Jon Stewart's guest tonight on the Daily Show was Larry Diamond of the Hoover Institute, who at the request of Condi went to Iraq to try to help with writing the new Constitution.
He has a new book out which calls the efforts "squandering" the victory.
On the show, his remarks were, to put it mildly, devastating.
I found a
URL which offers the substance of what is in his book.
A couple of quick remarks, and this is from memory because I was not blogging at the time.
He said that we had insufficient resources when we went in and we had insufficient resources afterwords.
He sent Condi a letter describing his concerns but did not hear back -- Stewart fired back that the email must be down.
He talked about shortly after he was over there one of his colleagues complaining that the Iraqi governing council was issuing orders and the Iraqis were following them -- this led to a bit of a discussion about how apparently we wanted democracy at least on the surface but not democracy in action.
He talked about how Sistani wanted direct elections for parliament, but we insisted on our caucus method.
If you get a chance to view it, believe me it is worthwhile. Remember, he is from HOOVER INSTITUTE< he went to Iraq apparently at the request of Rice, and she has not responded to his letter .. and he is very critical of what we have done since the war.