Category Archives: Washington

Meanwhile, back in Iraq…

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While much deserved atten­tion is paid to bat­tle for the truth against the Bush administration’s many chang­ing ratio­nales for war, the bat­tle for Iraq is still ongo­ing. _Newsday_ has a chill­ing inter­view with a man known as Khaled, who claims to be a com­man­der of the _Saddam Fedayeen_, and says the resis­tance is orga­nized, grow­ing and ruth­less.
“We have many more peo­ple and we’re a lot bet­ter orga­nized than the Amer­i­cans real­ize,” said Khaled, 29, who gave an hour-long inter­view to _Newsday_ on Wednes­day on the con­di­tion that only his first name be pub­lished. “We have been prepar­ing for this kind of guer­rilla war for a long time, and we’re much more patient than the Amer­i­cans. We have nowhere else to go.“

Khaled described the work­ings of a loosely orga­nized net­work of for­mer Baath Party mem­bers, Iraqi sol­diers, intel­li­gence offi­cers and other die-hard Hus­sein sup­port­ers who have been respon­si­ble for an unknown num­ber of the attacks that have killed 29 U.S. sol­diers and injured dozens since May 1.
He said the net­work oper­ates in cells of five or six mem­bers that answer to a secret lead­er­ship struc­ture. It goes by var­i­ous names  —  the Feday­een, the Iraq Lib­er­a­tion Army, Muhammad’s Army  —  and Khaled said only a hand­ful of peo­ple know its full reach. He said its mem­bers draw inspi­ra­tion from Hus­sein and from the belief that the ousted Iraqi leader is alive and will regain power once U.S. troops are forced to leave.

What has the United States marched its troops into? A quag­mire? An abat­toir?
I respect­fully dis­agree with other sites that the U.S. should bring the troops home by Christ­mas. While I resent that the men and women I met while in the war were lied to and put in harm’s way for a myr­iad of shift­ing ratio­nales, the fact of the mat­ter is that Iraq is a mess. Pulling out the troops now would make it even worse, if you can believe that.
Iraq is a dan­ger­ous place, full of dan­ger­ous men. Saddam’s regime ter­ror­ized his peo­ple leav­ing resent­ments, fury and the urge for revenge. If the U.S. pulled out before the coun­try was sta­bi­lized, there would be a civil war that might spill over into Turkey, Iran and Saudi Ara­bia. The Kurds would be mas­sa­cred as Turkey and Iran move in to pro­tect their inter­ests. The Per­sian Gulf would be impass­able. Energy infra­struc­ture from Basra to Baku in Azer­bai­jan would be destroyed, slower or oth­er­wise impaired. The world’s econ­omy would grind to a halt. And the real dan­ger to the West, al Qa’ida, would be able to oper­ate much more freely.
That’s not to say there aren’t any alter­na­tives, but none of them are very good. Turn­ing Iraq over to a U.N. trust to be admin­is­tered and policed by the body is a pop­u­lar one. That’s a tough call, how­ever. Iraq would be the biggest project of this kind ever under­taken by the United Nations, and its track record is mixed. Any real­is­tic U.N.-sanctioned force needed to estab­lish secu­rity would have to include a siz­able por­tion of Amer­i­cans — if only for logis­ti­cal pur­poses — who would be even less wel­come in Bagh­dad a sec­ond time around. Avoid­ing addi­tional ill will would prob­a­bly require plac­ing Amer­i­can troops under an Islamic com­mand, pos­si­bly Turk­ish or Pak­istani. Can any­one really imag­ine any pres­i­dent, Repub­li­can or Demo­c­rat, doing that?
Many, many opposed this war — I did. I thought it was a mis­take of colos­sal mag­ni­tude — still do. U.S. troops face 10 to 25 attacks _a day,_ and, as Khaled implied, it will get likely worse. The choices avail­able are all bad. Sim­ply put, *the Amer­i­cans can’t stay, but nei­ther can they leave.* What they call “lib­er­a­tion,” _tahrir_ in Ara­bic, too many Iraqis are call­ing _ihtilal,_ — “occu­pa­tion,” with the over­tones of the Chris­t­ian Cru­sades, the Mon­gol sack­ing of Bagh­dad in the 13th cen­tury, the divvy­ing up of the region between Britain and France after World War I and the Israeli pres­ence in Lebanon and the occu­pied ter­ri­to­ries. As Salon​.com writer Nir Rosen says:

