Why did the government fail to understand the needs of Iraq on the security front?
We all failed. I don’t blame the U.S. government on that. I think that was a more general failure. I have written about the looting that took place after 1991 or the looting in Kuwait. You know, I’m fully aware of incidents of looting in Iraqi history, written about by Iraqi sociologists. … But the scale of it this time was new, and I don’t blame anyone for not predicting it. We could talk about why that happened, what exactly happened with the collapse of the Iraqi state that was to create that. We can talk about the effects of 30 years of this regime that all of us can write about theoretically and try to study and understand from outside. But you understand only really by living persistently inside. I think very few people understood just how little investment had been made in the infrastructure of Iraq over the last 15 years. What the impact of that was– You know, they did a study of Saddam’s budget, 2002. Some $1.4 billion, $1.9 billion — I forget exactly — was devoted to Rep
