Another day in Iraq w/Amb Bremer

Hi Dan,

I assume you are referring to the current scandal involving
American MP's. No amount of money will erase the harm this
has caused. As the Iraqi's gain control of power, I'm sure
they will exercise an amount of infulence in the final outcome.

IMO, the most interesting comment in Bremer's statement was
".....but we expect to have an interim government in place by the end of the month......"

They've whittled down the language on this handover so much that the only real authority the interim government is going to have is what color sox to wear every day. 'Limited sovereignty' is just too vague to be a practical definition.

Dan

Too vague may be true, but what would you have?

The choices are either to pull out and leave complete chaos on a set date. (Which the terrororist and those determined to replace Saddam's dictatorship with their own would love.)

To give an un-named, unknown quality, unsure of stability, interium government command over OUR military and our citizens over there. (I hope you wouldn't go that far, I don't think you can get any majority in America to agree to that, not yet, inspite of calls for "international rule".)

It would be nice to have more details. But other than two bad choices, the third would be to do nothing to transfer any power, leadership, or legitimacy to some form of Iraq self-government.

RogerNC

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I wasn't referring to the UN or it's rule in forming a new Iraq interium government. I was referring to right now no one including the US gov't and the UN officals have any list of who will be on the interm goverment official list.

No one has any idea what will happen when they take over. The main point is that if they were given full authority yet our troops were to maintain peace, we'd find ourselves taking orders from as yet unknown individuals.

Or if we gave them authority and the responsibility to maintain it without US troop support, we'd have chaos.

I'm not totallly against the UN, although it's record is even worse IMO than US politicians. It's a great place to make speeches and (very occasionally) reach real agreements. Mostly it's a place for nations to point fingers at each other and pontificate about how wrong the other is. That has it's place even.

But I'm not ready to put them in charge of the US, or US troops in Iraq. The reference to calls for "international rule" probably does sound like I was talking about the UN as in Iraq.

It was meant to be just that inspite of some people's apparent desire to have the UN be a governing body instead of a negotiating body, I didn't think many Americans would agree to have any Iraqis interium government giving orders to American troops.

RogerNC

We've been in the puppet-government business before and nobody was very impressed with it's independence or legitimacy. It looked like a bad joke. We were occupiers despite our protests of having been invited and our every move and word were under a microscope. Up that close we don't look so good apparently. Of course, the badies are going to try to warp the lens as much as possible.

You may be right. At this point, in this situation it may not help very much to hand Iraq to the UN. It looks like there's a big crow pie waiting for us any we go and Junior and the boys don't impress me as ones to eat crow gracefully. A balanced diet of sticking with our story of being generous liberators and a little humility is called for. Iraqi's just don't seem to like us as much as we thought they would. <>Why won't they like us? We'll go home if they'll just like us.</sarcasm> The UN may be our best bet.

It's a shades of gray thing. The individual Iraqi must feel a little bit of "thank you" and big hunk of "who the hell do you think YOU are?". It's hearts and minds time. Again we've got our kids, who don't speak the language and don't know the culture, trying to be police and having to rely on natives of questionable motive to help them. And the bad guys don't wear uniforms!

"Our sovereignty" keeps us form putting our troops under UN command. And the Iraqi's sense of "our sovereignty" keeps them from fully cooperating with us.

And then there IS our inevitable sausage-being-made election.

He could say that there is no area in which Iraqis are prepared to govern themselves and that we'll be responsible for almost everything for the next couple of years, at least. That would be better than trying to maintain the distasteful fig leaf of a sham governing body.

Dan