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:: 11.03.2003 ::
Read this now. Chief among these agencies was the so-called Office of Special Plans, set up after Sept. 11, 2001, reporting to Douglas Feith in the Pentagon. It was given such a vague name, by Feith's own admission, because the administration did not want to have it widely known that there was a special unit in the Pentagon doing its own assessments of intelligence on Iraq. ''We didn't think it was wise to create a brand-new office and label it an office of Iraq policy,'' Feith told the BBC in July.
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Timothy Carney, a former American ambassador to Sudan and Haiti who served in the reconstruction team in Iraq just after the war, says that there was, in the Pentagon, ''a complete lack of grasp of Chalabi's lack of appeal for ordinary Iraqis.'' In the end, Chalabi sat out the war in the Iraqi desert and was taken to Baghdad only after the city had fallen and the Americans had moved in.
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The Future of Iraq Project did draw up detailed reports, which were eventually released to Congress last month and made available to reporters for The New York Times. The 13 volumes, according to The Times, warned that ''the period immediately after regime change might offer . . . criminals the opportunity to engage in acts of killing, plunder and looting.''
But the Defense Department, which came to oversee postwar planning, would pay little heed to the work of the Future of Iraq Project. Gen. Jay Garner, the retired Army officer who was later given the job of leading the reconstruction of Iraq, says he was instructed by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to ignore the Future of Iraq Project.
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"The Pentagon didn't want to touch anything connected to the Department of State." Our foreign policy is being decided by 2-year-olds. From Blueprint for a Mess, by David Rieff of the New York Times. Link thanks to Tom Tomorrow.
:: Deb 3:27 PM :: permalink ::
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