Bush legacy hinges on success in Iraq – Powell
Saul Hudson | Washington | July 2004
Reuters – President George W. Bush’s legacy hangs on overcoming the insurgency in Iraq and creating a democracy there, his top foreign policy adviser said on Friday.”Iraq is in a better place, the region is in a better place, the world is in a better place, because Saddam Hussein and that regime are gone and they’re not coming back,” Powell said.
excuse me while I gag
Bush legacy hinges on success in Iraq – Powell
16 Jul 2004 22:54:34 GMT
By Saul Hudson
WASHINGTON, July 16 (Reuters) – President George W. Bush’s legacy hangs on overcoming the insurgency in Iraq and creating a democracy there, his top foreign policy adviser said on Friday.
Bush, who is campaigning for reelection as a resolute war president, has fallen in the polls largely due to rising casualties and mounting evidence that Iraq was not a military threat before the first preemptive U.S. war.
“I think the president’s reputation certainly rides on this, as does mine, as do all of my colleagues here in government,” Secretary of State Colin Powell said. “Iraq is top dead center in terms of our legacy.”
Despite a litany of mistakes ranging from misjudging Iraq’s weapons programs to underestimating the strength of the postwar insurgency, the war has made the world a better place, Powell told the Charlie Rose television show.
The top U.S. diplomat, whose own popularity has sunk since he gave a keynote report to the United Nations on Iraq’s threat that was riddled with errors, acknowledged building a democracy in Iraq and stopping insurgent attacks would be tough.
“But does that mean we should say, ‘Well, Geez, it’s going to be too hard, let’s quit’? No, we don’t quit. We’ll stick with it. And the president is prepared to put his legacy on it, as am I,” Powell said.
The United States transferred sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government last month in a move welcomed around the world but it still has about 140,000 troops in the country and the violence has not abated.
Bush’s rival for the presidency, Sen. John Kerry, has criticized the incumbent for misrepresenting Iraq’s threat and mismanaging the postwar occupation.
Bush, the son of a one-term president who also went to war with Iraq, entered the White House with little foreign policy experience. But the former Texas governor established the so-called Bush doctrine of preemptive strikes and, after the Sept. 11 attacks, has launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“Iraq is in a better place, the region is in a better place, the world is in a better place, because Saddam Hussein and that regime are gone and they’re not coming back,” Powell said.
“Now what we are doing is consolidating the win,” he added.
‘Here you go. Here’s Iraq. Take it’
`We threw’ power at them: U.S. official
But much work got lost in transition
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=A
rticle&cid=1090017306434&call_pageid=968332188854
MITCHPOTTER
BAGHDAD–Leaning in close, the mid-level American administrator speaks more in a hiss than a whisper. His tone is confessional, drenched in frustration.
“We didn’t hand over power to the Iraqis. We threw it at them,” he confides, casting a guilty glance toward the many eyes filling the chandelier-lit room. Nobody else heard him. Good. This kind of talk could cost him his job.
“There was no orderly transition. Nothing gradual. Just, `Here you go. Here’s Iraq. Take it’.”
“None of us had any idea sovereignty was going to switch two days early,” he continues, speaking on the promise of anonymity. “So we didn’t even get the last contracts finished. It was chaos. More than a billion dollars in plans never went through. Huge appropriations were just left on the table, undone.”
It is dinner hour at the Great Hall of Saddam Hussein’s presidential palace, deep within Baghdad’s hermetically sealed Green Zone. Barely two weeks earlier, America’s presence here was downsized, on paper, from occupational power to invited guest, by decree of the United Nations and the interim Iraqi regime taking its place.
On the surface, little appears to have changed since that surprise ceremony of June 28, a low-key series of handshakes marking the jumped-up transfer of sovereignty. Suicide bombs and assassinations continue as before. The same 160,000 coalition troops remain spread across Iraq, as before.
Even here, in the U.S.-led coalition’s most sumptuous improvised dining hall, the same several hundred faces — diplomats, Pentagon administrators, military — mingle and munch through another contract-catered meal. As before.
But the truth of the matter is Baghdad is no longer theirs. Led by Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, the emerging Iraqi regime has been busy turning the paper transfer into something quite substantial. Ministry by ministry, they are taking back the country in a concerted effort to move forward the Iraqi way.
Whether that way, the Iraqi way, leads anywhere near the promise of freedom and democracy upon which last year’s war was fought now stands as the paramount question.
If it appears the U.S.-led coalition is easing up on the ambitious, if naïve, theoretical underpinnings of Operation Iraqi Freedom in order to find an exit strategy, the long-term results remain unclear.
“As a new government, we must gain strength by showing strength,” is how Adnan Hadi al-Assadi, Iraq’s interim deputy interior minister, explains the regime’s race to absorb all available power.
“In the months leading up to the handover, there were a lot of frustrations. We stood by without much say, objecting as bad decisions were made,” Assadi said in an interview. “At one point, (then U.S. envoy Paul) Bremer committed more than a billion Iraqi dollars to Jordan in a project to train Iraqi troops. Jordan! A country whose forces only fought one war in their history (1967′s Six Day War). And they fought it badly. They are supposed to show Iraqis how to fight?
