Reconstruction I
“We are passing through a phase marked by unprecedented chaos and corruption in government ranks.” — Iraqi planning minister Ali Khalib Baban, quoted in the June 20 Baghdad Azzaman daily.
Reconstruction II
“RAMADI, Iraq, July 4 — The Government Center in the middle of this devastated town resembles a fortress on the wild edge of some frontier: it is sandbagged, barricaded, full of men ready to shoot, surrounded by rubble and enemies eager to get inside... In three years here the Marine Corps and the [US] Army have tried nearly everything to bring this provincial capital of 400,000 under control. Nothing has worked. Now American commanders are trying something new. Instead of continuing to fight for the downtown ... they are going to get rid of it... They say they are planning to bulldoze about three blocks in the middle of the city ... and convert them into a Green Zone, a version of the fortified and largely stable area that houses the Iraqi and American leadership in Baghdad.” — New York Times, July 5.
Frustrated
“The senior officers in the Pentagon do not dispute the President’s contention that Iran intends to eventually build a [nuclear] bomb, but they are frustrated by the intelligence gaps. A former senior intelligence official told me that people in the Pentagon were asking, 'What’s the evidence? We’ve got a million tentacles out there, overt and covert, and these guys’ — the Iranians — 'have been working on this for eighteen years, and we have nothing? We’re coming up with jack shit’.” — From an article by US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in the July 10 New Yorker magazine.
From Green Left Weekly, July 19, 2006.
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