http://www.bookreporter.com/reviews2/0525949062.aspRepublicans and Conservatives really need to read this book. They wont of course because it would be unbearable to face the fact that they were hoodwinked by the GOP and especially the administration of George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Colin Powell, and the right wing media liars like hannity, Limbaugh, O'Reily, Coulter, Michael Savage etc.
Democrats should read it too as a reminder of how close this country came to losing many of our rights forever and to learn just how big a screwup invading Iraq really was, and how it was no accident but the result of total incompetance and indeed corruption within the Bush administration.
From the book:
"Army Secretary Thomas White summed it up:
We immediately found ourselves shorthanded in the aftermath. We watched people dismantle and run off with the country basically."Of course it's one thing to allow looters to plunder Iraq's cultural heritage along with computers bathroom fixtures and insulation from the Irrigation Ministry. It's quite another to allow looters to make off with hundreds of tons of high-grade explosives from sites that had been previously identified as probable WMD caches.
In 2003, Christmas came early for Iraqs' burgeoning bombmaker class. The weapons dump at
al Qaqaa, some 30 miles south of Baghdad, held 377 tons of extremely powerful explosives. Enough high explosives to make an IED for every Iraqi man, woman, and child with enough left over to detonate the 6 nuclear bombs that North Korea had developed while we were concentrating on Iraq.
Here's how the US troops who witnessed the looting described it to the LA Times.
"We were running from one side of the compound to the other side, trying to kick people out," said one senior noncomissioned officer who was at the site in April 2003.
"On our last day there, there were at least 100 vehicles waiting at the site for us to leave" so that they could come in and loot munitions.
"It was complete chaos, it was looting like LA during the Rodney King riots,"another officer said.
The soldiers said about a dozen US troops guarding the sprawling facility could not prevent the theft of the explosives because they were outnumbered by looters."
How many soldiers and innocent Iraqis' have been blown to pieces from IED's, and explosive vests of suicide bombers that can be traced to this theft one can only wonder. In fact, I doubt they have consumed even 5% of the amount they stole, so there's possibly 95% leftover.
A must read book! The Truth (with jokes) by Al Franken: click here to read the entire thread »