Retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who led U.S. forces in Iraq for a year after the 2003 invasion, accused the Bush administration Friday of going to war with a “catastrophically flawed” plan and said the U.S. is “living a nightmare with no end in sight.”
Sanchez also bluntly criticized the troop surge in Iraq, calling it “a desperate attempt by the administration that has not accepted the political and economic realities of this war.”
“The best we can do with this flawed approach is stave off defeat,” Sanchez said in a speech to the Military Reporters and Editors’ annual conference in Arlington, Va. “Without bipartisan cooperation, we are destined to fail. There is nothing going on in Washington that would give us hope.”
Sanchez may be best remembered for being the top general in Iraq during the period when the abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison occurred and was later revealed. He retired after defense officials, fearing that a public confirmation hearing would go badly in light of the abuse allegations, decided not to give him a fourth star.
