Apparently some have yet to be won over by our great progress in Iraq:
A former US national security adviser who served in the administration of the first president Bush, warned today that the war in Iraq threatens to grind on for years like the Vietnam conflict.
“It could become a Vietnam in a way that the Vietnam war never did,” Brent Scowcroft said in an interview published in Portuguese weekly newspaper Expresso.
“Our exit from that country did not have grave consequences, while if we wanted to get out of Iraq today, the consequences would be very deep.”
Scowcroft, who led a classified review of US intelligence in 2001 and heads the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board of the current President George W Bush, was an outspoken critic of the US-led invasion of Iraq, arguing it took the focus off the fight against the extremist al-Qaeda network.
He told the newspaper he believed the neoconservatives who strongly backed the invasion did not realise how difficult it would be to foster a democratic system in Iraq once the regime of Saddam Hussein was toppled.
“Their plans are fantastic but very difficult to apply because it is very difficult to implant deep political alterations in a society,” he said.
“This is the problem we are facing in Iraq and we do not have a magic wand to create a democratic society, or create a group of people who aspire to democracy.”