Allawi Book Rips 'Incompetent' U.S. Occupation

[RamboLiberal]

Source: Editor & Publisher/AP

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 corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order," Ali A. Allawi concludes in "The Occupation of Iraq," newly published by Yale University Press.

Allawi writes with authority as a member of that "new order," having served as Iraq's trade, defense and finance minister at various times since 2003. As a former academic, at Oxford University before the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, he also writes with unusual detachment.

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.


Read more: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003568765

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From Amazon.com

From Publishers Weekly
Allawi, until recently a senior minister in the Iraqi government, provides an insider's account of the nascent Iraqi government following the American invasion. His scholarly yet immensely readable exposition of Iraqi society and politics will likely become the standard reference on post-9/11 Iraq. It convincingly blasts the Coalition Provisional Authority for failing to understand the simmering sectarian animosity and conflicting loyalties that led Iraq into chaos. Beginning during Saddam's reign, among the motley gang of liberal democrats, Islamists and Kurdish nationalists that formed the opposition-in-exile, of which Allawi was a prominent member, he chronicles the fortunes and aspirations of the political parties, personalities and interest groups that now are tearing Iraq apart. In one representative episode, after the siege of Fallujah in 2004, the Marines initiated an ill-fated attempt to create a Fallujah Brigade of local men who would be loyal to the CPA. " Bremer... learned about it from newspaper reports.... The defense minister went on television, denouncing the Fallujah Brigade.... The 'Fallujah Brigade,' after a few weeks of apparent cooperation with the Marines, began to act as the core of a national liberation army. Any pretense that they were rooting out insurgents was dropped." (Apr. 9)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
Roger Owen :
"Magisterial. . . . Pure gold. . . . Will certainly become the benchmark work against which all later books will have to be measured. It is authoritative, incisive, dispassionate, devastating in its important judgments, and wholly original. Allawi is one of a handful of men who can tell the whole story of policy, government and administration from the basis of close, personal experience."-Roger Owen, Harvard University

Moises Naim :
"While many books have been written about Iraq's tragedy, Ali Allawi's story offers a unique insider's perspective of the global forces, local passions and diverse personalities that converged to create a situation that will haunt us for decades. An indispensable source of ideas about what happened - and what is likely to happen - in Iraq."-Moises Naim, editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine and author of Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy

Rory McCarthy :
"A comprehensive survey of the occupation of Iraq that highlights the complacency and failings of the American project. This is a sobering account, written from the rare view of an Iraqi insider. Allawi reveals how often the Iraqis were ignored in the chaotic rebuilding of their country and explains the complex dynamics behind Iraq's descent into violent sectarainism."-Rory McCarthy, Jerusalem correspondent for the Guardian and author of Nobody Told Us We Are Defeated: Stories from the New Iraq

[MissWaverly]

1. get the truth out, it's the only way

this will stop the spin machine for good!

[ohio2007]

2. ...another book deal....

Allawi is out to make a buck also.

[calimary]

3. But, but, but... Don't you think the Iraqi people are better off without Saddam?

Dontcha? Huh?? Dontcha??? C'mon! Dontcha???????

[PADemD]

4. Something to buy for your favorite war supporter.

[Canuckistanian]

5. Allawi certainly doesn't have clean hands....

Minister to investigate Allawi execution claims
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/19/1090089067871.html

Iraq's Human Rights Minister, Bakhtiyar Amin said he will investigate claims that Iraq's new Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, killed six prisoners, although he does not believe they are true.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported on Saturday that Mr Allawi shot dead up to six prisoners just days before taking power.

[RamboLiberal]

7. This is not Iyad Allawi who wrote this book but Ali Allawi

who is a cousin. From Wikipedia: Former minister of trade Ali Allawi is Chalabi's sister's son as well as Iyad Allawi's cousin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iyad_Allawi

But amazing how it again comes back to the crook Chalabi. Looks like D.C.'s den of thieves did business as usual with Iraq's exiled den of thieves.

Still could be an interesting read - like reading about two mafia families with one accusing the other of being total f*ck ups.

[Canuckistanian]

8. Whoops, my bad.

Still, Iraqi politics was and is a nest of vipers. You don't rise to a position of power in Iraq without stepping on some fingers (or corpses).

[agincourt]

6. When even the toadies call bullshit on the administration,

The song and dance of "the media don't report the great things going on", looks even stupider.

