Bremer: Iraq War Architects Are ‘Running Away From Their Building’
Bremer: Iraq War Architects Are ‘Running Away From Their Building’
In a CNN interview on Sunday, former Iraq occupation governor L. Paul Bremer responded to criticisms from Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, two of the Iraq war’s primary architects, of his decision to establish an extended American military occupation of Iraq, rather than handing over power immediately to an Iraqi government headed by former exiles like Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi.
Perle insists that invading Iraq was “the right decision,” but that the trouble began when “rather than turn Iraq over to Iraqis to begin the daunting process of nation building…we sent an American to govern Iraq.” Former director of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans Douglas Feith has likewise sought to cast blame on Bremer for “mishandling…the political transition” in Iraq.
In the CNN interview, Bremer fired back:
It sounds like the architects are running away from their building here. But it’s the same point. Basically what Feith is saying is we should have simply handed over right away to a group of unrepresentative exiles, and I just disagree.
Bremer asserts that the plan for a slow political transition conducted under the auspices of a longer-term U.S. military occupation was approved by President Bush, and condemns as unrealistic Feith’s and Perle’s plan to “simply hand over [power] to a group of unrepresentative exiles.” Watch it:
This is only the latest round in the blame game, as the architects of the Iraq war try to absolve themselves of responsibility for one of the biggest foreign policy blunders in American history. Contrary to Bremer’s assertion, however, the Iraq war architects haven’t run away as much as they’ve just moved upstairs to nicer apartments.
Think Progress has been keeping track of the Iraq War Architects and where they are now. Take a look at our updated report here.
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What else can you expect from a bunch of big, fat, p&ssies.
March 18th, 2008 at 11:18 amI detail the circular firing squad here. Enjoy!
Cheers,
March 18th, 2008 at 11:20 amgood_golly Says:
March 17th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
There have undoubtedly been phenomelal improvements, but there is obviously still work to be done.
(conservative talking points - so bland they work anywhere!)
March 18th, 2008 at 11:26 amHey Jerry - remember when Jay Garner tried to hold provincial elections in Iraq soon after the invasion to show the Iraqis that we were sincere in wanting to bring democracy to their country, and you were brought in to stop that plan? Remember that? Remember how it led to Moqtada as-Sadr’s creation of the Jaysh al-Mahdi?
Hey - remember that time you dissolved the Iraqi Army and De-Ba’athified the government, leaving all sectors of Iraq’s infrastructure with no technical staff and throwing hundreds thousands of people out of work with lots of unguarded surplus munitions?
Remember that?
Why don’t you keep that in mind before you go pointing fingers, kay?
March 18th, 2008 at 11:28 amOK, I got it. It was a much better idea to turn Iraq over to the Bush Administration because it is the elected representatives of the Iraqi people. I never realized that Georgie was on the ballot in the “purple finger” election. I just have to do a better job of keeping up with world events.
/snark off. A snark a day, keeps the neocons away.
March 18th, 2008 at 11:31 amHey, I’ll give you a hint:
When the roses the Iraqi people threw at their beloved USA liberators exploded, clanged, or otherwise didn’t smell good, that was a rather clear sign, right then and there, that things weren’t going as painted by the architects.
March 18th, 2008 at 11:34 amBremmy, it wasn’t your fault. You did a hekava job….why don’t you have a medal of freedom.
March 18th, 2008 at 11:34 amKeep Iraq safe from the Iraqis!!
What a quaint idea for democracy…..
March 18th, 2008 at 11:35 amSaddam at least provided electricity and clean drinking water, and the Euphrates did not run full of raw sewage.
March 18th, 2008 at 11:37 amHe may have been violent and repressive, but then…….
………….oh, wait……….. never mind……………
Did he include himself??
March 18th, 2008 at 11:39 amAnd security…you could walk the darkest streets in Baghdad in the middle of the night without any fear.
You just couldn’t talk about politics….
Now you can talk about politics, but you don’t have Electricity, water, food, money, or security.
I’d rather talk about sports myself….
March 18th, 2008 at 11:41 amThe cowardice of the people behind this war is astonishing.
