"No leadership, no strategy, no coordination, no structure and
inaccessible to ordinary Iraqis."


From The Guardian, 3/14/06:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1730427,00.html

US postwar Iraq strategy a mess, Blair was told

Ewen MacAskill, diplomatic editor
Tuesday March 14, 2006
The Guardian


Senior British diplomatic and military staff gave Tony Blair explicit
warnings three years ago that the US was disastrously mishandling the
occupation of Iraq, according to leaked memos.

John Sawers, Mr Blair's envoy in Baghdad in the aftermath of the
invasion, sent a series of confidential memos to Downing Street in May
and June 2003 cataloguing US failures.

With unusual frankness, he described the US postwar administration,
led by the retired general Jay Garner, as "an unbelievable mess" and
said "Garner and his top team of 60-year-old retired generals" were
"well-meaning but out of their depth".

That assessment is reinforced by Major General Albert Whitley, the
most senior British officer with the US land forces.

Gen Whitley, in another memo later that summer, expressed alarm that
the US-British coalition was in danger of losing the peace.

"We may have been seduced into something we might be inclined to
regret. Is strategic failure a possibility? The answer has to be
'yes'," he concluded.

The memos were obtained by Michael Gordon, author, along with General
Bernard Trainor, of Cobra II: the Inside Story of the Invasion and
Occupation of Iraq, published to coincide with the third anniversary
of the invasion.

The British memos identified a series of US failures that contained
the seeds of the present insurgency and anarchy.

The mistakes include:

· A lack of interest by the US commander, General Tommy Franks, in the
post-invasion phase.

· The presence in the capital of the US Third Infantry Division, which
took a heavyhanded approach to security.

· Squandering the initial sympathy of Iraqis.

· Bechtel, the main US civilian contractor, moving too slowly to
reconnect basic services, such as electricity and water.

· Failure to deal with health hazards, such as 40% of Baghdad's sewage
pouring into the Tigris and rubbish piling up in the streets.

· Sacking of many of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party, even though many
of them held relatively junior posts.

Mr Sawers, in a memo titled Iraq: What's Going Wrong, written on May
11, four days after he had arrived in Baghdad, is uncompromising about
the US administration in Baghdad.

He wrote: "No leadership, no strategy, no coordination, no structure
and inaccessible to ordinary Iraqis."

____________________________________________________________

Caught in a civil war

2,309 American troops are dead, 17,004 have been wounded, tens of
thousands of innocent Iraqis are dead and wounded in deranged Bush's
insane war.

Harry