I read earlier that there was a tug of war between Rumsfeld and Powell: Rumsfeld wanted Garner, and Powell backed Bremer. Could it be that Powell "won" and that's why they are changing an already implemented decision of having Garner in charge?
There is something behind the scenes that is going on here, which has nothing to do with how much they accomplished in 2 weeks. You don't fire someone that quickly.
I wonder what IS going on.
I also think it doesn't look good, when you recall the leaders you sent after a couple of weeks.
I just said:
"I read earlier that there was a tug of war between Rumsfeld and Powell: Rumsfeld wanted Garner, and Powell backed Bremer. Could it be that Powell "won" and that's why they are changing an already implemented decision of having Garner in charge?"
And afterwards I read the WP article, which has more detail than the Reuters article I posted. This is what the WP article says about this:
"The shortage of visible progress appears to have sparked consternation at the State Department, where officials argued that a civilian with diplomatic skills and foreign policy experience should coordinate reconstruction activities. The Defense Department chafed at that idea and insisted the program remain under military control. Ultimately, the State Department view won out at the White House on the grounds that having a civilian at the helm would inspire other nations to support the costly and complicated chore of transforming Iraq into a stable, democratic nation.
U.S. officials interviewed today said the U.S. presence in Iraq would likely become more assertive in coming weeks. The absence of strong leadership -- Iraqi or American -- is a subject of intense complaint among ordinary Iraqis, who are struggling with a lack of civil order after 35 years of authoritarian rule.
One senior American official in Baghdad said the U.S. team had been so concerned about being seen as an occupying power that officials were overly reluctant to exert their full authority."
I suggest reading the WP post article. Has much more detail.
One good thing about this, at least Barbara Bodine is being sent back as well.
Incompetent people get kicked upstairs:
The man who knew. Last night Frontline broadcast a 90-minute documentary about John O'Neill, the FBI counterterrorism expert who had already connected most of the dots leading to the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks last year. For six years he obsessed about bin Laden's network, tracing the line that led from the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, through the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, through the plans to stage a terrorist millenium explosion at LAX on the eve of 2000, through the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, to the summer of 2001 when the intelligence world again became aware that something big and awful was in the works.But the US government would not let O'Neill do his job. O'Neill was known throughout the FBI as the go-to guy on bin Laden, but he was not made aware of the Arizona flight school FBI memos or the custody of the alleged "20th hijacker" Zacharias Moussaoui. Barbara K. Bodine, US ambassador to Yemen, denied his visa to return to investigate the Cole bombing. Tom Pickard, at one point interim director for the FBI, did everything in his power to silence and frustrate O'Neill. The compartmentalized bureaucrats simply could not tolerate a maverick investigator whose only motivation was protecting the country from terrorism. He was forced out of the FBI in the late summer of 2001.
In the ultimate tragic irony, O'Neill was killed in the World Trade Center a week after taking a new job as head of security -- of the World Trade Center.
Frontline does a good job of covering all the angles, including such details as the relevance of two of the hijackers who flew into the Pentagon on Flight 77. Their names were on O'Neill's short list of potential threats.
Good ole Reuters never lets you down.
I refuse to believe that the Bush administration, who planned the war so well, didn't have a solid plan for post-war Iraq. They had plenty of time to plan for that, with all the bull____ going on in the UN. And I heard that they were planning on using former Iraqi soldiers to do most of the labor - but surely someone else can pick up garbage, etc.
Is a lot of stuff happening that we're not made aware of?
It makes me sad to think that we did such a good thing in freeing the Iraqis, and now we look inept. Esp when we're shuffling people around so early in the reconstruction.