| |
Iraq's special envoy, with a special
task
By David Isenberg
 Once
upon a time, in an administration both far away and far
right, a newly-hired bureaucrat, known as Jerry to his
friends, sat at an office desk at the US State
Department; room 7224 to be exact.
Now that
bureaucrat is about to become America's proconsul, or
top civil administrator and special envoy in diplomatic
jargon, in Iraq. Congratulations L Paul Bremer III,
you've come a long way, baby.
Bremer, 61,
received his BA from Yale, a CEP at the Institut
d'Etudes Politiques of the University of Paris, and a
MBA from Harvard, and entered the Foreign Service in
1966 where he stayed for 23 years. During his time at
the State Department he became a career member of the
Senior Foreign Service. His assignments have included
posts in Afghanistan and Norway, and among his posts
since 1981 he has served as executive secretary and
special assistant to the secretary of state.
During his career he received the State
Department Superior Honor Award, two Presidential
Meritorious Service Awards and the Distinguished Honor
Award from the Secretary of State. He is a duly
certified member of the establishment, belonging both to
the International Institute for Strategic Studies and
The Council on Foreign Relations.
The recent
news coverage about his selection to be the man to whom
retired general Jay Garner will report, generally
describe him as a longtime former diplomat. His
selection is also billed as some sort of victory for
Secretary of State Colin Powell, who is depicted as a
moderate, at least compared to the uber-hawk Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. But such a sound bite
description does not begin to do him justice.
He
is not, by an stretch of the imagination, a dove. One
article noted that like the neoconservatives, he has
long called for a very hard line against what he calls
"extremist Islam" and for aggressive tactics, including
assassination, in pursuing and preempting suspected
terrorists.
In a 1996 Wall Street Journal
article he called on then-president Bill Clinton to
deliver ultimatums to Libya, Syria, Iran and Sudan to
cease any support for terrorism or face military action.
His rhetoric in that regard has been labeled as
distinctly "Rumsfeldian".
In 1986, after being
ambassador to the Netherlands for three years, he was
appointed by then-president Ronald Reagan to succeed
Robert B Oakley as director of the office of
counterterrorism and emergency planning at the State
Department. He later became ambassador-at-large for
counterterrorism until 1989. In June 1989, after
retiring from the State Department, he became managing
director of [Henry] Kissinger Associates, where he
stayed until 2000.
Bremer is a member of several
corporate boards, such as Air Products & Chemicals
Corp (since 1993) and Akzo Nobel NV (since 1997).
He chaired the congressionally-established
National Commission on Terrorism in 1999 to review US
counterterrorism policy. That role made him something of
a doomsayer, a role that came naturally after years of
warning about terrorist threats. In 2000, Bremer warned
in congressional testimony of such scenarios as a
radioactive release that "made 10 miles of Chicago's
waterfront uninhabitable for 50 years". Shortly after
the attacks of September 11, Bremer warned that the
country faced the risk of a catastrophic terrorist event
"which will have tens of thousands of deaths".
But such warnings had already been made by
other, more prescient commissions, such as the US
Commission on National Security for the 21st Century
(chaired by former US Senators Gary Hart and Warren
Rudman), which submitted its last report to Congress in
February 2001.
He became chairman and chief
executive in 2000 of the global "risk services" firm of
Marsh Inc, part of Marsh & McClennan Companies Inc,
and has warned clients about the danger posed to
businesses operating overseas from "growing income gaps
and social tensions". Marsh is in a position to speak
about that. Nearly 300 Marsh employees were killed in
the attack on the World Trade Center. Bremer was also
co-chairman of a Heritage Foundation report, "Defending
the American Homeland" which came out in early 2002.
Last June, President George W Bush named Bremer
to the President's Homeland Security Advisory Council.
Bremer' appointment is likely to cause, at least
initially, as much confusion as it solves. Press reports
do not say what his relationship will be with the
provisional Iraqi government scheduled to be elected in
late May. Reportedly, under Bremer, Garner will stay in
charge of reconstruction, while Zalmay Khalilzad, Bush's
special envoy to Iraq, will oversee the political
transition that now centers on forming an interim Iraq
authority.
As Bremer has no particular Persian
Gulf or Iraqi expertise, his selection seems to signal
that the Bush administration is less interested in a
democratic revival of Iraq than in ensuring that it
cannot serve in the future as an kind of base for
threats against the American homeland, which was one of
the rationales offered by the Bush administration for
its invasion in the first place.
(©2003 Asia
Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
