Iraq Situation Said Tougher Than Expected

LONDON - The situation in Iraq (news - web sites) is tougher than Britain anticipated last year, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Tuesday.


"It's palpable that the difficulties which we have faced have been more extensive than it was reasonable to assume nine months ago," Straw told British Broadcasting Corp. radio.


He said many of the security problems in Iraq had arisen following the attacks on the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad. The first on Aug. 19 killed 22 people including top U.N. envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello.


But Straw insisted that the U.S.-led coalition would transfer sovereignty to an interim Iraqi administration on June 30. He added that it would be up to the Iraqis to decide if they wanted foreign troops to remain in the country after that date to help with security.

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http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=540&e=3&u=/ap/britain_iraq

(How come millions of anti-war protesters knew more than the British and American governments BEFORE they invaded? All this was predicted by average citizens!)

This Straw idiot I suppose was listening only to Wolfowitz and company.

These people are delusional.

I'm amazed that the British people have put up with these dunderheads for so long. Completely baffled.

ALL the signs were there. Hell the British were thrown out of fucking Iraq in 1920 in a popular uprising and lost thousands of British soldiers.

WTF is going on in Britain?

What's that old saying about "those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it"?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25266-2004May13.html

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) then hit Wolfowitz, who is seen as a major architect of the Bush administration's approach to Iraq, with a virtual indictment. "You come before this committee . . . having seriously undermined your credibility over a number of years now," she said. "When it comes to making estimates or predictions about what will occur in Iraq, and what will be the costs in lives and money, . . . you have made numerous predictions, time and time again, that have turned out to be untrue and were based on faulty assumptions."

She quoted to him from his previous testimony from the run-up to the war, in which he asserted that the Iraqi people would see the United States as their liberator, that Iraq could finance its own reconstruction and that the estimate of Gen. Eric Shinseki, then the Army chief of staff, that it would take several hundred thousand troops to occupy Iraq was "outlandish."

When you have a PNAC neocon cabal running foreign policy, what do you get? Worldwide Military Disasters or WMDs.

You know, written a couple of letters or waved a sign in the streets? I'm sure the government would have noticed and listened.

I see Straw's also floating the "trial balloon" of "we'll leave after June 30 if they ask." The devil, as usual, resides in the details. Right now Bremer's temporary authority is writing rules and regulations as fast as it can to guarantee the status quo after June 30, including forcing Iraq to accept foreign ownership of its resources and industries as a condition of "governing itself."

Does the word "infidel" mean anything to these people? I still cannot believe America chose these imbeciles to be our leaders.

"Bush is a very stupid man. The American people are not stupid, they are very clever. I can't understand how such clever people came to elect such a stupid president."
http://www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com/

that they were not greeted with flowers ??

aaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahaha

"The shock has backfired on them. They are shocked because of what they have seen. No one received them with roses. They were received with bombs, shoes and bullets. Now, the game has been exposed. Awe will backfire on them. This is the boa snake. We will extend it further and cut it the appropriate way."

"We're going to drag the drunken junkie nose of Bush through Iraq's desert, him and his follower dog Blair...There are 26 million Saddams in Iraq"

"They are achieving nothing; they are suffering from casualties. Those casualties are increasing, not decreasing."

"We are winning!"
http://www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com/

majority of the people in Britain and probably 40% of the people in the U.S, knew this and the U.S. and British governments didn't know it? And still no one in either government has the cojones to say they screwed up. (Powell has hinted at it but still wants to blame it on someone else, imo)

This scumbag should be hung along with Blair for high treason.

"All this was predicted by average citizens!"

Oh, it was predicted by the scum who foisted this war on us.
This war isn't being waged on Iraq; it was an assault on the civilised world at large, and the civilised workd should move to punish the real evil doers.

they were quite reasonable to assume, and they were warned about back then. They are simply more extensive than the idiots behind this war were willing to admit.

There was a fairly big "focus group" that predicted a good
approximation of what has happened.

out in suburban Tulsa,Oklahoma and I figured out it was going to be a mess two years ago. All one had to do was read a little history, pay attention to those who really knew what was going on, and read the Pitt/Ritter book.