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Ex-CIA analyst criticizes Iraq war

By Sam Kusic
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Declaring war against Iraq was a poor idea, a former CIA political analyst told a crowd of college students and local residents Monday evening.

Stephen Pelletiere addressed an audience at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, telling them that the United States likely will be stuck fighting a poorly conceived war that it! can't afford long term.

Pelletiere, who holds a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of "America's Oil Wars." He served as the CIA's senior policy analyst on Iraq throughout the Iran-Iraq war and, in 1988, became a senior research professor at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle. He headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States.

Pelletiere studied Arabic for a year in Cairo and is the author of four books on Iraq.

He said the Bush administration is corrupt in that it has put its self-aggrandizement ahead of the needs of the country. The administration also has refused to admit to its ineptitude, he said.

"Bush is tarred with both," he said.

He said there was no need to go to war with Iraq. But that the country is waging a war there owes much to the "security apparatus" created to fight the Cold War.

Once it ended, he said, the apparatus needed a new enemy to justify its existence.

"They wanted to keep the cash flowing to the military-industrial complex," he said.

Pelletiere said bureaucrats, not military leaders, are making the war decisions. As such, the war planners in the beginning decided to fight through air power. That was a mistake, he said.

"Popular guerrilla wars cannot be suppressed with air power."

The war is not about protecting national security or bringing democracy to the Iraqis, he said. It is about oil.

"The administration was lured into going to war by the prospect of appropriating Iraq's oil."

He said Bush can't be blamed solely. The press is at fault, too, as are Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

"These currents were moving before the Twin Towers ever happened," he said

The solution, he said, is political opposition and a stronger Democratic Party.

"We've got to get back the two-party system," he said.

Sam Kusic can be reached at [e-mail] or 724-836-6077.

http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/trib/westmoreland/s_296975.html