Postwar Iraq: Who will run it, and how?
David E. Sanger
New York Times
Apr. 8, 2003 12:00 AM
WASHINGTON - With an end in sight to the battle for Baghdad, President Bush is moving to end two arguments that were never resolved before the shooting started: one between the United States and Europe over who will run Iraq, and a second between his own State and Defense departments over how to run it.
Before he arrived in Northern Ireland on Monday to meet with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and discuss their differences on how to administer post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, Bush left little doubt about the territory he was staking out. But as in the war itself, he is once again taking a gamble. He is betting that he can face down the U.N. Security Council and Europe again, and counting on his ability to wend a middle path between Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon and the advisers around Secretary of State Colin Powell, who see postwar Iraq not only as a democracy project, but a chance to repair damaged alliances.
Leaving out the U.N.
There is no question where Bush wants the United Nations: in the back of the supply convoy. They can dole out food and textbooks, bring in fresh water and help get local businesses on their feet. But under Bush's plan, the United Nations would not play a role in shaping the new government, especially at what the president and his aides call the "power ministries" - defense and internal security - or in the critical decisions about when Iraq is ready to be turned back to Iraqis.
This would seem to put him at odds with Blair, who favors a more prominent role for the United Nations, to bridge America's gap with Europe and his own country.
Even Powell has somewhat reluctantly taken up the line that the victors get the voting rights, though he has insisted that the United Nations would retain a major if unspecified role. "There isn't as much debate and disagreement about this as you might read in the newspapers," he said aboard Air Force One on Monday.
On Friday, the president thrust National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in front of reporters to declare that only those nations that shed "life and blood to liberate Iraq" would take the lead in remaking the nation.
His message to France, Germany and Russia was clear: When you refused to vote for "serious consequences" for Iraq, you lost your voting power about how the country would move from dictatorship to democracy.
Contracts at stake
If Old Europe was bitter about the start of the war, it is bound to be bitter about that proclamation about how it will end, because those in control of the power ministries will doubtless determine who gets the contracts to rebuild a shattered country, who will pump the oil and to whom Iraq will pay old debts.
"Blair is caught here in the middle and you'll see the president defer to that a bit," one senior administration official predicted this evening. "But you know George Bush: He knows how to sound deferential and then go home and pick up the plan exactly the way we set it six months ago."
That plan, as described by administration officials for several months, is loosely based on the American experience in the occupations of Germany and Japan, the last time enemy countries of large size and bureaucratic sophistication were transformed into democracies. Those are not models Bush's aides want to discuss publicly, in part because the military phase of the occupation lasted for years. In fact, the White House has banned the word "occupation," and speaks only of "liberation."
While Bush deals with the global diplomacy, he is also facing another episode in the ongoing struggle between Rumsfeld's world view and Powell's. It is a debate that raises fundamental issues of how soon power will be turned over to Iraqis and which Iraqis will be empowered.
Rumsfeld insisted until last week, long after the issue was allegedly decided, that the Iraqi exiles who have just been put back into southern Iraq should be in charge of the Iraqi Interim Authority. But Friday, Rice said all Iraqis would have a role.