The west put 'amateurs' in important positions in occupied Iraq and risks doing the same in Afghanistan today, the Chilcot inquiry was told today.
Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Viggers, who was the senior British military representative in Iraq from May to September 2003, said he was not talking about soldiers and civilians, 'but it's the intellectual horsepower that drives these things [that] needs better coordination ...
'We are putting amateurs into really important positions and people are getting killed as a result of some of these decisions. It's a huge responsibility and I just don't sense we are living up to it.'
The speed of the military operation that led to the occupation of Iraq in 2003 took planners by surprise, Viggers told Sir John Chilcot's inquiry into the war, and reconstruction efforts were hampered by a growing insurgency, security issues, economic, governance and power supply problems.
'It was rather like going to the theatre and seeing one sort of play and realising you were watching a tragedy as the curtains came back.
'We suffered from a lack of any real understanding of the state of that country post-invasion.'
I mean, really, no one wanted to bring this up 6 years ago? And don't say they did, because the street protests were not Parliament inquiries.
By: Brant
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