4 Quotes by Ken Pollack

If the Shiite population turns against the United States and you see a large-scale resistance by the Shiites against the United States, this reconstruction effort is doomed.

It sends them the message that if you try to help the Americans re-build the country, no good will come of it, only bad. ... Obviously, any would-be Iraqi police officer or other participant in the security forces has got to consider the possibility that he will be killed.

In both cases, the United States has come into it as an outside power, and increasingly is being seen by one group as the partisan of another.

These are numbers that the United States needs to concentrate on far more intensely.