{"id":1814,"date":"2006-12-07T09:04:12","date_gmt":"2006-12-07T09:04:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/?p=1814"},"modified":"2006-12-07T09:04:12","modified_gmt":"2006-12-07T09:04:12","slug":"2006-12-7-the-iraq-study-group-report-html","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/?p=1814","title":{"rendered":"The Iraq Study Group Report"},"content":{"rendered":"<div data-src=\"v5\">Reading commentary on the release of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.usip.org\/isg\">Baker-Hamilton report on Iraq<\/a>, you get the impression that some people expected a report to end the civil war and are disappointed that it didn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>One interesting thing in the report is that apparently the US embassy in Baghdad has only <strong>six<\/strong> fluent Arabic speakers. Another is that the Iraq war is costing <strong>eight<\/strong> <strong>billion<\/strong> US dollars a month, with an eventual total cost of some <strong>two<\/strong> <strong>trillion<\/strong> dollars. At the risk of sounding completely insensitive to the plight of Iraqis under Saddam Hussein (I am not) I think I would rather have Saddam untoppled and that money would have been better spent on virtually any global problem such as global warming, food security, human, drugs, and arms traffic control, economic development in the Third World, AIDS, etc. Of course that might not have been as good for the bottom line of big business.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<div data-src=\"v5\">Reading commentary on the release of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.usip.org\/isg\">Baker-Hamilton report on Iraq<\/a>, you get the impression that some people expected a report to end the civil war and are disappointed that it didn&#8217;t.<br \/>\nOne interesting thing in the report is that apparently the US embassy in Baghdad has only <strong>six<\/strong> fluent Arabic speakers. Another is that the Iraq war is costing <strong>eight<\/strong> <strong>billion<\/strong> US dollars a month, with an eventual total cost of some <strong>two<\/strong> <strong>trillion<\/strong> dollars. At the risk of sounding completely insensitive to the plight of Iraqis under Saddam Hussein (I am not) I think I would rather have Saddam untoppled and that money would have been better spent on virtually any global problem such as global warming, food security, human, drugs, and arms traffic control, economic development in the Third World, AIDS, etc. Of course that might not have been as good for the bottom line of big business.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[26,92],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1814"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1814\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}