By Sam Kusic
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Declaring war against Iraq was a poor idea, a former CIA political analyst told a crowd of college students and local residents Monday evening.
Stephen Pelletiere addressed an audience at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, telling them that the United States likely will be stuck fighting a poorly conceived war that it can't afford long term.
Pelletiere, who holds a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of "America's Oil Wars." He served as the CIA's senior policy analyst on Iraq throughout the Iran-Iraq war and, in 1988, became a senior research professor at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle. He headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States.
Pelletiere studied Arabic for a year in Cairo and is the author of four books on Iraq.
He said the Bush administration is corrupt in that it has put its self-aggrandizement ahead of the needs of the country. The administration also has refused to admit to its ineptitude, he said.
"Bush is tarred with both," he said.
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