Representative Press Blog

Rumsfeld's Iraq Plan of "Screw 'em" Backfires

praktike writes that he bought a copy of Larry Diamond's new book, Squandered Victory, "One story that really got me was the tale of former ambassador to Yemen Barbara Bodine suggesting to Rumsfeld in March of 2003 that it would behoove the Bush administration to develop a plan to pay Iraqi civil servants. Rumsfeld replied that American taxpayers would never go for it and that he was not concerned if they were paid for several weeks or even months; if they rioted in the streets in protest, he said, the US could use such an eventuality as leverage to get the Europeans to pick up the tab."

A big grievance of Iraqis is the unemployment, it is worse now than before the US attacked Iraq. A fact not made clear to the viewers of American TV news is the facts that many Iraqis are angered by the way they are treated by US policies. The insurgents feel that the US has wronged the Iraqis and they don't like what the US is doing.
The Rumsfeld mindset with regard to paying Iraqi civil servants mentioned inSquandered Victory is a perfect of how this cruel, arrogant, and stupid Administration has not only not made us safer but has increased the threat to the US. They have increased the anger at the US because of the specific things they are doing to people in the Middle East.

US policy makers have has also violated the terms of the occupation. This is yet another example of the Bush Administration's vicious approach to things.

Remember this the Bush Administration pressured the EPA to suppress information about health threats to New Yorkers living and working near the WTC site. This is what they do to the American public, what do you think these people are willing to do to people in foreign lands?

The author of Squandered Victory, Larry Diamond, is a researcher at the Hoover Institution. In a review of the book, Reuel Marc Gerecht, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, writes "is essentially a memoir of three months in Iraq: January through March 2004, the period when Diamond served in the Coalition Provisional Authority, the occupation brain center run by L. Paul Bremer III and the American military." - 'Squandered Victory' and 'Losing Iraq': Now What? July 10, 2005 NYT

Interestingly Reuel Marc Gerecht describes the US reluctance for democracy in Iraq as "Diamond prescriptions" when the fact is it was the Bush Administration that was not eager for elections and had to allow what Iraqi people were demanding. "... in Iraq, people don't like occupation and many, especially the Shiites' pre-eminent cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, had caught the democratic bug. Had Diamond's prescriptions been followed, the entire country might have flared into rebellion."
The spin today is that the Bush Administration was eager for the elections.