“Now, we are beginning to make our own decisions. Now that we have some authority, we want our ministries to handle everything.”
The soft-spoken fear among those letting go is that the new Baghdad may well emerge as every bit the omnipotent, power-wielding monolith it was before the war. However clumsy the effort, the U.S.-led coalition clearly had hoped all these months of idea-farming might gently nudge Iraq toward an almost Canadian model of decentralized democracy.
But the new government’s first instinct, clearly, has been to revert to the tried-and-true formula of the larger Arab world — aggressively corralling power toward a strong (and strong-armed) central government, with the powers of Baghdad second to none.
(Allawi himself executed as many as six suspected insurgents just days before the handover, the Sydney Morning Herald reports, citing two alleged witnesses.)
One coalition source recalls a deputy minister appearing at his desk in the Green Zone the morning after the handover.
“Our team spent six months building an infrastructure in the regions to implement our program. But he just stood there and said: `We want everything back in the ministry. In Baghdad. Now.’
“I realized I had no choice but to say, `Okay.’ Everything we worked toward was over in one word.”
The centrepiece of the emerging regime’s muscle-flexing was the July 7 announcement of an Order for Safeguarding National Security, in which Allawi and his closest deputies claimed the right to impose a sweeping range of emergency powers.
The right to random searches, seizures, closures, eavesdropping, curfews — all tools of the modern police state — are now in the hands of the small and unelected Baghdad leadership; and in the fine print, the establishment of a half-dozen new security agencies, each with a name, acronym and marching orders reminiscent of the decidedly undemocratic Mideast norm.
With near-unanimity, Iraqis welcomed the crackdown. Whatever doubts they may have about who really is in charge, the sight of Iraqi leaders standing up and announcing Iraqi solutions to more than 15 chaotic months of lawless behaviour won instant favour on the streets of Baghdad.
The response spoke volumes about how dramatically downsized the expectations of Iraqis have become. In April, 2003, the nation, then still numb from a generation of U.N. sanctions interspersed with three wars, was giddy with the promise that life was about to improve. If America has the technology of pinpoint bombing, surely it also has the technology to bring instant affluence, the thinking seemed to go.
But that better life remains a distant illusion. Iraqis today seem grimly resigned to buy into anyone with the leadership to restore law and order. Never mind freedom and democracy, whatever that is.
If it takes the re-entry of some former Baathist apparatchiks, the reappointment of some Mukhabarat security agents and the eventual revival of Saddam’s former army commanders to bring it about, don’t expect Iraqis to object. A state of order, the hallmark of all that was before the first bomb landed last year, is what they now crave most.
Just how far the new government might stray from U.S.-led objectives for postwar Iraq will be measured in the coming months by the degree of acrimony between the two.
Iraqi government insiders are also wary of internal discord over the thorny issue of who among the former Baathists and army officials should be considered for official jobs. Many hold neighbouring Arab regimes in utter contempt for allegedly harbouring senior exiled former Baathists, who, in turn, are helping to finance the insurgency.
“When it comes to the former regime, the biggest question nobody is asking is why so many of them got away?” one highly placed source with the Iraqi National Congress told the Star in an interview, on condition he not be named. “In some cases, the Americans allowed private jets to be flown into Baghdad right after the war so that senior people with the regime and their families could fly to safety.”
An Iraqi government said only Iraqis who had refused Saddam’s orders to fight were allowed to flee.
Allawi and his cabinet are acutely aware that each confrontation with the newly inaugurated U.S. and British embassies are likely to improve their standing with Iraqis. But to bite too deeply into the hands that feed the new government could staunch the flow of reconstruction aid upon which the fledgling regime depends.
The other flow in the equation — oil — remains Iraq’s greatest irony. Weekly attacks on the country’s aging petroleum pipelines have forced the emerging regime to continue spending precious dollars importing oil to meet its needs.
Those attacks continue as intensely as ever, according to one contracted crew chief — a Montrealer by birth — who spent the past 12 weeks working and sleeping at the scenes of 19 different pipeline ruptures.
“It never seemed to get better or worse. We just kept going the whole time. We went from Basra to Mosul. We’d go seven, eight days without a shower to the point where we all stank,” said the foreman, who gave his name as “Uncle Al.”
“It was unbelievable. Nineteen repairs in 12 weeks. We got mortared, we got RPG-ed (rocket-propelled grenades), we got IED-ed (improvised explosive devices), we took rockets. It was hot the whole time.”
During a chance encounter at the departure lounge at Baghdad International Airport, the wiry, gray-haired 60-something “Uncle Al” said his tour was over and no amount of money could bring him back.
He’s seen a lot since he left Montreal as a teenager in 1961 to volunteer in the U.S. Air Force. One tour of Vietnam, 1964-65, then a lifetime in the most adventurous ends of the oil patch. He put out fires with the legendary Red Adair, whose exploits John Wayne characterized in the 1968 movie, Hellfighters.
But he can’t recall anything as hairy as these past three months: Fire so hot the earth boiled beneath it; on-the-spot repairs amid incoming mortars.
