“First of all: THE John Batchelor???”

Yeah. I was wondering the same thing.

(*SMILE*)

“…Mr. Frum’s “Unpatriotic Conservatives” list…”

NICE get!

(*WINK*)

BILL

If so that would be phenomenal.

Secondly, nobody here has asked whether this makes Mr. George Will a member of Mr. Frum’s “Unpatriotic Conservatives” list? http://www.nationalreview.com/frum/frum031903.asp

It was worse than that – because you’re not considering the whole process of “de-Baathification”.

There was absolutely no way for the “lower levels of society (civil service, police, infrastructure) (to) remain intact” … because we deliberately banned virtually everyone who had held any level of responsibility in those organizations from having a job in Paul Bremer’s Iraq.

There’s a lot of reasons to believe that this wasn’t just stupidity – it was stupidity based on ideology. The neocons with little or no foreign policy experience who staffed the CPA were there to dismantle everything socialist (ie – the Baath Party infrastructure), and rebuild a new country to show what oil revenues and unfettered capitalism could accomplish.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48543-2004May22.html

When Ledeen’s group showed up at the palace — with their North Face camping gear, Abercrombie & Fitch camouflage and digital cameras — they were quite the spectacle. For some, they represented everything that was right with the CPA: They were young, energetic and idealistic. For others, they represented everything that was wrong with the CPA: They were young, inexperienced, and regarded as ideologues.

Several had impressive paper credentials, but in the wrong fields. Greco was fluent in English, Italian and Spanish; Burns had been a policy analyst focused on family and health care; and Ledeen had co-founded a cooking school. But none had ever worked in the Middle East, none spoke Arabic, and few could tell a balance sheet from an accounts receivable statement.

Other staffers quickly nicknamed the newcomers “The Brat Pack.”

“They had come over because of one reason or another, and they were put in positions of authority that they had no clue about,” remembered Army Reserve Sgt. Thomas D. Wirges, 38, who had been working on rehabilitating the Baghdad Stock Exchange.

Some also grumbled about the new staffers’ political ties. Retired U.S. Army Col. Charles Krohn said many in the CPA regard the occupation “as a political event,” always looking for a way to make the president look good.

Zarqawi went to Iraq to fight against Kurd nationalists. He fit the Hussein agenda to a Tee.

Anyway, back to square one:-
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8233980.stm
2 September 2009
A member of the Nigerian Islamist sect behind a deadly uprising in July has confessed to receiving military training in Afghanistan, police say.

The member of the sect known locally as Boko Haram and Taliban said he had been paid $5,000 (£3,000) to do the training and promised $30,000 on his return.

The uprising in northern Nigeria left some 700 people dead, mostly militants. ………………….For years Western diplomats have feared a al-Qaeda sleeper cell might launch attacks on oil infrastructure in Nigeria, which is increasingly large supplier for the US……………….

Zarqawi (AQ) left Afghanistan and re-settled in Iraq. This was 2002. Why were AQ terrorists moving to Iraq?

In 2002, Zarqawi went to Iraq and set up shop in the Kurdistan region.

Given the poor relations between Saddam and the Kurds, this doesn’t sound to me like it was organized by Saddam.

If that had been true, then when David Kay told Congress in December 2003 that no modern WMD stockpiles could be found in Iraq, the U.S. could have begun a process of withdrawal right then. (Rumsfeld’s original war plan, now declassified under the Freedom of Information Act, called for all U.S. troops to be withdrawn by December 2006.)

But we learned a hard lesson: The regimes of developing countries are personality cults. If you decapitate the personality, there’s often nothing left underneath.

As soon as Saddam fell, civil order collapsed, looting broke out, and ancient ethnic hatreds resumed. Terrorists and criminal gangs soon took advantage. Rumsfeld’s “small footprint” of 130,000 troops was totally inadequate to suppress anarchy. (Studies have shown that effective occupation requires a ratio of 1 soldier to every 50 civilians, which in Iraq’s case would have meant 520,000 U.S. troops to police the country.)

At that point, we were STUCK in Iraq. We couldn’t get out without leaving exactly the type of failed state we had said had given al-Qaeda safe havens. And so, instead of withdrawing, we got ourselves into a major counterinsurgency war. Rumsfeld had never believed that would happen.

The British did a good job civilizing India–going after the Thuggees and helping to bust the caste system which included so-called “untouchables”–but that took literally centuries of sometimes brutal operations. Americans won’t accept that.

Besides, the Brits were quite open about wanting a worldwide empire for the sake of empire. The ostensible goal of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan was to fight terrorism. But the top al-Qaeda leadership seems to have fled into Pakistan. The U.S. can and should go after them there.

al-Qaeda has proven itself to be flexible and mobile–moving from country to country as needed. We need to be just as flexible and mobile, and not get tied down to any one country. Bush tied us down in Iraq, which was a mistake. Let’s not get tied down for many more years in Afghanistan.