March 18th, 2008 at 11:41 amAll these miserable failures either still have jobs in the administration or have moved on to some good ole WINGNUT WELFARE. They should all be in prison or better yet dead.
March 18th, 2008 at 11:47 amHas anyone followed the “where are they now” link?
If you haven’t, I’ll save you the trouble:
All either got promotions (of course!) or received cushy gigs at conservative think tanks or are teaching (!!!) at university or have book deals.
Rummy’s shopping his memoirs around.
Bush stole a second election.
Nice.
March 18th, 2008 at 11:51 amjb:
I’m sure they have better access to health care than you or I so I’m sure they’ll live happily (and wealthily) into their “golden years”.
March 18th, 2008 at 11:52 am[…]we should have simply handed over right away to a group of unrepresentative exiles, and I just disagree.
Obviously Bremer thinks it’s a better idea to retain the power in the hands of a group of unrepresentative, and foreign, military invaders.
Yeah, Iraqis will certainly be so much more comfortable with that idea. Right.
March 18th, 2008 at 11:52 amHow much blood is enough?
March 18th, 2008 at 12:00 pmFrosty Cupcake Says:
March 18th, 2008 at 11:52 am
jb:
I’m sure they have better access to health care than you or I so I’m sure they’ll live happily (and wealthily) into their “golden years”.
Ah, America isn’t she great. Seems to me the “market place of ideas” is a rigged market….like Wall Street.
March 18th, 2008 at 12:00 pmWell, the building is on fire and they know it, they want to totally stick it to their dupe, War Criminal Bush, the Butcher of Bagdad.
Bush/Cheney/NeoCons
Hague Trials ‘09
Themanwhocared
March 18th, 2008 at 12:02 pmNight Grammar School ‘08
The “invading Iraq was the right thing to do” spin just keeps getting more and more entertaining. Or at least it WOULD be amusing if people weren’t getting killed and our country wasn’t bankrupting itself.
I wonder how this debacle will be portrayed in the history books of 2050?
March 18th, 2008 at 12:03 pmPlus, Bremer is establishing a false dichotomy here: Holding direct elections shortly after the invasion doesn’t seem to be an option in his mind.
As a matter of fact, the Bush administration put all kinds of roadblocks, opposing this very idea, when it was proposed by the Iraqis themselves.
So, this “I disagree that handing power over to unrepresentative exiles is a good idea” meme is hogwash; not that it needs saying.
March 18th, 2008 at 12:04 pmFrosty Cupcake Says:
March 18th, 2008 at 11:51 am
All either got promotions (of course!) or received cushy gigs at conservative think tanks or are teaching (!!!) at university or have book deals.
————————————-
Sounds like the Watergate crowd. Except, of course, most of them went to jail first. And I don’t think anyone got a promotion.
March 18th, 2008 at 12:05 pmThe War Criminals blame game started! Under Bremer, millions belonging to the Iraq people disapeared! Perle and D. Feith are as much of a war criminal as Chenney and Bush! They should all be facing the International Court at Hague for War Crimes!
March 18th, 2008 at 12:10 pmI have this dream every so often that a powerful foreign government sees Bush as a despotic leader who must be removed. They invade America, perform a bunch of shock-and-awe bombing and kick out Bush, Cheney, and everyone else who’s part of that administration. Naturally, the Bush loyalists put up a fight, but they can’t really do much because our National Guard is gone and our military is broken.
Afterwards, these foreign invaders hang around for “nation building” — the conventional wisdom being that if we are left to do it ourselves, we can’t be trusted to do it right and we will wind up with another tyrant for a leader. Furthermore, because we no longer have a government, our polarized society is in danger of breaking out into full-scale civil war.
How would we feel under such an occupation?
March 18th, 2008 at 12:11 pmHmm, not much coming from the Neoturd crowd on this.
Could it be that there’s no corollary on the opposite side of the partison isle?
March 18th, 2008 at 12:13 pmmissmolly Says:
March 18th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
“most of them went to jail first. And I don’t think anyone got a promotion.”
————————————-
Ah, the good old days of Nixon.
Never thought I’d miss that crook. Thanks, neocons, for proving that things can always get worse.
