{"id":778,"date":"2004-04-09T12:24:58","date_gmt":"2004-04-09T20:24:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2004\/04\/09\/there-is-no-history-of-ethnic-strife-in-iraq\/"},"modified":"2004-04-09T12:24:58","modified_gmt":"2004-04-09T20:24:58","slug":"there-is-no-history-of-ethnic-strife-in-iraq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=778","title":{"rendered":"There is no history of ethnic strife in Iraq"},"content":{"rendered":"

I generally avoid blogging about Iraq, both because it’s too depressing and because there are other bloggers who do it so much better than I could. But this quote about Paul Wolfowitz’s February 2003 testimony before congress is too stunning not <\/i>to reproduce.<\/p>\n

In his testimony, Mr. Wolfowitz ticked off several reasons why he believed a much smaller coalition peacekeeping force than General Shinseki envisioned would be sufficient to police and rebuild postwar Iraq. He said there was no history of ethnic strife in Iraq<\/i>, as there was in Bosnia or Kosovo. He said Iraqi civilians would welcome an American-led liberation force <\/i>that “stayed as long as necessary but left as soon as possible,” but would oppose a long-term occupation force. And he said that nations that oppose war with Iraq would likely sign up to help rebuild it. “I would expect that even countries like France will have a strong interest in assisting Iraq in reconstruction<\/i>,” Mr. Wolfowitz said. He added that many Iraqi expatriates would likely return home to help.<\/p>\n

….Enlisting countries to help to pay for this war and its aftermath would take more time, he said. “I expect we will get a lot of mitigation, but it will be easier after the fact than before the fact<\/i>,” Mr. Wolfowitz said. Mr. Wolfowitz spent much of the hearing knocking down published estimates of the costs of war and rebuilding, saying the upper range of $95 billion was too high…<\/i>.Moreover, he said such estimates, and speculation that postwar reconstruction costs could climb even higher, ignored the fact that Iraq is a wealthy country, with annual oil exports worth $15 billion to $20 billion. “To assume we’re going to pay for it all is just wrong,” he said.<\/div>\n

Oy, oy, oy, oy.<\/p>\n

Via Political Animal<\/a>..<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I generally avoid blogging about Iraq, both because it’s too depressing and because there are other bloggers who do it so much better than I could. But this quote about Paul Wolfowitz’s February 2003 testimony before congress is too stunning … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international-issues","category-iraq"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}