"No leadership, no strategy.."

I would add all greed, no brains.

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Thirteen Words Say It All

"No leadership, no strategy, no coordination, no structure and inaccessible to ordinary Iraqis."

British envoy John Sawers' assessment of the U.S. occupation forces to Tony Blair in
May 2003, four days after he arrived in Iraq. Three years ago. The scathing report
was loaded into a memo even more scathingly titled "What's Going Wrong," one of a
series of leaked documents given to The Guardian , which described the exchanges
as peppered with "unusual frankness."
The memos - written in the immediate aftermath of Mr. Bush's infamous "Mission Accomplished" photo op on the USS Lincoln - detail a devastating ineptness and
indifference at every level of the occupation. The Guardian's laundry list of
Sawers' observations include:

A lack of interest by the US commander, General Tommy Franks, in the
post-invasion phase.
The presence in the capital of the US Third Infantry Division, which took
a heavyhanded approach to security.
Squandering the initial sympathy of Iraqis.
Bechtel, the main US civilian contractor, moving too slowly to reconnect
basic services, such as electricity and water.
Failure to deal with health hazards, such as 40% of Baghdad's sewage
pouring into the Tigris and rubbish piling up in the streets.
Sacking of many of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party, even though many
of them held relatively junior posts.

The most striking thing about this list is ... how generic the areas of failures are for
the Bush administration. This is modus operandi for this bunch. Switch out the
proper names of the people and entities involved, and you've got yourself Katrina.
Tweak it a bit for the bureaucratic stage and you've got Medicare D. And these
are the people who want us to trust them to reform Social Security. Ha! Not on
your life. Or rather, not on mine.
The one thread that runs through everything this administration and its favored
minions undertake is ... they simply don't give a shit. They can't be bothered. They
don't care enough to plan, to organize, to anticipate anything, not an insurgency, not
a forewarned hurricane, not the effects of a crippling budget deficit. More and more,
I'm coming to believe people - real Iraqis, real New Orleans residents, real senior
citizens - just don't register on the Bush radar at all; it's not that these officials
despise them. It's as if they - we - do not exist. We're in their blind spot in the
rearview mirror and they're doing 95 on the I-5, headed straight to Vegas,
come hell or high water. We're just ballast - and payment - for the ride.
by SusanG

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