Amanpour: Iraq war a “disaster”
[media pundits are likening this to the moment when Walter Cronkite turned against the Vietnam War, which helped turn public opinion against it - Bob & Doug are the ABC News anchor & technician wounded by a bomb the other day]
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0601/30/lkl.01.html
The war in Iraq has basically turned out to be a disaster and journalists have paid for it, paid for the privilege of witnessing and reporting that and so have many, many other people who have been there.
And I think that’s terribly, terribly difficult for us and unfortunately for some reason, which I can’t fathom, the kind of awful thing that’s going on there now on a daily basis has almost become humdrum. So, when something happens to people that we identify, like Bob and like Doug, we wake up again and realize that, no, this is not acceptable what’s going on there and it’s a terrible situation.
[…]
I mean, by an indicator Iraq is a black hole.
Yes, they have had elections. What kind of a government are they going to come up with. Will it be a national unity government? Or will it be the one that sows the seeds of civil war?
Yes, the U.S. has promise reconstruction, but the United States inspector general for reconstruction is about to come out with a report that is saying that it is just not going apace and that it is difficult to see, according to this report, how they are ever going to get what they promised done.
Which means, according to a new poll that is coming out today, that most of the Iraqi people are now losing hope that the promised reconstruction is going to happen and that the quality of their lives is going to increase. This is a big drama because hope is the only thing they have in the middle of this spiralling security disaster. And by any indication whether you take the number of journalists killed or wounded, whether you take the number of American soldiers killed or wounded, whether you take the number of Iraqi soldiers killed and wounded, contractors, people working there, it just gets worse and worse.