Iraq war’s biggest fiasco

Re Five lessons from the failed war on terror, Insight Sept. 10 With his usual trenchant insight, Tony Burman has zeroed in on some of the major reasons for the sad legacy of measures undertaken post-9/11 by the Bush administration.

He might also have mentioned the incredible blunder committed by the occupying U.S. forces in May 2003 in disbanding some 385,000 members of the Iraqi armed services and the police force. Instead of being employed gainfully, for example, in reconstruction projects, these men were simply turned loose on to the streets, jobless and many still in possession of their weapons.

Fuelled by the anger that this demobilization policy generated against the U.S. administration in Iraq, it’s not difficult to imagine how many of these bitter, disaffected men were willingly recruited by insurgent entities.

This massive fiasco reportedly encompassed, in all, about half a million Iraqis and arguably did more than any other single act to fuel hatred of the United States and, by association, the West in post-war Iraq. Brian Veall, Port McNicoll, Ont. Rather than deconstruct Tony Burman’s simplistic and revisionist history article on 9/11 point by point, let me just state that his five lessons to be learned wouldn’t qualify in any journalistic realm as a realistic and fair analysis of the war on terrorism.

It’s quite clear from this brief and shallow rendering of the U.S. government of that day puts this article as a non-news item and somewhat throw away piece of journalism during a slow news cycle. Does Burman scratch the surface with this column? No more than the guy who gets his historical accurateness from CNN and Fox news. Daniel Kowbell, Toronto