Iraq on verge of genocidal war, warns ex-US official (are you listening, Petraeus?)

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,,2105443,00.html

Iraq on verge of genocidal war, warns ex-US official

Patrick Wintour
Monday June 18, 2007
The Guardian

The man who led the initial American effort to reconstruct Iraq after the war believes the country is on the brink of a genocidal civil war and its government will fall apart unless the US changes course and allows a three-way federal structure. He has also urged talks with Iran and other regional players.

Jay Garner, the former US general appointed two months before the invasion to head reconstruction in Iraq, admitted that before the 2003 war coordination between the various US departments and military had been disjointed.

He also disclosed that the US state department official in charge of postwar planning, Thomas Warrick, was prevented from joining his team by Donald Rumsfeld, who was defence secretary. He said he was shocked by the Pentagon's decision to reduce troop levels and disband the Iraqi army.

"The problem from my standpoint within the United States was that there had been a lot of planning done by each element ... by the CIA, the state department, the treasury department, defence department," Mr Garner told the Future of Iraq Commission chaired by Lord Ashdown, Lady Jay and Lord King.

"But the problem with that planning is that it had been done in the vertical stovepipe of that agency and the horizontal connection of those plans did not occur".

The Guardian disclosed, in an interview on Saturday, that Andrew Bearpark, the British director of operations for the body that took over from Mr Garner, the Coalition Provisional Authority, discovered the plan to boost Iraq's postwar electricity production ran to one page. He said those who failed to plan for the postwar period were guilty of "criminal irresponsibility".

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Wants to use Iraq to prove we could have won Vietnam