Criminality has a name

David Gardner, Financial Times, August 10:

Future historians of how Iraq was lost will, of course, alight on the memoirs and the memos of those who drove the policy, measuring declaration against execution, ambition against outcome. They will savour the solipsism of a Paul Bremer, the US viceroy whose disbandment of the Iraqi army left 400,000 men destitute and bitter, but armed, trained and prey to the insurgency then taking shape – but whose memoir paints him as a MacArthur of Mesopotamia.

They will be awed by the arrogance and fecklessness of a Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary and theorist of known unknowns, who summed up the descent into anarchy and looting in the hours after Baghdad fell (when, very possibly, Iraq was lost) – “Stuff happens”.

But their research will be greatly assisted by the diligence of the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of the US Congress, which keeps on unearthing the bottomless depths of incompetence behind the Bush administration’s misconceived adventure in Iraq.

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