"Mission Unaccomplished, Madness of King George, Potemkin Chicken Factories"

[KoKo]

(It's a good read...and the snips I could give don't do the preview of the book justice. But, for those interested here's a snip & link)

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Mission Unaccomplished
Why the Invasion of Iraq Was the Single Worst Foreign Policy Decision in American History
By Peter Van Buren

I was there. And “there” was nowhere. And nowhere was the place to be if you wanted to see the signs of end times for the American Empire up close. It was the place to be if you wanted to see the madness — and oh yes, it was madness — not filtered through a complacent and sleepy media that made Washington’s war policy seem, if not sensible, at least sane and serious enough. I stood at Ground Zero of what was intended to be the new centerpiece for a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East.

-snip-


The Madness of King George

It’s easy to forget just how normal the madness looked back then. By 2009, when I arrived in Iraq, we were already at the last-gasp moment when it came to salvaging something from what may yet be seen as the single worst foreign policy decision in American history. It was then that, as a State Department officer assigned to lead two provincial reconstruction teams in eastern Iraq, I first walked into the chicken processing plant in the middle of nowhere.

By then, the U.S. “reconstruction” plan for that country was drowning in rivers of money foolishly spent. As the centerpiece for those American efforts — at least after Plan A, that our invading troops would be greeted with flowers and sweets as liberators, crashed and burned — we had managed to reconstruct nothing of significance. First conceived as a Marshall Plan for the New American Century, six long years later it had devolved into farce.

In my act of the play, the U.S. spent some $2.2 million dollars to build a huge facility in the boondocks. Ignoring the stark reality that Iraqis had raised and sold chickens locally for some 2,000 years, the U.S. decided to finance the construction of a central processing facility, have the Iraqis running the plant purchase local chickens, pluck them and slice them up with complex machinery brought in from Chicago, package the breasts and wings in plastic wrap, and then truck it all to local grocery stores. Perhaps it was the desert heat, but this made sense at the time, and the plan was supported by the Army, the State Department, and the White House.

MORE RE the "IRAQ POTEMKIN CHICKEN FACTORY" at:

http://my.firedoglake.com/tomengelhardt/2013/03/07/peter-van-buren-one-day-even-the-drones-will-have-to-land/

[bemildred]

1. Awesome piece.

TPTB cannot admit error of this magnitude, they are mostly shallow egotistical people, and to admit the truth would make their self-importance and their lives a sham. These are the same people, the same political forces, that got us into Vietnam, and they have never admitted to themselves their own error there either.

But history will ridicule them all.

[hedda_foil]

2. +1,000,000,000!!! This is spectacular reading. Thanks, Koko.

[libodem]

3. .

[dixiegrrrrl]

4. "the al-Qaeda brand name, which did not exist in Iraq before our invasion"

this fact needs to be remembered forever.

Excellent article!

[dixiegrrrrl]

5. Author has a blog..funny stuff

www.wemeantwell.com

[KoKo]

7. Thanks...!

[Jefferson23]

6. Bookmarked and highly recommend...this is depressing info but the US requires consistent

reminding how screwed up this entire objective was from its inception and the aftermath we still
live with and especially those nations we wreck havoc/destruction upon.

* As one Iraqi told me, “It is like I am standing naked in a room with a big hat on my head. Everyone comes in and helps put flowers and ribbons on my hat, but no one seems to notice that I am naked.”