[Peace Patriot]

9. The Iraq War would be an abomination whether or not it was a "success."

We slaughtered a hundred thousand innocent people in the initial bombing alone. Our leaders should be in jail for that alone. But there is so much more. There is, to start off with, Congress handing over its sole power and duty to declare war to George Bush, in violation of their oaths of office. There is the 100% pack of lies they told to get this engine of war profiteering started--to create a plausible narrative for it. There is the gross violation of international laws. There is the violation of the views of the majority of Americans, 56% of whom opposed this war way back in Feb. '03, before the invasion. There is the rigging of the 2004 election with electronic voting machines, run on "trade secret," proprietary programming code, owned and controlled by Bushite corporations, to manufacture a phony endorsement for the war and other fascist policy. There are the crimes all along the way--torturing prisoners, numerous violations of the Geneva Conventions, massive looting of reconstruction money by the vice president's own company.

The "incompetence" of the occupation--which I put in quotes because I am not convinced that it wasn't/isn't deliberate--is just one of many grave crimes, which started with the FIRST crime of lying us into a corporate resource war. And when you look at other situations, such as Katrina/FEMA, you see something very similar: failure to shore up the levees, and then profiteering from disaster, with cold, callous, moral brutishness toward the victims.

Maybe it will be ultimately viewed as our salvation that OUR nazis were incompetent, greedy, stupid and duplicitous. They couldn't even "make the trains run on time." In fact, they took two countries--the US and Iraq--that were actually functioning pretty well, and, in the case of Iraq, smashed it to pieces, and, in the case of the US, are doing the same in slow motion ($10 trillion deficit; squeeze on all public services; widening the division between rich and poor; outsourcing of jobs; outsourcing of our manufacturing capability; greedy, incompetent ideologues in every agency, etc). They could hijack the US army and misuse it for an oil war, but they couldn't maintain it. They couldn't even equip it properly. They could brutally invade another country, but they couldn't hold it, because they haven't the first clue about running a country. And their appparent incompetence became so appalling that they lost the loyalty of both the army and the people.

But their failure at being nazis is not the worst thing they have done, nor the worst thing that has happened. Their INITIAL violation of international law, by invading Iraq without international consensus--and their hijacking not just of our military but of our election system, to further that crime--is their worst legacy. Because in those actions, they gravely damaged both the mechanisms of world peace and of democracy. Democracy is the human enactment of evolution. It is our method of changing course, of improving, of adapting, of progressing toward a better world and higher consciousness. And, for all its faults, the US is--or has been--the ikon of democracy, a beacon to the world. To damage US democracy as they have done--to prevent a democratic change of course, to force us into an old path, of imperial war--is to fundamentally mess with human progress toward peace and justice. It blackens peoples' hopes. It makes us feel like we've reverted to the Middle Ages. Their "failure" in Iraq--if that is what we are looking at (and that is not yet clear--they're still there, aren't they?) may well be a blessing--an opening for RESTORING democracy in the US, and efforts at world peace, international law and disarmament.

We shall see. Allawi is not coming from a democratic tradition--though he was educated in the west. I don't know that he understands or cares about the horror to Americans of seeing the Bush Junta steal elections and rip up our Constitution. I don't know what his criteria are, for judging Bush/US actions in Iraq. Would he have applauded a Bushite imperial success? (--say, like the British raj in India?). Would he like to be sitting atop a new dictatorship in Iraq? (--say, like the one the US helped set up in Chile under Pinochet?). I don't want to downplay the horrific suffering of the Iraqi people under Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld's cruel and careless and thieving and "incompetent" rule. I would prefer successful imperialism to that, if I had to choose. But the choice of becoming imperial rulers was not given to the American people. And we, as a whole, clearly rejected that idea--as exemplified in the invasion of Iraq--from the beginning. In the face of 24/7 war propaganda, 56% of us say no. Our will was defied. And our will today--with 75% now against the continued war and occupation--continues to be defied by our leaders in the White House and in the Congress. In terms of long range implications, this may be the greater tragedy.

[cyberpj]

10. Doesn't anyone else believe it was supposed to be a disaster? More time to set up, more war profits

and even more time for the civil war to kill off most of the rebels to make it easier to manage.

I simply believe they wanted it this way.

[dazzlerazzle]

11. On PBS with diane rheme

He said around 300,000 casualties since the occupation. Wonder how much MSM coverage he will get promoting his book?