Today's online Washington Post features an article by Rajiv Chandrasekaran under the headline Mistakes Loom Large as Handover Nears. The article paints a grim picture and implies that democracy for Iraq is an unrealistic expectation. The American occupation of Iraq will formally end this month having failed to fulfill many of its goals and stated promises intended to transform the country into a stable democracy, according to a detailed examination drawing upon interviews with senior U.S. and Iraqi officials and internal documents of the occupation authority. The ambitious, 15-month undertaking stumbled because of a series of mistakes...
An unnamed "senior advisor" provides a lot of input. The article quotes a lot of unnamed officials and advisers. Here are three offerings from the unnamed "senior adviser"."The failure to get the reconstruction effort launched early will be regarded as the most important critical failure," said one of Bremer's senior advisers. "If we could have fixed things faster, the situation would be very different today."
"I don't know anyone who thinks there's enough troops here," the senior adviser to Bremer said.
Elsewhere in the palace, the sense of regret is far more pronounced. The senior adviser to Bremer said he felt "a sense of opportunity that slipped away."
The article paints a picture of utter hopelessness and lost opportunity, and offers this hint as to the root causes of failure. "It [Stratcom] didn't put any effort into communicating with the Iraqi people," a British CPA official said. "Stratcom viewed its job as helping Bush to win his next election."
Mr. Chandrasekaran closes with this from the unnamed "senior advisor",
"The ambition for us was a grand one. We had great things in mind for them. We believed we could do it," he said. "But we didn't keep our promises."However, buried in the articles five pages detailing mistakes and failures we find this single paragraph that makes mention of success.
The Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. entity that has administered Iraq, cites many successes of its tenure. Nearly 2,500 schools have been repaired, 3 million children have been immunized, $5 million in loans has been distributed to small businesses and 8 million textbooks have been printed, according to the CPA. New banknotes have replaced currency with ousted president Saddam Hussein's picture. Local councils have been formed in every city and province. An interim national government promises to hold general elections next January.Perhaps if Mr Chandrasekaran were to expand a bit on what's happening with the local councils or what's going on with the small businesses, the article might have some balance. But one paragraph is all he managed to devote to anything remotely related to success. The article is very well written. Quite dramatic. And no doubt things could be going better in Iraq, but it's too early to concede failure, too early to admit defeat. Rich Lowry's Arduous Occupation in the National Review provides some perspective. He closes his article about post-war Germany and Japan with this.
Patience, of course, is now in short supply. By the exquisite standards of today's media and the critics of the Iraq War, the men who rebuilt Japan and Germany were incompetents. They had to muddle their way to success through policy failures and bureaucratic infighting. Incompetence can achieve the same success in Iraq, if it's given the chance.Is it too much to expect some patience from the press? With all the unnamed advisers and officials, the aticle from the Washington Post has the tone of a "Watergate" expose, with our "senior advisor" playing the roll of "Deep Throat". Is this a serious article about Iraq or to paraphase the British CPA official, does the Post view its job as helping George Bush lose his next election?
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