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The New Downing Street Memos Hit the US

It looks like this edition of theis garnering more attention more quickly than I had anticipated in myon them.
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It looks like this edition of the Downing Street Memos is garnering more attention more quickly than I had anticipated in my last post on them. The UK media are abuzz with revelations of the post-invasion memos from UK envoy John Sawers in the book Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, by Michael R. Gordon, chief military correspondent of The New York Times, and retired Marine Corps lieutenant general Bernard E. Trainor. The San Francisco Chronicle's online World Views has stepped up to the Americans' plate with some choice bits from the still-mostly-international coverage.

Major General Albert Whitley, Britain's most senior officer on the ground with the American forces during the war's early phase, also communicated with Blair's government during the summer of 2003. Corroborating Sawers' criticisms, Whitley wrote: "We may have been seduced into something we might be inclined to regret. Is strategic failure a possibility? The answer has to be 'yes.'"

BBC Security Correspondent Gordon Corera told Radio 4's Today that the memos from May and June 2003 paint "a jarringly and devastatingly frank picture of just how bad things were going early on."

Mr Gordon, who was an "embedded" correspondent with the US military, said at the time of the memo journalists were writing about "many of these problems" such as looting, an absence of electricity and the absence of law and order as well as the coalition not being well prepared to cope with these problems. ... These concerns were often dismissed as "the carping of journalists" by military spokesmen, but internally many diplomats had "as sobering a view as the journalists had."

The UPI's UK correspondent adds to the pile-on:

Sawyers identified a particular U.S. army unit, the Third Infantry Division, as "a big part of the problem" in Baghdad. They were unwilling to leave their heavily armored vehicles or to learn new techniques, he said, reporting an incident witnessed by British Paratroopers in which a U.S. tank responded to "harmless" rifle fire into the air from a residential apartment block by unleashing three tank rounds into the building. Every civilian who approached a U.S. checkpoint was treated as a potential suicide bomber, he continued, concluding: "Frankly, the Third Infantry Division need to go home."

And the AP has picked up the story, including a worrisome anecdote foreshadowing the coming insurgency.

Sawers said stepped-up reconstruction efforts regarding Baghdad's failing sewage, garbage, telephone, television, electricity and drinking water systems were needed to win public support. "We need visibly successful projects, however small: schools and hospitals reopening, new bakeries, food distribution points," he said.

"I was given two fliers yesterday by an Iraqi, one calling for the assassination of all Baathists, and other for the killing of all U.S. forces."

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