In his new book, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created A War Without End, Galbraith, the son of the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith, claims that American leadership knew very little about the nature of Iraqi society and the problems it would face after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
A year after his “Axis of Evil” speech before the U.S. Congress, President Bush met with three Iraqi Americans, one of whom became postwar Iraq’s first representative to the United States. The three described what they thought would be the political situation after the fall of Saddam Hussein. During their conversation with the President, Galbraith claims, it became apparent to them that Bush was unfamiliar with the distinction between Sunnis and Shiites.
Galbraith reports that the three of them spent some time explaining to Bush that there are two different sects in Islam–to which the President allegedly responded, “I thought the Iraqis were Muslims!”
Think about this for a minute. Remember the first Persian Gulf War? Remember how Poppy encouraged the Shi’ites to rise up and oust Saddam? Remember how Saddam slaughtered them? Remember how we had to set up no-fly zones to protect the Shi’ites and the Kurds? Remember all that? Because the son of the President that was commander-in-chief at that time wasn’t paying the slightest attention. He obviously didn’t take the slightest interest in understanding Iraq. How could he even know it was a threat? Because Paul Wolfowitz told him it was a threat?
He chose to take this nation into a war and he didn’t even understand who would emerge as the most powerful Iraqi. He didn’t even know who Grand Ayatollah Sistani was, let alone why his position would be significant.
This is beyond disgraceful. This is so impeachable that there really couldn’t be anything more impeachable. I challenge anyone to defend this level of apathy about issues related to our national security.
