Racing the Clock in Iraq (Newsweek) [View All]

[UpInArms]

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4121960/

excerpt:

As a result, Bremer may have the toughest job in the world right now. Consider: the fabled MacArthur, the "American Caesar," took seven years to remake Japan. John McCloy, the High Commissioner who reconstituted post-Hitler Germany, took three years, coming on top of four years of military rule. Bremer has just five months to go. And whereas Japan was already unified, Bremer is trying to build a new Iraq by abruptly reversing the divide-and-rule course that Saddam brutally pursued for 35 years. He must meld together fractious Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds in a backward economy with a jobless rate still at 30 to 40 percent (about half what it was after the war, by Bremer's latest estimate), and in a region of the world where bordering nations, like Iran and Syria, are constantly interfering. Henry Kissinger, who's made diplomatic history himself, says the task his onetime protege is engaged in (Bremer was his chief of staff and managed his firm, Kissinger Associates) "is unprecedented." Bremer's job is "much harder" than MacArthur's, says Kissinger. "I can't think of many situations in which there were so many moving parts. And so many conflicting pressures that had to be resolved in so little time... Secondly, in Japan there was no challenge to legitimacy of the occupation. It was basically accepted."

<snip>

None of this was expected when Bush launched his war, saying Americans would be welcomed as liberators. Perhaps the best measure of the failure so far of the administration's grand neocon vision is that while Americans are now spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on Iraq, they'll find no gratitude here. Few Iraqis can admit, even to their family or friends, that they are working for a U.S. company, much less the CPA. The reason: they would be shunned or killed. Despite Saddam's capture on Dec. 13, the insurgency persists. It is now inseparable from the occupation itself, fueled by deep resentment of Americans and their foreign and Iraqi collaborators. Just last Friday there were 35 attacks, nearly as many as occurred daily in the worst month before the capture. For Iraqis hungry for the vision Bush promised, after nearly 11 months of chaos, it's all too slow, too violent, too brutal at the hands of U.S. soldiers who can detain them arbitrarily, and often do. To correct that, Bremer is engaged in what he says is the fastest police-training program in history (85,000 new trainees in a year). But meanwhile the daily killings, humiliations and power outages have created a sense among Iraqis that the Americans have bungled things.

<snip>

Bremer thinks he can still make things stick together by the time he departs. His overriding goal is to leave behind so many new institutions by June 30 that the forces of integration overtake the chaos. He's trying to create facts on the ground that will engender a powerful demand for sovereignty, outflanking Sistani's power bid. Hence his intense push to hold town-hall meetings and local caucuses, even though officially his caucus idea is suspended pending the United Nations' finding on whether elections are feasible. Now Bremer must fight a rear-guard action as well: jittery suggestions back in Washington that America skip selection of a new transitional assembly altogether and simply hand off to the IGC. But that would almost certainly not be accepted as a legitimate government— the Bremer-appointed IGC is widely seen as a collection of U.S. stooges. Still, Bush is so intent on that date (coming as it does before the GOP convention) that Bremer cannot dismiss the idea of a handover to the Governing Council.

...more...

(emphasis mine)