Anybody who watched Paul Bremer recently before a senate committee and doesn't simply put his/her head in his hands and figuratively cry is way beyond me. Obviously someone who screwed up as much as Bremer in Iraq is not going to admit it. We are into hindsight, of course, but what hindsight does is only reflect the lack of planning in going to war anyway.
Bremer said, "I've made mistakes." Well, Dud! Descriptions of loading 18 wheelers with pallets of cash, weighing tons didn't seem to even phase Bremer. He said something like, "Iraq was a country in chaos and a cash culture and we were trying to survive and look after the people." Oh, so you just hand out hundred dollar bills to the elite of Baghdad. The poor surely didn't get the bucks. Bremer says all of this with a straight face. Looking after the people: what people were those?
No accountability for all this cash. The IG who sat next to him contradicted him with the idea that he didn't have a clue where all that money went. I can remember reading about soldiers at some supply point in Iraq or maybe they were contractors playing foodball with bound up stacks of hundred dollar bills.What enrages me as an American taxpayer is that when I think of the working poor, the homeless and needy in our country who are trying to survive and we are giving out stacks of American taxpayers' money like it is a monopoly game. And, to make it worse, it probably went to the least deserving and worse still into the hands of possible terrorists. We simply don't know.
You have got to be kidding me! Here it is two years down the road and we have come out from under the ether. I am appalled and Americans who care should be too. Most who have any real interest in what has happened in Iraq commonly acknowledge that disbanding the Iraqi Army and purging the Baathists from the government was simply stupid. The thing I remember is reading about Bremer screaming, "I don't want to hear anything about Vietnam." Oh yeah, doesn't want to hear that Iraq has become Iraqnam. Guess what? Bremer got his "freedom" medal given by the Prez and would be off scot free were it not for the new Congress.
Bremer's admissions is but one more example of how Iraq has morphed into one disaster after another. And, we are still debating doing more of the same. If there has ever been a case for post Vietnam, this may be it. When we departed the scene in Vietnam, who knew what would happen. Some things were not pretty but our staying there would have only postponed the inevitable. As we have seen, Vietnam not only survived but has prospered and has even become our trading partner. We should be so lucky in Iraq. Let's hope with new leadership we are truly heading for a new strategy and it ain't surge.
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