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April 25, 2007
Ali Allawi's New Memoir On Iraq Shows Collapse Was Inevitable
Topics: Iraq...if what Allawi says is true, then Iraq was headed straight for implosion and failure, both as a state and a society, well before 2003. Not only this, but its Sunni ruling elite was flirting increasingly with a Salafist ideology. In such circumstances--as many Iraqi dissidents argued even at the time--the United States had to face the alarming fact that a ruined Iraq was in its future whether it intervened or not. - Christopher Hitchens.
Christopher Hitchens wrote at Slate on Monday that Ali Allawi's memoir The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace certainly deserves the praise and attention it has been getting:I think I could pass an examination in the failures of our post-2003 policy and even add a few observations from experience. But I have never been able to overcome the feeling that Iraq was our ward and responsibility one way or another, and that canceling or postponing an intervention would only have meant having to act later on, in conditions even more awful and dangerous than the ones with which we have become familiar. Whether Ali Allawi now agrees with this I could not say, but his excellent and lucid book makes it a case that is extremely difficult to dispute.For those who don't catch the connection, a cohort heavily comprised of the present Democratic leadership and its supporters, Allawi's statement that Iraq's Sunni ruling elite was flirting increasingly with a Salafist ideology well before the U.S. went into Iraq points directly to "the chief font of al Qaeda's ideology."
You can read Hitchens' review here, then go read read Allawi's book.
Posted by Abdul at April 25, 2007 10:01 AM
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