WASHINGTON - "As recognized in UN Security
Council Resolution 1546, the Coalition Provisional
Authority will cease to exist on June 28, at which point
the occupation will end and the Iraqi interim government
will assume and exercise full sovereign authority on
behalf of the Iraqi people."
With those words, L
Paul Bremer on Monday formally ended his 414-day tenure
as the US civil administrator in Iraq, and promptly left
the country - flanked by arms-wielding security guards.
Handpicked for the job by US Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, Bremer, 63, made it clear he was not perturbed
by the prospect of a life of leisure. "I'm going to
sleep," he told USA Today. He was more forthcoming with
Time magazine about his future, outlining an active
post-public life revolving around writing a book about
Iraq and enrolling at the Academy of Cuisine in
Washington.
Before the US-led war in Iraq, the
administration of US President George W Bush said it
expected ordinary Iraqis to welcome coalition soldiers
because they had deposed Saddam Hussein as president.
Instead, many Iraqis expressed ambivalence about the
invasion. They were glad to see Saddam's departure, yet
resisted the idea of occupation.
Widespread
looting was followed by sporadic bombings and other
attacks that, in the past year, have grown into what
appears to be a coordinated resistance.
The
situation in Iraq is far different from Germany, for
example, after the defeat of the Nazis, according to
Marina Ottaway and Kenneth Allard. Ottaway is an analyst
for the Democracy and Rule of Law Program at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington
policy center. Allard is a retired US Army colonel who
teaches military history at Georgetown University, also
in Washington.
Both Ottaway and Allard tell
RFE/RL that the post-World War II allies faced no armed
resistance in Germany because the Germans were, for the
most part, less hostile to their occupiers than Iraqis
are today. And, while no country can be said to be
entirely homogeneous, the Germans had a far more unified
character nearly 60 years ago than the Iraqis do today.
Iraq, Allard says, has three distinct and
mutually hostile cultures: the Kurds in the north, the
Sunni Muslims in the center, and the Shi'ites in the
south. He says each of these ethnic divisions is further
divided by clans that are used to taking care of their
needs by themselves, not through a government.
Allard says that despite reports of foreign
fighters in Iraq, he believes the core of the current
resistance is made up of Iraqis themselves. He says this
is how they respond when someone - whether indigenous or
an invader - decides to impose a new order on them.
"Those have always been the classical problems
of dealing with and governing Iraq. And they have
classically been solved by the most violent possible
means," Allard says. "When you get that tradition, that
heritage, it is not terribly encouraging for anybody
that comes in with the objective of simply taking over
and doing something different. And that is what we're
trying to do."
Allard says the Bush
administration evidently was oblivious to this reality,
even though he applauds what he believes was the good
intention of ridding Iraq of a dictator and trying to
import liberal democracy.
"I think it is
probably a legitimate objective, and it certainly says a
great deal for the United States, for the people that
are in charge of that policy, as well as for their good
intentions. It does not say terribly much about their
realism, about their understanding of what the
difficulties would be," Allard says.
The US at
least has tried to minimize some of these difficulties
by having Bremer issue several formal restrictions on
Iraq's new interim government and the popularly elected
government that is expected to follow.
Some are
merely updates to Iraq's old legal code. But others are
more intrusive, such as one that creates a seven-member
electoral commission that is authorized to ban political
parties, and their candidates, from the democratic
process.
Under Iraq's transitional constitution,
these rules cannot be repealed without the approval of a
majority of the cabinet, the president, and both vice
presidents.
But Ottaway says she is not
concerned that Bremer's influence will be felt too
strongly in Iraq long after he is gone. She explains
that in many countries, constitutions can be changed
more easily than they are in the West. And she says
getting the necessary quorum to overturn one of Bremer's
rules should not be too difficult.
"I'm not sure
that it's going to be all that difficult to put together
a majority of the cabinet and the president and the vice
presidents and so on. Secondly, I'm not sure what's
going to happen if Allawi was to come out and say, 'We
think that it is in the best interest of the country to
allow such-and-such a party to run for elections.' I
don't think the US would be in a position to do very
much without undermining the credibility of the Iraqi
government," Ottaway says.
But then, Ottaway
says, this government might have trouble establishing
its credibility from the very start. Its credibility is
linked to that of its creator, the US. "On the issue of
credibility," Ottaway says, "let me point out that the
US has zero credibility in the Arab world."
A
number of Bremer's major decisions have been criticized.
Among them:
Disbanding the army. Soon after Bremer arrived in
Baghdad, he formally disbanded the Iraqi army and
intelligence services. The move threw as many as 500,000
Iraqis out of work. Many of these men are believed to
have joined the insurgency.
De-Ba'athification. Bremer also quickly issued an
edict firing all high-ranking former Ba'ath Party
members from government jobs and barring them from
future government employment. This left another 30,000
jobless, including many skilled workers the Iraqi
economy badly needed.
Cracking down on clerics. In late March, Bremer
ordered a crackdown on Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical
Shi'ite cleric who had railed against the US occupation
and had gathered an armed militia. But when al-Sadr's
newspaper was closed and his top aide arrested, the
cleric called his followers into armed revolt. The
rebellion spread, convulsing the center and south of the
country.
Fallujah. After the Sunni uprising began in this
small city west of Baghdad in April, Bremer demonized
the Fallujah fighters, calling them criminals and thugs
and saying negotiations were impossible. Three weeks
later, after the Marines failed to defeat the rebels in
bloody house-to-house fighting, US troops were forced to
essentially cede Fallujah to the insurgents and local
security forces.
Copyright (c) 2004, RFE/RL
Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio
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