Blackwater Soldiers Run Over Iraqi Woman

Quote from Radeck : in case you were unaware, our military did not do this for kicks and giggles...there were instance of purposeful use of civilians, women, children, etc standing on the road to slow or stop convoys, which were then ambushed and soldiers killed. so, what would be YOUR solution to this quandary? Obviously it wasn't their first choice to do this, so rather than just criticizing from your comfy arm chair, what is YOUR solution to these ambush tactics?

If you read the excellent book, "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone [amazon.com]," you'll get a very good idea of how we could have avoided this. There were two problems with the Iraq War: The first is that we started it, the second was that the White House, Pentagon and State Department very, very badly mismanaged it. Cheney and Rumsfeld ensured that career diplomats, military experts and Mideast experts were utterly ignored, and a set of utterly absurd policies, such as de-Baathification, were implemented. The Bush administration engaged in a groupthink mentality, characterized by Donald Rumsfeld stating that our soldiers would be greeted by open arms.

Don't deny that Rumsfeld said that, and don't deny that he was utterly wrong. They gave enormously large projects to utterly inept people. For example, they put the reconstruction of the stock market and banking system in the hands of a 24 year-old who said that his most interesting job before that was working on an ice cream truck. Reconstruction of the nation's utterly devastated heathcare system was given to a man who didn't even have a medical degree, who's contribution to rebuilding the destroyed hospitals was to put up anti-smoking posters and launch an anti-abortion campaign.

The de-Baathification policy ensured that every single person who was a member of Saddam's Baath party was ineligible for government employment. This meant that virtually every university teacher, hospital staffer, police officer and mid-level civil servant was fired, across an entire country. Can you see how badly this destroyed the nation? There was no order whatsoever.

You can't make stuff up that is as absurdly wrong as what the Bush Administration did. Read the book; it'll really open your eyes.