The most com­mon refrain one hears from Iraqis these days is: “They came as lib­er­a­tors and now they are occu­piers.” The sig­nif­i­cance of the lib­er­a­tion vs. occu­pa­tion debate can get lost in trans­la­tion here, but its immense polit­i­cal impli­ca­tions were evi­dent in a June 2 meet­ing, hosted by the Coali­tion Pro­vi­sional Author­ity, for nearly 300 tribal lead­ers of all reli­gions and eth­nic groups. Hume Horan, a polit­i­cal advi­sor to Bre­mer, also was present. Horan, a for­mer ambas­sador to Saudi Ara­bia and flu­ent Ara­bic speaker, addressed the audi­ence in Ara­bic about the coalition’s efforts and its need for Iraqi sup­port.
After Horan fin­ished speak­ing, Sheik Munther Abood from Amarra thanked Pres­i­dent Bush for remov­ing the Baath regime of Sad­dam Hus­sein and stated that he had seen the mass graves full of dead Shias in the south and was firmly opposed to Sad­dam. He then asked Horan if the coali­tion forces in Iraq were lib­er­a­tors or occu­piers. Horan responded that they were “some­where in between occu­pier and lib­er­a­tor.“
This was not well received by the audi­ence. Sheik Abood stated that if Amer­ica was a lib­er­a­tor, then the coali­tion forces were wel­come indef­i­nitely as guests, but that if they were occu­piers, then he and his descen­dants would “die resist­ing” them. This met with ener­getic applause from the audi­ence. Sev­eral other sheiks echoed the same sen­ti­ment. Then the meet­ing dete­ri­o­rated and a third of the audi­ence stood up and walked out, despite efforts by Horan and other orga­niz­ers to encour­age them to stay. At which point the meet­ing ended. It was not a pub­lic rela­tions success.

Is it any won­der peo­ple like Khaled find sup­port? “The guer­rilla must move amongst the peo­ple as a fish swims in the sea,” Mao once said. (He also said, “Weapons are an impor­tant fac­tor in war, but not the deci­sive fac­tor; it is peo­ple, not things, that are deci­sive.” Khaled and peo­ple like him are prov­ing Mao right.)
All Amer­i­cans should be aware of the ago­niz­ing posi­tion Team Bush has put them in. There are few good solu­tions to this that will a) ben­e­fit the Iraqi peo­ple and respect their dig­nity and sov­er­eignty, and b) keep the region sta­ble and secure while reduc­ing Amer­i­can casu­al­ties. The answers that do look viable — pump­ing mas­sive quan­ti­ties of aid and money aimed at rebuild­ing the country’s infra­struc­ture and deal­ing with Iraqis on their terms and not on the Americans’ — don’t seem to on the table in Wash­ing­ton and Bagh­dad. Per­haps it’s just not in this White House’s polit­i­cal DNA to deal with any­one except at gun­point. (“Polit­i­cal power grows out of the bar­rel of a gun.” — Mao, again.)
For­mer CENTCOM com­man­der Tommy Franks says the world is fac­ing a four-year pres­ence in Iraq. So, elect­ing a Demo­c­rat into the White House in 2004 won’t be a solu­tion. As I’ve argued above, the chaos and anar­chy that would result in a pre­ma­ture pull­out will force any pres­i­dent to main­tain a siz­able pres­ence in Iraq. (Amer­i­cans should still turn Bush and his cronies out on their col­lec­tive ass, though. The list of rea­sons to do so other than Iraq are ency­clo­pe­dic.)
The com­ments from Khaled, Franks, Horan and Sheik Abood remind me of the apoc­ryphal story told of the encounter between an Amer­i­can colonel and his North Viet­namese coun­ter­part at the Paris Peace Con­fer­ence. “You know,” the Amer­i­can said, “you never defeated us on the bat­tle­field.” His coun­ter­part responded: “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”

Sept. 11 report said to be “highly explosive”

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Despite the unfor­tu­nate choice of words by for­mer Rep. Tim Roe­mer, who called the upcom­ing Sept. 11 report due out in the next cou­ple of weeks as “highly explo­sive,” I won­der if the report will live up its billing.
12190008.jpg“It’s com­pelling and gal­va­niz­ing and will refo­cus the public’s atten­tion on Sept. 11,” pre­dicted Roe­mer, an Indi­ana Demo­c­rat. “Cer­tain mis­takes, errors and gaps in the sys­tem will be made clear.“
The report allegedly has at least two rev­e­la­tions, including:

  • More infor­ma­tion on ties between the Saudi royal fam­ily, gov­ern­ment offi­cials and ter­ror­ists. The FBI may have mis­han­dled an inves­ti­ga­tion into how two of the Sept. 11 hijack­ers received aid from Saudi groups and individuals.