March 18th, 2008 at 12:14 pmmissmolly:
“Bush as a despotic leader who must be removed”
How can I sign up for your newsletter? ;)
March 18th, 2008 at 12:15 pmWill the Iraq situation be a “lesson learned” for future generations — that if you break something, it’s not always easy to fix?
I doubt it. When the Vietnam conflict was finally finished, I thought that surely the United States would never again be so stupid to squander 58,000 young lives on such a lost cause. I was wrong.
March 18th, 2008 at 12:16 pmNever underestimate the power of greed and hubris.
March 18th, 2008 at 12:21 pmWill these bastards be hunted down the way the Nazis were? Its what they deserve.
March 18th, 2008 at 12:25 pmmissmolly Says:
March 18th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
I wonder how this debacle will be portrayed in the history books of 2050?
Good question. How do you write “Iraq” in Mandarin Chinese?
March 18th, 2008 at 12:27 pmMore Winter Soldier testimony:
March 18th, 2008 at 12:38 pmhttp://www.democracynow.org/ 2008/ 3/ 18/ winter_soldier_contd_us_vets_active
This 2004 article in Harper’s by Naomi Klein is full of the details on the pre/post invasion logic, including this…”I was also reminded of the most common explanation for what has gone wrong in Iraq, a complaint echoed by everyone from John Kerry to Pat Buchanan: Iraq is mired in blood and deprivation because George W. Bush didn’t have “a postwar plan.” The only problem with this theory is that it isn’t true….”
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2004/09/0080197
“….But before the fires from the “shock and awe” military onslaught were even extinguished, Bremer unleashed his shock therapy, pushing through more wrenching changes in one sweltering summer than the IMF has managed to enact over three decades in Latin America. Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate and former chief economist at the World Bank, describes Bremer’s reforms as “an even more radical form of shock therapy than pursued in the former Soviet world.”
The tone of Bremer’s tenure was set with his first major act on the job: he fired 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers, publishers, and printers. Next, he flung open the country’s borders to absolutely unrestricted imports: no tariffs, no duties, no inspections, no taxes. Iraq, Bremer declared two weeks after he arrived, was “open for business.” …
March 18th, 2008 at 12:41 pmGood question. How do you write “Iraq” in Mandarin Chinese?
???
March 18th, 2008 at 12:41 pmNeocon cannibalism at its finest!
March 18th, 2008 at 12:42 pmHmm, TP didn’t like me cut-n-pasting Chinese script…
March 18th, 2008 at 12:42 pmDieNowForPeace Says:
March 18th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Hmm, TP didn’t like me cut-n-pasting Chinese script…
Hmm - the new template must not support Unicode. But the Charset is UTF-8, so it should.
Let me try: 伊拉克
March 18th, 2008 at 12:49 pm“I remember one woman was walking by, and she was carrying a huge bag, and she looked like she was heading towards us. So we lit her up with the Mark 19, which is an automatic grenade launcher. And when the dust settled, we realized that the bag was only full of groceries. And, I mean, she had been trying to bring us food, and we blew her to pieces for it.”
—————————————-
And we wonder why they’re not wild about us being in our country? I’m not blaming our troops — when you are fighting an unidentifiable “enemy”, you pretty much shoot at anything that looks remotely suspicious. I’m blaming our leaders for putting us in a situation (fed by the rah-rah-war-on-terror crowd back home) where so many people who mean no harm are dying.
March 18th, 2008 at 12:56 pmLet me try: ???
That’s it.
Also, the big, private schools here in Texas have shifted language priorities from Latin to Mandarin.
Got to prepare to become the low-payed slaves to the Chinese sooner or later.
March 18th, 2008 at 1:08 pmmissmolly Says:
March 18th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
And we wonder why they’re not wild about us being in our country? I’m not blaming our troops — when you are fighting an unidentifiable “enemy”, you pretty much shoot at anything that looks remotely suspicious. I’m blaming our leaders for putting us in a situation (fed by the rah-rah-war-on-terror crowd back home) where so many people who mean no harm are dying.
