Top State Department Middle East Diplomat Cites U.S. "Stupidity" in Iraq

Alberto Fernandez (left), a top U.S. State Department diplomat, speaking in Arabic in an interview with al Jazeera that aired Saturday afternoon, confirmed what we already knew when he said "We tried to do our best but I think there is much room for criticism because, undoubtedly, there was arrogance and there was stupidity from the United States in Iraq. We are open to dialogue because we all know that, at the end of the day, the solution to the hell and the killings in Iraq is linked to an effective Iraqi national reconciliation," he said, speaking in Arabic from Washington. "The Iraqi government is convinced of this." He went on to state that failure to pacify the widening sectarian strife in Iraq as well as an enduring insurgency would damage the entire Middle East. "We are witnessing failure in Iraq and that's not the failure of the United States alone but it is a disaster for the region. Failure in Iraq will be a failure for the United States but a disaster for the region." (Emphasis mine)

Lets see - the top Arabic-speaking diplomat in the State Department makes statements like that in Arabic, the top General in the British Army comes out and says that the presence of coallition forces is making the situation in Iraq worse. The Lancet reports a survey finding that approximately 650,000 excess deaths have occured in Iraq since the invasion. Sixteen United States intelligence agencies found that the invasion of Iraq had fueled terrorism, not curbed it.

So what the hell do we do now? What's the exit strategy? How do we extricate ourselves from this clusterfuck? (Notice the children of the neocons, the Brats of Privelege like Jenna and not-Jenna, are not in uniform.)

Things are royally fucked up, and the options range from bad to worse, there is no good. See what you did? The neocons of the United States and the United Kingdom are singularly responsible for this mess. They all have to be held accountable . We should consider war crimes against these people. If the evidence indicates, take them before the very tribunals they authorized. What is to stop the next president from invoking the very law Bush just signed and having Bush and Cheney and Perle and Wolfowitz and Rice and Rumsfeld taken into custody as enemies of the state and rendered to Guantanamo; right before reversing that very law?

The Times of London: Time to get out of Iraq

HARK — CAN YOU hear it? Borne on the wind, can you hear the sounds of construction — of hammers hammering and woodsaws sawing? And do you detect a note of panic? I do. The good ship Neocon is going down. She has struck the Iraqi rocks, the engine room is awash, and on the deck in anxious pursuit of something to float them away is a curious assembly.

Matthew Parris said that very well. Love those Brits when they set out to paint a word-picture.

They are building a lifeboat for their reputations. The task is urgent. It is no small thing to find oneself on the wrong side of an argument when the debate is about the biggest disaster in British foreign policy since Suez; no small thing to have handed Iran a final, undreamt-of victory in an Iran-Iraq war that we thought had ended in the 1980s; no small thing to have lost Britain her credit in half the world; no small thing — in the name of Atlanticism — to have shackled our own good name to a doomed US presidency and crazed foreign-policy adventure that the next political generation in America will remember only with an embarrassed shudder.

I swear to God - I wrote about Suez before I read this editorial. But I admit to feeling giddy at this moment - if I am on the same page with Matthew Parris, I'm likely to be downright insufferable for a bit.

It is no small thing to have embellished the philosophy, found the prose and made the case for the most almighty cock-up in politics that we are ever likely to witness. They meant for the best, these politicians, dreamers and writers. They didn’t think it would end like this. But it has: more killed than even Saddam could boast, and nothing to show for it but an exhausted British Army and the global energising of violent Islamism on a scale of which Osama bin Laden never dreamt.
Our British neocons have invested heavily in this ill-fated craft, and the wreck is total. How shall they be saved? Never fear. They’ve been working on the elements of a rescue plan. By Christmas all will be singing from the same sheet. All together, now, warrior-columnists and soon-to-be-former Cabinet ministers: one, two three . . .
“The principle was good but the Americans screwed up the execution.”
Oh diddums, guys. Damned awful luck. You had this fantastic plan for invading a foreign country and harnessing a grateful populace behind your ideas for rebuilding an Arab nation along better lines — and then along come the Americans and make a mess of it. Now why in Heaven’s name would they do a thing that? Vandals.

And then we - the United States - are alone in Iraq with 16 Dominicans and a Russian advisor.

As Parris so aptly analogized, the ship has hit the rocks and is going down. The Brits, who have a history in the region that they should have reminded their own Neocon chuckleheads about before they sailed into these dangerous waters, are more prone to take the long view. But they have a more informed populace who is more likeley to remind then that

Funny, because I don’t quite recall most of you saying it at the time — some of you wrote columns and some of you delivered speeches declaring that Iraq was making giant strides; most of you blamed the difficulties on “Saddam loyalists and foreign fighters”, and some of you actually visited and returned rejoicing at the progress — but let’s overlook that. Let’s for the sake of argument grant that you worried from the start that the US just didn’t have the hang of this nation-building business. Now, you declare, we know that’s the reason the whole strategy hit the rocks.
Crap. The strategy failed because of one big, bad idea at its very root. Your idea that we kick the door in. Everything has flowed from that.
We were not invited. We had no mandate. There were no “good” Iraqis to hand over to. We had nothing to latch on to, no legitimacy. It wasn’t a question of being tactful, respectful, munificent, or handing sweets to children. We were impostors, and that is all.

Dannat speaking up was no slip-up. The Brits are out by 01 March.