  • A coher­ent nar­ra­tive of intel­li­gence warn­ings, some of them ignored or not shared with other agen­cies, before the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Cen­ter and the Pentagon.

The report also seems to say that the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion was warned in the sum­mer of 2001 that al Qa’ida was going to attempt to hijack planes and launch “a spec­tac­u­lar attack.“
This appears to con­tra­dict (again) what Con­doleeza Rice told the San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle on May 17, 2002.

Rice said that the pres­i­dent, as part of his daily intel­li­gence brief­ing, was informed Aug. 6 while on vaca­tion at his ranch that Islamic mil­i­tants asso­ci­ated with bin Laden might hijack Amer­i­can air­lin­ers. The men­tion of bin Laden and “hijack­ing in a tra­di­tional sense” was part of a 1 1/2-page ter­ror­ism report given to Bush dur­ing the brief­ing.
But Rice said the admin­is­tra­tion never con­sid­ered alert­ing the pub­lic to a pos­si­ble hijack­ing threat at home and had no idea that hijack­ers might con­sider using an air­plane as a mis­sile in a sui­cide attack. (empha­sis added.)
“The most impor­tant and most likely thing was that they would take over an air­liner, hold­ing pas­sen­gers and demand the release of one of their oper­a­tives,” Rice said.
“That ter­ror­ism and hijack­ing might be asso­ci­ated is not rocket sci­ence,” she added. “I don’t think that any­one could have pre­dicted that these peo­ple would take an air­plane and slam it into the World Trade Center.”

We’ll have to see what’s in the report, of course. I’m look­ing for­ward to it. But I’ll go out on a limb and pre­dict that if the report is as embar­rass­ing as Roe­mer and Sen. Bob Gra­ham, D-Fla., who is run­ning for Pres­i­dent in part armed with alle­ga­tions of neg­li­gence against the White House, say it is, the response from Team Bush will con­sist of a) denial that they had any warn­ings, and when con­fronted with evi­dence that they _did_ have warn­ings, b) blame it on Bill Clin­ton.
Just a hunch.

First Responders Unprepared, Underfunded for Next Terror Strike

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The United States is dan­ger­ously unpre­pared for another major ter­ror strike, with local police, fire and other emer­gency per­son­nel unable and gen­er­ally ill-trained for deal­ing with another Sept. 11-sized attack, accord­ing to a report pub­lished Sun­day by the Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions.
“Dras­ti­cally Under­funded, Dan­ger­ously Unpre­pared” says that:

  • On aver­age, fire depart­ments across the coun­try have only enough radios to equip half the fire­fight­ers on a shift, and breath­ing appa­ra­tuses for only one third. Only 10 per­cent of fire depart­ments in the United States have the per­son­nel and equip­ment to respond to a build­ing collapse.

  • Police depart­ments in cities across the coun­try do not have the pro­tec­tive gear to safely secure a site fol­low­ing an attack with weapons of mass destruc­tion (WMD).
  • Pub­lic health labs in most states still lack basic equip­ment and exper­tise to ade­quately respond to a chem­i­cal or bio­log­i­cal attack, and 75 per­cent of state lab­o­ra­to­ries report being over­whelmed by too many test­ing requests.
  • Most cities do not have the nec­es­sary equip­ment to deter­mine what kind of haz­ardous mate­ri­als emer­gency respon­ders may be facing.

If the nation does not take imme­di­ate steps to bet­ter iden­tify and address the urgent needs of emer­gency respon­ders, the next ter­ror­ist inci­dent could have an even more dev­as­tat­ing impact than the Sep­tem­ber 11 attacks.

