Quote of the day (on the Iraq aftermath)
On the US refusal to plan for the aftermath of Saddam Hussein's overthrow, Sir David Manning (Tony Blair's chief foreign policy advisor in 2002 and now the UK ambassador to Washington) said this:
They may agree that failure isn't an option, but this does not mean that they will avoid it.
Meanwhile, the mercenaries hired by the Pentagon serve their purpose well: to disguise the true number of casualties caused by this war. Here's what failure looks like:
Private security companies, funded by billions of dollars in U.S. military and State Department contracts, are fighting insurgents on a widening scale in Iraq, enduring daily attacks, returning fire and taking hundreds of casualties that have been underreported and sometimes concealed, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials and company representatives.
[...]
"It was like there was a major war being fought out there, but we were the only ones who knew about it," Wayne said.
(Victoria Wayne was deputy director of logistics for the US Army Corps of Engineers until 2006.)