Iraqi's Book Takes on U.S. Mismanagement

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In a rueful reflection on what might have been, an Iraqi government insider details in 500 pages the U.S. occupation's ``shocking'' mismanagement of his country - a performance so bad, he writes, that by 2007 Iraqis had ``turned their backs on their would-be liberators.''

``The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order,'' Ali A. Allawi concludes in ``The Occupation of Iraq,'' newly published by Yale University Press.

(snip)
First came the ``monumental ignorance'' of those in Washington pushing for war in 2002 without ``the faintest idea'' of Iraq's realities. ``More perceptive people knew instinctively that the invasion of Iraq would open up the great fissures in Iraqi society,'' he writes.

(snip)
Although Allawi, a cousin of Ayad Allawi, Iraq's prime minister in 2004, is a member of a secularist Shiite Muslim political grouping, his well-researched book betrays little partisanship.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-6541921,00.html