12190008.jpgMore­over, the var­i­ous local first-response agen­cies around the coun­try will by under­funded by $98.4 bil­lion over the next five years if the cur­rent fund­ing lev­els are main­tained.
Cur­rently, the Home­land Secu­rity Depart­ment and other fed­eral agen­cies spend about $5.4 bil­lion a year on first respon­ders, accord­ing to the Wash­ing­ton Post. The study says they should be spend­ing about $25 bil­lion annu­ally to do the job.
The fed­eral gov­ern­ment will spend about $27 bil­lion on first respon­ders over the next five years, and the hard-to-forecast state and local agen­cies will spend between $26 bil­lion and $76 bil­lion, accord­ing to the report.
The bud­getary fig­ures were devel­oped with the Con­cord Coali­tion and the Cen­ter for Strate­gic and Bud­getary Assess­ments.
The Council’s report is a follow-up to the Council’s pre­vi­ous report, “Amer­ica — Still Unpre­pared, Still in Dan­ger” pub­lished in Octo­ber 2002 and researched by the Council-sponsored Inde­pen­dent Task Force on Home­land Secu­rity, co-chaired by for­mer Sens. War­ren B. Rud­man, R-N.H.�and Gary Hart, D-Colo. The cur­rent report was authored by the Inde­pen­dent Task Force on Emer­gency Respon­ders and was chaired by Rud­man.
“I believe in the next five years — can’t tell you when, where, what or how — there will be an attack,” Rud­man told Tim Rus­set Sun­day on NBC’s “Meet the Press.“
“And, God for­bid, it’s an attack with either chem­i­cal or bio­log­i­cal or worse, some sort of nuclear device. We are not pre­pared to deal with that.“
CFR pres­i­dent Leslie Gelb echoes that sen­ti­ment in his for­ward:

It is likely that a ter­ror­ist group some­where in the world is devel­op­ing plans to attack the United States and/or Amer­i­can inter­ests abroad using chem­i­cal, bio­log­i­cal, radi­o­log­i­cal, nuclear or cat­a­strophic con­ven­tional means. At the same time, diplo­mats, leg­is­la­tors, mil­i­tary and intel­li­gence offi­cers, police, fire and emer­gency med­ical per­son­nel, and oth­ers in the Unites States and across the globe are work­ing fever­ishly to pre­vent and pre­pare for such attacks. These two groups of peo­ple are ulti­mately in a race with one another. This is a race we can­not afford to lose.

Accord­ing to the New York Times, Gor­don John­droe, a spokesman for the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity, said Sun­day that the addi­tional $98 bil­lion rec­om­mended by the coun­cil report for first respon­ders is “grossly inflated.“
This report comes on the heels of bla­tant par­ti­san­ship. Last Tues­day, the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives passed the first of 13 appro­pri­a­tion bills that fund the fed­eral gov­ern­ment. This one dealt with the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity. House Democ­rats com­plained of the short-changed first respon­ders and said the bill fell “dan­ger­ously short” of what was needed. Rep. David R. Obey, D-Wisc., offered an amend­ment that would have added $1 bil­lion for police and fire­fight­ers, paid for by reduc­ing the amount of the 2004 tax cut for those earn­ing more than $1 mil­lion a year from $88,326 to $83,326. The Repub­li­cans, rul­ing the amend­ment out of order, defeated it in a party-line vote of 222 – 200.
“Do we trust Pres­i­dent Bush and his team to set homeland-security pol­icy, or do we think it should be set by the same mem­bers of Con­gress who voted against the estab­lish­ment of the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity in the first place?” asked DeLay. (Actu­ally, it was Sen­ate Democ­rats who first pro­posed the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity and pushed and pushed for months until a reluc­tant White House finally caved.)
Leav­ing aside the nox­ious fact that some­one mak­ing $1 mil­lion will get more than an $80,000 tax cut, what’s really out of order is that the DeLay Brigade refuses to ask its mil­lion­aire patrons to con­tribue $5,000 more a year each in an attempt to fund the peo­ple who pro­tect and serve those mil­lion­aires. (You know, even Obey’s pro­posed $83,326 tax­cut is way more than the aver­age yearly salary of a police offi­cer, fire­fighter or emer­gency med­ical worker. Just think how much the first respon­ders would get if the tax cuts were actu­ally real­is­tic and sane.)
So this lack of fund­ing is not a great sur­prise. The Bush 2004 bud­get cuts ben­e­fits to vet­er­ans and active duty sol­diers, ser­vices the poor and middle-class depend on and gives short shrift to just about every envi­ron­men­tal ini­tia­tive going. Ameri­corps is on its last legs, thanks to spend­ing cuts and the Medicare ini­tia­tive is a bait-and-switch to get the elderly to move into pri­vate HMOs. And while Bush says one thing — “I’ll make Amer­ica safer” — his actions are a com­bi­na­tion of ruinous for­eign pol­icy that desta­bi­lizes the world and a domes­tic national secu­rity agenda that attacks basic civil rights, ignores vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties such as ports, bor­der cross­ings and stabs stressed out, under­funded police and fire­fight­ers in the back. All this while his Repub­li­can allies in Con­gress wrap them­selves in the twin flags of hypocrisy and selec­tive amne­sia when­ever some­one tries to do what’s right — even if it’s only $5,000 worth of right­ness.
There is no excuse this time if (when?) another ter­ror strike catches the nation unaware. One can almost buy the White House’s fail­ure of imag­i­na­tion regard­ing Sept. 11 — if you’re feel­ing gen­er­ous, which I’m not. But if (when?) another attack kills large num­bers of Amer­i­cans, Bush, thanks to his asi­nine spend­ing pri­or­i­ties and gnat-like atten­tion span, will be an acces­sory to murder.

