Word: saddamism
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...simply a question of who foots the bill or which companies get the contracts. Iraq's rebuilding efforts are being hamstrung by sclerotic administrative procedures that are in desperate need of modernization, after decades of inefficient centralized control, corruption, cronyism, wars and sanctions. "It's almost as if Saddam froze the clocks, froze the calendars in 1980, and nothing moved," says Terrence L. Barnich, a senior U.S. adviser for law, policy and regulatory affairs in the Iraq Transition Assistance Office. The result, Barnich says, is a generation of managers and technocrats cut off from how business is done...
...included a bitter reprise of U.S. foreign policy, which he saw as criminal; and he puckishly offered his services as George W. Bush's speechwriter, with this as an audition text for the President: "My God is good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians." Though the cancer had made his voice weak and raspy, Pinter had not forgotten the lessons of his years in repertory; the consummate actor delivered his screed with understated power...
...Gulf war, the Pentagon badgered the CIA for things like sand samples and stress limits of Iraq bridges, the terrain its Abrams tanks would roll across. Yes, that information was nice to have, but such requests diverted CIA resources from strategic intelligence. Rather than answering the question of whether Saddam had kept his weapons of mass destruction, the CIA sent its clandestine sources into Iraq with baggies and little plastic shovels...
...Saddam, and as incomplete as that may be, it is the best we can do, even if we were to stay in Iraq for the next hundred years. Unless we stick to the withdrawal schedule like a Swiss train, the odds go up that something like Sunday's shoe-throwing incident will cascade into a situation far beyond our control - an Iraqi Nabatiyah...
...News interview the next day, the President conceded for the first time that al-Qaeda had no presence in Iraq before the U.S. invasion, adding, "So what?" In another news cycle, this admission would have dominated the headlines: that after the debunking of Bush's original excuse for war--Saddam's weapons of mass destruction--his argument that Iraq was a crucial nexus in the global war on terrorism also held no water. Thanks to al-Zaidi, nobody heard the other shoe drop...