Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

Think at your own risk.
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Friday, March 10, 2006
A Rumsfeldian pickle
The U.S. is going to close the twice-infamous (once under Saddam, once under us) Abu Ghraib prison within months ... unless it isn't ...

Our ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalizad, is feeling pessimistic ... until he's feeling optimistic ...

Iraq is not in a state of civil war, unless it's in the midst of a raging one. And if the civil war that's not happening should suddenly be happening, the Iraqis would be the ones to deal with it. That would be the same Iraqis who aren't ready to deal with it.

Blast from past headline. Can you guess when this Knight-Ridder headline ran?
CIA Officers Warn of Iraq Civil War, Contradicting Bush's Optimism

The answer: January, 2004... the details:
WASHINGTON - CIA officers in Iraq are warning that the country may be on a path to civil war, current and former U.S. officials said Wednesday, starkly contradicting the upbeat assessment that President Bush gave in his State of the Union address.

The CIA officers' bleak assessment was delivered verbally to Washington this week, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the classified information involved.

The warning echoed growing fears that Iraq's Shiite majority, which has until now grudgingly accepted the U.S. occupation, could turn to violence if its demands for direct elections are spurned.

Tens of thousands of Shiite Muslims protest in the streets Baghdad, Iraq. The protesters are demanding a fair election process for Iraq. (Photo/ Tom Pennington)

Meanwhile, Iraq's Kurdish minority is pressing its demand for autonomy and shares of oil revenue.

"Both the Shiites and the Kurds think that now's their time," said one intelligence officer. "They think that if they don't get what they want now, they'll probably never get it. Both of them feel they've been betrayed by the United States before."

These dire scenarios were discussed at meetings this week by Bush, his top national security aides and the chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, said a senior administration official, who requested anonymity.

Another senior official said the concerns over a possible civil war weren't confined to the CIA but are "broadly held within the government," including by regional experts at the State Department and National Security Council.
And yet, despite having known what's coming for so long, not a thing has changed -- not the policy and not even the spin.

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posted by JReid @ 12:46 AM  


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