August 27, 2007 (LPAC)--U.S. Ambassador to the UN Zalmay Khalilzad, in an interview with Vienna's Die Presse, warned that the current crisis situations across the Middle East "have the same potential to engulf the world," as did Europe's crises in the past, which "became world wars."

While arguing that foreign troops must remain in Iraq for as long as 10-20 years, Khalilzad also said that this disaster was not unavoidable, but that "historians are discussing now whether we should have sent more troops to Iraq to preserve law and order, if it was right to dissolve the Iraqi army, if we should have built an Iraqi government quicker, if there should have been such a sweeping de-Baathification program."

New York Times journalist Roger Cohen reported in an op-ed today that Khalilzad directly accuses Paul Bremer for these horrendous blunders, and blames the Bremer appointment on a last-minute whim of President Bush. (This ignores the well-established fact that Cheney insisted on Bremer's appointment as pro-consul). The original plan, Khalilzad told Cohen, was for "Bremer to run things and me to convene the loya jirga" (a meeting of all factions to choose an Iraqi government from among themselves, as Khalilzad had overseen in Afghanistan). Both Bremer and Khalilzad were to be Presidential envoys. When Bremer was appointed to run the government, dropping Khalilzad's plan for an interim government of Iraqis, Secretary of State Powell called Khalilzad to ask, "What happened?" Khalilzad responded: "You're Secretary of State, and you're asking me what happened?"

Khalilzad added: "I feel strongly that the US ruling was wrong. We could have had an interim Iraqi government." Powell agreed.