Condi Rice Colleague and Bremer advisor on how we lost the war.
Diamond recounts how Donald Rumsfeld kept virtually every career State Department official – people with actual experience in civil administration – from taking a significant role in the pre-war planning or overseeing the post-war reconstruction. When Barbara Bodine, a former Ambassador to Yemen, briefed Rumsfeld before the war began that it was urgent to make sure Iraqi civil servants got paid to keep government services running, Rumsfeld dismissed the idea. "When someone suggested that there would be riots in the streets if the civil servants didn't get paid, Rumsfeld replied that this could be used as leverage to get the Europeans in to pick up the burden, " (p. 31). Riots as leverage!???
As Diamond notes, the American military has never been able to fully control the lawlessness that erupted after the war, and American soldiers are paying the price for the Bush administration's failures.
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