You should listen to the Winter Soldier testimony at Democracy Now - it’s quite frightening. It’s really not the soldiers’ fault - they were following orders, some more reluctantly than others. In case after case, these soldiers keep saying that they were given orders from above to shoot any Iraqi for any reason, and plant evidence if the victims turned out to be innocent.
March 18th, 2008 at 1:08 pmKeep in mind, folks, Winter soldiers are the ones still fortunate enough to be able to speak.
30,000 dead & wounded young Americans break my heart.
But Bremer really, really pisses me off.
March 18th, 2008 at 1:17 pmThe build up to the war deceitful; the occupation was bungled before, during, and after Bremer; and the national treasury has been plundered, while Iraqi’s have borne incredible suffering. Many Iraqi refugees in neighboring countries are reduced to begging, prostitution, and crime. The criminals who brought this upon us and them are all busy pointing at one another and the “money keeps on rolling out”! And McBush is for the status quo!!!
March 18th, 2008 at 2:01 pmDoc Rock Says:
March 18th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
The build up to the war deceitful; the occupation was bungled before, during, and after Bremer; and the national treasury has been plundered, while Iraqi’s have borne incredible suffering. Many Iraqi refugees in neighboring countries are reduced to begging, prostitution, and crime.
But Iraq got a flat tax, so it’s all good.
March 18th, 2008 at 2:08 pmhussein toasterhead Says:
March 18th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
How do you write “Iraq” in Mandarin Chinese?
___________
Dunno, but I suspect the ideograph will also double to mean “the end of the US” too.
March 18th, 2008 at 2:16 pmits been made abundantly clear that a key fundamental characteristic of all neocons is that they CAN’T think past blowing shit up.
March 18th, 2008 at 2:39 pm.
Each of these now-ousted reprobates (Bremer, Feith, Perle. Powell etc) now “eat their own” as they are on their own rather than coddled in an Adminsitration-secured proviliged self affirming frat-house of testosterone fueled fantasies of the triumph of their will.
As pitiful and sickening as their new-found retrotactive defiant sagacity is, equally as reprhensible is that these ‘oiks’ (look it up)are still allowed not a scrounged soapbox, but a a glittering podium from which they are allowed to re-write their own histories without any meaniingful challenge, not only to their pasts but to the words they now add to their old recipe to make it seem new and invogorating and relevant to the current taste.
Those supplicants in the press that were convinced then when these parasites were bursting with the bloody rewards of tolerance, now regard the survivors of their infestation with the sympathy reserved for any endangered species, absent the recognit that they were and still are parasites and not benign symbiotic agent essential to the maintenance of life.
Oops, a bit OTT there, sorry! But goddamit if the press can persuade these bastards to crawl out from under once again the press should be there witha goddam shoe, reday to pound them to goo. Instead they maintain the morbid fascination of a child viewing a repulsive yet compelling creature before being distracted again by the promise of more food at the table or a trip to the cinema–the importance of their discovery of a weird and isdious creature lost once again as easily as it was found.
When are these people going to be held accountable? WHEN?!!
March 18th, 2008 at 3:34 pmQuit saying that, call it what it is. It is the biggest foreign policy blunder in American History.
March 18th, 2008 at 6:24 pmBremer never spoke about the 900 billion dollars he stole from Iraq and gave to the GOP insiders. We know Dennis Hastert got his suitcase full of money brought to his second home in Illinois. Yes even the Iraqis that helped with the lie are living large in England. Now comes the blame game. The Contractors took billions of dollars and did nothing. Americans can add that Bush/Cheney pay off to the US Treasury Debt. Now Americans are more concerned about a Democratic Gov. who hires a prostitute then paying attention to the crimes done by the Bush Administration. Bremer has his stolen money safely hide in off shore accounts as does the others who got their US money. Now the bill is left for the American people to pay and we will be paying for generations to come. The Good news is the Middle East cleaned out the US Economy and now will give the US loans if needed. Dubai who got 10,000 per cent profit and took their money and left because the American people were told there was a problem with the US Treasury. I laughed with what the BBC News had to say about Bush he is clearly a joke and a true liar. But Americans don’t seem to mind an idiot as President as we put him in office twice. Their still laughing at Bush’s speech of the US Economy slow down.
March 18th, 2008 at 6:27 pm