I watched the second half of it last night and we've left Basra in a hell of a state.
We encouraged people to come out of the woodwork and take a stand for civil liberties. human rights etc. and now they are being treated like dogs under sharia law.
We only have about 30,000 deployable troops at any one time, that's it! So we don't have enough bodies on the ground to do the job in Iraq and Afghanistan and, as one British Commander said "We are just the most well armed tribe down here".
Another couple of eye openers to come out of last nights program:
A few weeks into the invasion a British expert was given the task of getting the electricity back on. The entire plan consisted of half a page of paper with a list of six power stations on it and a figure next to each, that was the
whole plan (so much copper was looted from the power lines in the immediate aftermath of the invasion that copper prices dropped on the world markets).
The other was the financial system to be put in place, as one diplomat read down the page he read that the only currencies that were to be allowed were the US Dollar, which he thought was fair enough, but where he expected to see the Riyadh as the other currency he was shocked to see that it was in fact the German Reichsmark (
), then he realised that someone had just copied and pasted full paragraphs from the post WW2 plan for rebuilding Germany..
What was clear was that anyone who tried to point out these glaring flaws in planning to the US administration before, during and after* the invasion were either cut out of the loop (like Tony 'Lame Poodle' Blair) or actively began to distance themselves (like Colin Powell).
It also made me look at the current US surge in a different light.
The country is pretty much fucked as it is, so they have nothing to lose by giving it a go, the alternative would most likely result in the country going to the dogs and being handed to Iran (and anyone else up for taking a slice) on a plate.
*Rumsfeld's 'Office of Special Plans' (or Fantasy Factory as it was often known) which came up with most of the post invasion plans was headed up by Douglas Feith, a man Gen. Tommy Franks called "The dumbest motherfucker on the face of the earth!", when you consider that this is the team that most likely came up with the plan for getting the power back on, supplied the Lonely Planet guide book to the US Ambassadors and did the copy/paste job from the 1945 plan, it isn't hard to believe that the man was spot on in his observations.
