war - Rice - is still (mis)managing things at State.
But the real tragedy is that the world still has another two years (almost to the day) with President Bush setting the tone in Washington, blithely insisting that somehow America will win in the end because after all they can't lose and that since God is on his side everything will eventually pan out for the best, with his idiot Secretary of State snug in her Oscar de le Renta outfit smiling and nodding agreement while over in Iraq the flames around the Green Zone lick a little higher.
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If people are interested Greg Palast's book Armed Madhouse traces some of the organisational chaos before and at the beginning of the occupation to (as I recall) power struggles between the neocons and oil interests in the White House.
Also suggests reasons it might be in the latter's interests to have ongoing chaos in Iraq.
I realise that if you're disinclined to agree Palast may seem a bit tinfoiley, but there is generally at least some evidence.
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