Monday, October 22, 2007

Don't hold your breath Juan

Yet another former mouthpiece to the clusterfuck comes clean...years too late:

Feisal Istrabadi, former deputy ambassador of the Shiite government of Iraq to the United Nations, has resigned because of the corruption and inefficiency of the Iraqi government...and all during our righteous all victorious surge!

Why the nerve!



A principal architect of Iraq’s interim constitution, who resigned in August as one of the country’s top diplomats, has laid out a devastating critique of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the U.S. occupation, telling NBC News that, functionally, “there is no Iraqi government.”...

Istrabadi made it clear in an exclusive interview with NBC News that he was dismayed by al-Maliki’s government and the U.S. occupation, saying the government was stocked with incompetent administrators who had helped bring about “chaos and instability.”

The Iraqi government is an illusion, said Istrabadi, who is now a visiting professor at the Indiana University Law School. “You’ve got patently incompetent men appointed to important positions.”...

Istrabadi traced what he called the country’s “chaos and instability” in part to the U.S. insistence on holding elections in 2005, before Iraq had developed robust democratic institutions to buffer the influence of religious leaders...

Istrabadi acknowledged that he harbored those doubts at the time but was powerless to speak out because he represented the government. “I publicly defended them because that was the government’s policy,” he said.

Free of that burden now, Istrabadi was eager to speak out.


Juan Cole notes that this is yet another guy who admits he lied about how good things were going in Clusterfuck Utopia when it really mattered:

I debated Istrabadi more than once, as at the Lehrer Newshour, and also on radio shows such as Warren Olney's To the Point and have to wonder whether, despite our surface disagreements (with me playing the critic and pessimist), he actually agreed privately with much of what I was saying. Another issue is that far Rightwing and mostly very dishonest blogs such as Powerline used the testimony of Iraqis such as Istrabadi to bring sharply into question my own analyses. They used to charge that Cole was way off base since our generals and the Iraqi officials agreed with Bush about the 'improving' situation in Iraq. And all these brain dead Rightists are now crowing about the reduced casualty counts in Iraq, as though they weren't artificially achieved, as though they could possibly be sustained, and as though they meant anything in the absence of genuine political progress. Now that Sanchez and Istrabadi are revealing that they actually privately agreed with critics such as myself even at that time and all along, will the Rightwing blogs now apologize to those they smeared?


Yeah, right.

Besides, this time ... we're winning all over again.

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