10 April 2003

But if you take what you say, it was doomed from the start...

From the ABC's Four Corners program:

No. No, no. That's a bit unfair. I'd be amazed if they use the words ignorant ideologues. If someone like Paul Wolfowitz was running the post war state in Iraq and he had American public opinion behind him and he had a core of people who knew about Iraq in his team and they had a generation-long commitment to building democracy, then maybe the possibility that that democracy could slowly be have been built up, these were the the huge issues that one would be wrestling with. But Wolfowitz hasn't got the money; he hasn't got a generation; he hasn't probably got after this war, American public support; so what are we going to have? We're going to have at best something... where you know, a thousand people are brought into a room. They all cheer the next military leader and leave. If that brings stability and that military leader is less brutal, less prone to using weapons of mass destruction, less prone to invading other people's countries than Saddam Hussein, then the war wasn't necessarily a loss. But thousand's of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans will have probably died by then, and that's not going to give Iraq a better life, and Iraqi kids aren't going to get a better future for that, which is what they were promised when this invasion started.

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