Subject: Missteps Soured Iraqis on U.S.: “We can’t have 535 members of Congress micromanaging the war”, Geo. Bush. By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent; In a rueful reflection on what might have been, an Iraqi government insider details in 500 pages the U.S. occupation's "shocking" mismanagement of his country — a performance so bad, he writes, that by 2007 Iraqis had "turned their backs on their would-be liberators." The U.S.- and British-educated engineer and financier is the first senior Iraqi official to look back at book length on his country's four-year ordeal. It's an unsparing look at failures both American and Iraqi, an account in which the word "ignorance" crops up repeatedly. First came the "monumental ignorance" of those in Washington pushing for war in 2002 without "the faintest idea" of Iraq's realities. "More perceptive people knew instinctively that the invasion of Iraq would open up the great fissures in Iraqi society," he writes. What followed was the "rank amateurism and swaggering arrogance" of the occupation, under L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which took big steps with little consultation with Iraqis, steps Allawi and many others see as blunders:_ The Americans disbanded Iraq's army…_ Purging tens of thousands …from government, school faculties and elsewhere …_ focus on private enterprise allowed the "commercial gangs" of Saddam's day to monopolize business._ Its free-trade policy allowed looted Iraqi capital equipment to be spirited away across borders._ … selling gasoline at giveaway prices and draining the budget. In his 2006 memoir of the occupation, Bremer wrote that senior U.S. generals wanted to recall elements of the old Iraqi army in 2003, but were rebuffed by the Bush administration. Bremer complained generally that his authority was undermined by Washington's "micromanagement." Allawi writes that the Americans'"insipid retelling of `success' stories" merely hid "the huge black hole that lay underneath."

RESPONSE: It should be obvious even to the casual observer that if it were not for bad judgement these Republicans running this war would have no judgement. There is almost nothing they have gotten right...and the lies and spin at some point just grow old..."progress" ... we have heard this for the last four years...'dead enders,' 'purple fingers,' 'MISSION ACCOMPLISHED,' and now the lie is 'progress' as more and more die in a war that Bush and Cheney refuse to place at risk their own or call for sacrifice from the rich...but they do want more tax breaks for the rich before they will raise the minimum wage. HUH?