Iraqi intrigue

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Hm. Accord­ing to Ara​bic​News​.com, Amer­i­can pro­con­sul L. Paul Bre­mer told jour­nal­ists in Mosul that he had no inten­tion of delay­ing the for­ma­tion of an interim gov­ern­ment, as I com­mented on Sat­ur­day, and said he “does not know the source of these sto­ries.“
Hey, Paul, here’s a hint: It’s British Diplo­mat John Saw­ers, who’s _quoted_ in the story from the New York Times and The Asso­ci­ated Press.

“It’s quite clear that you can­not trans­fer all pow­ers onto some interim body, because it will not have the strength or the resources to carry those respon­si­bil­i­ties out,” The Asso­ci­ated Press quoted Mr. Saw­ers as say­ing. “There was agree­ment that we should aim to have a national con­fer­ence as soon as we rea­son­ably could do so.”

So what are we to con­clude from this? That Jayson Blair is report­ing from Iraq? Or that Bre­mer is engag­ing in a lit­tle “cheat and retreat” of his own? Is he dash­ing the hopes of Iraqi oppo­si­tion fig­ures on the one hand and then deny­ing it to jour­nal­ists a cou­ple of days later? Is the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion tak­ing yet another play from Ronald Rea­gan, who once famously quipped, “My right hand didn’t know what my far right hand is doing”?
Viv­ion Vin­son, over at the excel­lent Iraq Democ­racy Watch, men­tions a Reuters report that Bre­mer has started draw­ing a dis­tinc­tion between an interim “author­ity” and an interim “gov­ern­ment,” lead­ing to deep sus­pi­cion on the part of the until-now strongly pro-American Iraqi National Con­gress.

“An interim author­ity is a very vague con­cept. I am not sure that an Iraqi rep­re­sen­ta­tive would go to OPEC meet­ings (of oil export­ing coun­tries) under this setup,” Entifadh Qan­bar, a senior offi­cial in the Iraqi National Con­gress, told Reuters.
“We will con­tinue to tell him and push very hard. Any­thing of this sort will not work. The U.S. will come back and accept an interim gov­ern­ment,” Qan­bar said.
Qan­bar said the United States had repeat­edly agreed to form a sov­er­eign gov­ern­ment rather than a mere “authority”.

