Iraq. Explained.
Salon is feature a great piece today by a reporter who was in Iraq during May of 2003. Among other things, he discusses 200 members of the former Iraqi army looked to him for orders when he gave them a crash course in how to setup a protest march. The basis of hs piece was that if the former Iraqi military was looking to him for orders, then, uh, things are pretty goddamn fucked in the country. Near the end, he whips out this paragraph which is the best description I've seen concerning why we're still in Iraq:
As we now know, disbanding the Iraqi military, leaving 400,000 troops jobless and humiliated with ready access to their old weapons, was a huge blunder -- as was committing too few of our own forces in the first place (something even Bremer now acknowledges). Because Iraq had no secure borders, outside provocateurs could sow mayhem. Without an indigenous security force, the much-publicized big reconstruction projects couldn't proceed. Stoked by a lack of air conditioning, refrigeration and staples such as medicine and gasoline, the anger of average Iraqis soon would be boiling over. Throw in a nascent insurgency by both Sunnis and Shiites, and it is easy to understand how our great, optimistic enterprise in Iraq went awry.
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