Amsterdan

It's bad. It's very bad.

I yield the floor to Tim Dickenson writing in Rolling Stone (rollingstone.com), March 22, 2007. A panel of experts tells writer Tim Dickinson the war is lost, surge or no surge. "Even if we had a million men to go in, it's too late now," says retired four-star Gen. Tony McPeak, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Persian Gulf War. "Humpty Dumpty can't be put back together again." How awful can it get? The panel's three scenarios:

BEST CASE -- Civil war in Iraq and a stronger al-Qaida: "The best we can hope for is an Iraq that is politically passive but hostile toward America," says Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security adviser.

"It's complete anarchy now," says Nir Rosen, author of "In the Belly of the Beast." "Americans are still killing Iraqi civilians left and right. There's no government in Iraq; it doesn't exist outside of the Green Zone. We deliberately created a weak government so that we would have final authority over everything in Iraq. ... The best you can hope for is that doesn't spill into the neighboring countries."

MOST LIKELY -- Years of ethnic cleansing and war with Iran: Rosen says our Sunni allies like Saudi Arabia are pushing the United States to switch sides and support the minority Sunnis in Iraq. "The whole buildup to a new war against Iran, which sounds so much like the buildup in 2002, is part of that," he says.

Bob Graham, ex-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, adds: "This administration seems to be getting ready to make -- at a much more significant, escalated level -- the same mistake in Iran that we made in Iraq. If Iraq has been a disaster, this would be multiple times Iraq. The extent to which this could be the horror of the 21st century is hard to exaggerate."

Brzezinski says, "If the war continues without any American willingness to accommodate regionally and to pull out, the Iraq war will be extended to Iran."

WORST CASE -- World War III: "Israel sees that it's threatened by these developments," says McPeak. "Once the Israelis get involved, then everybody piles on. And you've got nuclear events going off in the Middle East."

He concludes: "Our country's international standing has been frittered away by people who don't have the foggiest understanding of how the hell the world works. America has been conducting an experiment for the past six years, trying to validate the proposition that it really doesn't make any difference who you elect president. Now we know the result of that experiment . If a guy is stupid, it makes a big difference."

Labels: blunder, Bush, fiasco, Iran, Iraq

posted by DanZ @ 10:21 PM