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Ah, yes. Hindsight. Two prominent senior Republicans make the case for a new UN Resolution
that would enable the US to seek allied help with financing and staffing the
Iraq military war - yet unfinished - and the long and complicated cause of nation-building. It seems almost ridiculous in the age
of the internet when past comments can be retrieved and rebroadcast that Sen.
Lugar would say what he does below.
Nice try, guys. We went on
this as Lone Rangers; so whining now that everyone else needs to pitch in when
we deliberately set ourselves up for this commitment is duplicitous and not
befitting a “superpower”. This
administration was tone deaf and pound-foolish, among other things. No sympathy from me. I’m sure the Veterans for Peace and
anti-war activists who opposed this war from the beginning will have something
to say about this better-late-than-never damage control. Also note that NATO is moving into Afghanistan, partly because we
cannot find allies willing to continually man the ongoing, frontline
peacekeeping. Pax Americana, y’all. - KWC Sen.
Says Assumptions Causing Iraq Flap
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Flawed assumptions
by President Bush's advisers about postwar Iraq are contributing to Iraqis' resentment of the U.S.
occupation and undermining its legitimacy, the
chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said Sunday. Even the war itself has yet to be won,
said Sen. Dick Lugar, R-Ind.
"Having said that," Lugar said, "I reiterate we're there
now. Whether they made a good choice or not in terms of tactics is
irrelevant." Friday was the 100th day since Bush
declared an end to major combat. In his radio address Saturday, he said the
administration was "keeping our word to the Iraqi people by helping them
to make their country an example of democracy and prosperity throughout the
region." But Lugar and former
Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia, once chairman of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, looked back at the Iraq war in less rosy terms. "Clearly
this is a war that still has to be won. By that, I mean, militarily, we have to
finally find the rest of the malefactors. We have to try to make sure other forces
don't intrude - that is, terrorists in the country. You've going to need the
lights on in Baghdad," Lugar said on NBC's "Meet the
Press." "In other words,
we really have to get conditions in the country such that the Iraqis know what
we are doing, we communicate that to them, while we fight off those who are
trying to disrupt the whole business." Lugar recently wrote a newspaper opinion
piece that said the administration's postwar planning was so poor that Americans are contending in Iraq "with ethnic and
religious rivalries; a long-repressed people; a war-damaged infrastructure
already decayed from years of neglect and corruption; a lack of Iraqi
democratic experience; and a host of extreme clerics, looters, gangsters and
warlords-in-waiting." Asked
Sunday how the planning was lacking, Lugar replied: "I think a thorough
misunderstanding of how complex the politics of Iraq are and continue to be; an
inability to understand the decapitation theory - that is, getting rid of the
top types while the workers continue - wasn't going to work," he
said. "In other words, the
basic assumptions, whoever was making them, at State, at NSC, at Defense,
simply were inadequate to begin with." NSC is the National Security
Council. He said the facts in Iraq
show "that if we are theorists before the fact, we better all talk about
it a great deal more." His committee's consultations with
administration officials, Lugar said, "showed that the administration
really was not prepared on those grounds." A major step the administration needs to
take, Lugar said, is to come up with a
five-year budget for the reconstruction of Iraq to include sources of the
money. "It could come from
other countries," he said. "We must be vigorous in trying to get that
and a U.N. resolution to give us more legitimacy" as the lead occupying
power. "It is regrettable that some countries still believe
that this is our mission entirely. And the U.N. legitimacy and the
reaching-out to these other countries is of the essence, not only in the short
term but in the intermediate term," Lugar said. Nunn agreed that a new resolution
is singularly important, but no matter what, "We have got to see it
through now. Whether you were for the war or against the war, America has a
huge stake there now, and our allies have to
understand it's in their best interest to really help us." |
Title: Ah, yes
