Iraq, the 5 year plan?
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September 28, 2007
With the testimony of General Petreaus and Ambassador Crocker, there's certainly no shortage of Iraq progress assessments in the mix. But George Packer and Deborah Amos, both experienced Middle East reporters, think there are things that aren't being talked about in Washington.
Amos has been covering the Iraqi refugee crisis for NPR — according to the United Nation Commission on Refugees, more than 4.2 million Iraqis have left their homes. Of these, some 2.2 million Iraqis are displaced internally, while more than 2 million have fled to neighbouring states Amos says: "This community that's now in Damascus and Amman, and increasingly going to Lebanon, is the middle class. These are the technocrats, the kind of people that you need if you want to rebuild a country." George Packer contends that what is lacking is the long view of the role of the U.S. in Iraq: "We fought this war in three month increments....No one in the administration that I've talked to and no one in Congress that I've talked to seems to be thinking ahead to what we want in Iraq in five years, what we can possibly achieve in Iraq in five years."
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10-01-2007, 11:26 AM
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