"There was no orderly transition. Nothing gradual. Just, `Here you go. Here's Iraq. Take it'."
"None of us had any idea sovereignty was going to switch two days early," he continues, speaking on the promise of anonymity. "So we didn't even get the last contracts finished. It was chaos. More than a billion dollars in plans never went through. Huge appropriations were just left on the table, undone."
...If it appears the U.S.-led coalition is easing up on the ambitious, if naïve, theoretical underpinnings of Operation Iraqi Freedom in order to find an exit strategy, the long-term results remain unclear.
"As a new government, we must gain strength by showing strength," is how Adnan Hadi al-Assadi, Iraq's interim deputy interior minister, explains the regime's race to absorb all available power.
"In the months leading up to the handover, there were a lot of frustrations. We stood by without much say, objecting as bad decisions were made," Assadi said in an interview. "At one point, (then U.S. envoy Paul) Bremer committed more than a billion Iraqi dollars to Jordan in a project to train Iraqi troops. Jordan! A country whose forces only fought one war in their history (1967's Six Day War). And they fought it badly. They are supposed to show Iraqis how to fight?
"Now, we are beginning to make our own decisions. Now that we have some authority, we want our ministries to handle everything."
The soft-spoken fear among those letting go is that the new Baghdad may well emerge as every bit the omnipotent, power-wielding monolith it was before the war. However clumsy the effort, the U.S.-led coalition clearly had hoped all these months of idea-farming might gently nudge Iraq toward an almost Canadian model of decentralized democracy.
But the new government's first instinct, clearly, has been to revert to the tried-and-true formula of the larger Arab world — aggressively corralling power toward a strong (and strong-armed) central government, with the powers of Baghdad second to none.
Toronto Star article
"None of us had any idea sovereignty was going to switch two days early," he continues, speaking on the promise of anonymity. "So we didn't even get the last contracts finished. It was chaos. More than a billion dollars in plans never went through. Huge appropriations were just left on the table, undone."
...If it appears the U.S.-led coalition is easing up on the ambitious, if naïve, theoretical underpinnings of Operation Iraqi Freedom in order to find an exit strategy, the long-term results remain unclear.
"As a new government, we must gain strength by showing strength," is how Adnan Hadi al-Assadi, Iraq's interim deputy interior minister, explains the regime's race to absorb all available power.
"In the months leading up to the handover, there were a lot of frustrations. We stood by without much say, objecting as bad decisions were made," Assadi said in an interview. "At one point, (then U.S. envoy Paul) Bremer committed more than a billion Iraqi dollars to Jordan in a project to train Iraqi troops. Jordan! A country whose forces only fought one war in their history (1967's Six Day War). And they fought it badly. They are supposed to show Iraqis how to fight?
"Now, we are beginning to make our own decisions. Now that we have some authority, we want our ministries to handle everything."
The soft-spoken fear among those letting go is that the new Baghdad may well emerge as every bit the omnipotent, power-wielding monolith it was before the war. However clumsy the effort, the U.S.-led coalition clearly had hoped all these months of idea-farming might gently nudge Iraq toward an almost Canadian model of decentralized democracy.
But the new government's first instinct, clearly, has been to revert to the tried-and-true formula of the larger Arab world — aggressively corralling power toward a strong (and strong-armed) central government, with the powers of Baghdad second to none.
A serious question for Washington, however, is whether we can control Allawi any better than we did Saddam, and I have my doubts.
....and hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
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