“I’ve had enough of diving into ditches when things start landing and exploding,” he said. “Someone else can do it from now on.”
“When it comes to the former regime, the biggest question nobody is asking is why so many of them got away?” one highly placed source with the Iraqi National Congress told the Star in an interview, on condition he not be named. “In some cases, the Americans allowed private jets to be flown into Baghdad right after the war so that senior people with the regime and their families could fly to safety.”
???
…is the source – I’d guess that the INC doesn’t lose anything by casting aspersions like this – increased distrust of other factions in the new government and the Americans is, just off the top of my head, I think a net benefit for them. I seriously doubt that such events ever happened (keep in mind that this is a classic conspiracy assertion, coming from a culture that currently is more accepting of tales of conspiracy than any I’ve ever seen [and that's really saying something, given regional norms]).
The real dirty little secret of why so few of these guys got caught (and I’m not sure that you can unreservedly say that, given the proportion of the deck of 52 that are currently incarcerated, or taking a dirt nap) is that there’s a huge amount of sympathy for them in significant parts of the population. As far as I can see, the backbone of the insurgency is Ba’athist, pure and simple [well, except for the apparent acquisition of a light coating of Islamism] — I have a strong feeling that a lot of the mid-upper guys (your light colonels, colonels and Brigadiers [and if one takes a look at the Iraqi ORBAT, one'd see that there's a huge number of colonels] and their relatives) are in this one up to their eyeballs. I’m also convinced that large parts of the non-Ba’athist segments probably have a good deal of sympathy for them even now; they don’t want a Ba’athist government, but at many levels they don’t mind watching the Americans getting kicked in the teeth by Iraqis — quite apart from the fact that there’s an awful lot of folks playing both [all] sides against the middle, trying to get the most power for their tribal group.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/16/opinion/diplomatic/main630345.shtml
Powell Still Defending Iraq War
WASHINGTON, July 16, 2004
Ambassador L. Paul Bremer no longer rules the roost in Baghdad and the Coalition Provisional Authority no longer exists. Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, leader of Iraq’s interim government, is clearly in charge in Iraq these days, notwithstanding almost daily efforts by insurgents to challenge his authority. John Negroponte, the new U.S. ambassador in Baghdad is keeping a low profile, which is what the Bush administration wants and what Allawi needs to show 25 million Iraqis that Washington is no longer pulling the strings of political power.
Security, however, remains a problem, and is in fact the big problem, just as it was before when Bremer and his CPA ran the show. The American military is not only responsible for allowing the political mechanisms to be set up so Allawi and his government could assume power, it is also the glue that keeps Allawi’s power in place. With luck this situation will hold until elections can be held, perhaps in six months time.
Back in Washington the political season is as warm as Washington’s heat and humidity index and everyone in the administration is busy making, and re-making, the case to justify the war in Iraq. This week, Secretary of State Colin Powell, in a speech at The U.S. Institute of Peace, once again defended the administration’s case against Saddam Hussein.
“The question that always comes up, of course is, ‘Did we do the right thing?’ And the answer is, yes, we did the right thing,” Powell said.
There was a re-statement of Saddam’s defiance of the U.N., of the intelligence that Powell said everyone agreed showed the former Iraqi leader’s intent to develop a weapons of mass destruction capability.
OK, Powell conceded, no stockpiles have been found but, moving to the immediate task, he said, “Now, the challenge before us is not to get faint, not to let the problems we’re having in security now deterring us from our real purpose, and that is to bring democracy to this part of the world, thereby fundamentally changing this part of the world, fundamentally reshaping history for the 21st century.”
Now you know. It wasn’t Saddam’s defiance of U.N. resolutions for twelve years; nor Iraq’s links to terrorism, real or imagined; nor the intelligence reports, accurate or not, about WMD programs. The real reason we went to war was to reshape history for the 21st century.
Powell confessed again this week that we now know, a year later, there “were some errors” in the case he made to justify war before the U.N. on Feb. 5, 2003.The interesting thing about Powell’s remarks is the apparent feeling inside the administration of the constant need to keep making them. And the reason for that is simple: presidential politics. Because the Bush administration’s game plan did not go according to plan (no, it wasn’t the “slam dunk” then CIA Director George Tenet promised the president it would be) it was left to deal with a post-conflict rear guard insurgency which continues today.
The case for taking the country to war, and the need to defend the human and financial costs, has become one of the main points of political debate between President George W. Bush and his challenger, Senator John Kerry and there’s every indication this will remain the case until November.
Someone with knowledge of both the current situation in Iraq and the administration’s concerns about how to proceed says, “I don’t think this administration is committed. You can feel it at the political level. They (the Bush administration) want out.”
Of course you hear the opposite from Powell. “And we have to stay strong with the Iraqis who are now stepping forward. We have to make sure that they know that we will not falter, we will not wilt, we will have no second thoughts about the commitment we have made to these people, that we have made to this country.”
It will not be until well after November’s election in the U.S. and perhaps not until well after elections are held in Iraq early next year that we will know the true nature of Washington’s commitment to the people of Iraq, let alone this administration’s effort at “fundamentally reshaping history for the 21st century.”