What’s going on here? Is this another exam­ple of the “pull it out of your ass at the last minute” plan­ning that has marked the Bush administration’s “admin­is­tra­tion” of post-Saddam Iraq so far? I have no doubt that Bre­mer and Saw­ers told the Iraqi oppo­si­tion group at a meet­ing that plans for an interim gov­ern­ment would be put off. And I still main­tain this is the least bad deci­sion to make. With all the groups in Iraq jock­ey­ing for power — Ahmad Khaf­faji, a polit­buro mem­ber of the Shi’ite Supreme Coun­cil for the Islamic Rev­o­lu­tion in Iraq (SCIRI), accused Wash­ing­ton of break­ing its promises to set up a sov­er­eign Iraqi gov­ern­ment and warned darkly of civil dis­obe­di­ence if the Amer­i­cans don’t “ful­fill their promises” — turning Iraq over to a gov­ern­ment before it’s ready would be a recipe for civil war. This, obvi­ously, would be the worst of all sit­u­a­tions and the United States would be in a quag­mire prac­ti­cally alone.
This puts the U.S. in a bit of a pickle. If it hands over the reigns of gov­ern­ment too quickly, it’s civil war (prob­a­bly.) If it holds on to them, it’s a colo­nial power in a region with long and painful mem­o­ries of colo­nial­ism. Run­ning Iraq like an oily fief­dom is not likely to engen­der coop­er­a­tion from reluc­tant allies. And make no mis­take: They _are_ reluc­tant. The sum total of troops con­tributed by allies other than Britain and Aus­tralia can be mea­sured in the hun­dreds — their num­bers look like bowl­ing scores at U.N. league night.
Fur­ther com­pli­cat­ing mat­ters are, of course, the Kurds, par­tic­u­larly Jalal Barzani’s Talabani’s Patri­otic Union of Kur­dis­tan. The PUK is already nego­ti­at­ing deals with Turk­ish (!) oil com­pa­nies Pet Oil and Gen­eral Energy to develop the oil fields around Taq­taq near Kirkuk. (Iraq War Reader has a good take on this.) As Micah Sifry muses:

All this may fore­shadow a col­li­sion between the United States and the Kurds of north­ern Iraq over who will con­trol the country’s rich­est oil fields. Hope­fully, some of the jour­nal­ists who have dis­tin­guished them­selves on the Kur­dish beat, like Charles Glass, Patrick Cock­burn and Tim Judah (whose arti­cle on the Kurds graces our book), will shed more light on this soon.

With the delay of an interim gov­ern­ment, a pos­si­ble dis­pute with the Kurds — and Turkey? — in the future, the United States’ work in Iraq is cut out for it.
*CORRECTION May 29, 2003*
I misiden­ti­fied Jalal Tal­a­bani in the pre­ced­ing para­graph. It has since been corrected.

U.S., Britain put off Iraqi self-rule “indefinitely”

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In a move seem­ingly designed to infu­ri­ate Euro­peans and oth­ers sus­pi­cious of the motives of the United States in Iraq, the U.S. and Britain have told the Iraqi oppo­si­tions that plans to put in place an interim gov­ern­ment led by the oppo­si­tion groups have been put on hold “indef­i­nitely.“
As _The New York Times_ reports, Amer­i­can pro­con­sul L. Paul Bre­mer and British diplo­mat John Saw­ers told Iraqi polit­i­cal fig­ures “that the allies pre­ferred to revert to the con­cept of cre­at­ing an ‘interim authority’ — not a pro­vi­sional gov­ern­ment — so that Iraqis could assist them by cre­at­ing a con­sti­tu­tion for Iraq, revamp­ing the edu­ca­tional sys­tem and devis­ing a plan for future demo­c­ra­tic elec­tions.“
Believe it or not, this is prob­a­bly the best idea the Coali­tion has had since it decided to turn Iraq into the 51st state. Iraqis don’t want democ­racy right now. Well, they do, actu­ally, but they want secu­rity a whole lot more. And they want eco­nomic devel­op­ment. Hemin Sul­tan, one of my trans­la­tors in Arbil, told me that given a choice between democ­racy and jobs, the Iraqi peo­ple would take jobs. And he’s a Kurd in the rel­a­tively pros­per­ous part of the coun­try! There’s no wide­spread loot­ing in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan, nor are there rov­ing mili­tias claim­ing turf and threat­en­ing to turn that part of the coun­try into a 21st cen­tury Lebanon.
This also sends the reas­sur­ing sig­nal to the region that the United States is in this for a longer haul than some imag­ined. It’s exactly the oppo­site what hap­pened in Afghanistan, in which Amer­ica was so anx­ious to hand over power to the loya jirga and Afghanistan’s “gov­ern­ment” that poor Harmid Karzai has been reduced to being the Mayor of some parts of Kabul instead of the pres­i­dent of his coun­try.
This is a cru­cial sig­nal to send, for if there’s one thing Iraq’s neigh­bors want to see _less_ than an extended U.S. pres­ence in Iraq is a too hasty retreat that leaves the coun­try shat­tered and refugees pour­ing into Syria, Jor­dan, Iran, Saudi Ara­bia, Kuwait and Turkey. It will also send a mes­sage to the Kurds, so they don’t get the idea they can lever­age their newly ascen­dent posi­tion in Iraq to wring _de facto_ inde­pen­dence from a weak interim gov­ern­ment.
The story reports that Iraqi oppo­si­tion fig­ures (it doesn’t men­tion names) are “dis­ap­pointed” over the United States’ rever­sal.

Oppo­si­tion lead­ers were “very respect­ful” to Mr. Bre­mer and Mr. Saw­ers, a par­tic­i­pant said, “but I think every­one was also pretty force­ful about the need to have full sov­er­eignty for the Iraqis.” A ques­tion they kept pos­ing, he added, was, “Do you want to run this place, or should we?” …
Today’s deci­sion was a dis­ap­point­ment for the for­mer oppo­si­tion forces and their sup­port­ers in the Pen­ta­gon and the Con­gress, where offi­cials had been press­ing for an early turnover of sov­er­eign power to a gov­ern­ment formed by the oppo­si­tion groups.

Also of note is that this deci­sion is a vic­tory for Colin Powell’s State Depart­ment, which has been fight­ing a not-very-private war of its own with the Pen­ta­gon and Defense Sec­re­tary Rums­feld. State has _never_ trusted INC head Ahmed Cha­l­abi, who is wanted in Jor­dan for fraud in con­nec­tion to the col­lapse of Petra Bank. State has never liked the idea of turn­ing Iraq quickly over to the frac­tious oppo­si­tion, know­ing full well it and not the Pen­ta­gon ulti­mately would be the depart­ment that would have to clean up what­ever messes Cha­l­abi and his cronies would leave.
This is sec­ond such vic­tory by the State Depart­ment recently in this internecine war in the Bush admin­is­tra­tion. The first was the appoint­ment of Bre­mer, who, while report­ing to Rums­feld, is a State Depart­ment man, hav­ing spent 23 years in the diplo­matic corps before retir­ing as a diplomat-at-large for counter-terrorism in 1989.
(I hinted at some­thing like this back in Feb­ru­ary, and while I was out­raged then, I have to reluc­tantly admit that this is prob­a­bly the best solu­tion at the moment. Secu­rity must come first. Only by build­ing the foun­da­tions of a civil soci­ety can democ­racy have a hope of with­stand­ing the buf­fets of the region’s pol­i­tics, and that foun­da­tion can’t be laid in a coun­try dom­i­nated by mili­tias, rap­ing, pil­lag­ing and the prob­a­ble plun­der of the nation’s trea­sury by a cabal of cor­rupt exiles lead­ing an impo­tent interim gov­ern­ment.)
It will be inter­est­ing to see what the reac­tion will be from the neo­cons and other hawks at the Pen­ta­gon — includ­ing vice pres­i­dent Dick Cheney — who sup­ported Cha­l­abi and the Iraqi oppo­si­tion through­out the 1990s. It will be even more inter­est­ing if Bre­mer can keep the United States’ eyes on the ball and still in the game.
*Adden­dum*
I’m sure sev­eral read­ers have already pointed this out in the com­ments — I haven’t read them yet; I will! — but the obvi­ous and bet­ter solu­tion would be to turn Iraq over to the United Nations to be gov­erned as a trust, sort of like Kosovo. This would have the added ben­e­fit of encour­ag­ing more coun­tries to send peace­keep­ing troops, some­thing few are doing now. This, how­ever, would require the Bush admin­is­tra­tion to do the Right Thing, which it has proven remark­ably adept at avoid­ing. And since wait­ing on the White House to come around to that point of view will lead to a lot of Iraqis being killed as the coun­try falls into chaos, what is the bet­ter choice? I’m not advo­cat­ing Bremer’s “Shoot the Loot­ers on Sight” pol­icy, but secu­rity, order and basic ser­vices must be estab­lished first and fore­most before a crony-filled, pup­pet gov­ern­ment is established.