The abrupt shake-up of the US administration in Iraq so soon after the Americans took over the country is nothing less than an admission of failure. Barbara Bodine, the effective mayor of Baghdad, is going home, and the arrival of Paul Bremner, who is now cast in the role of chief administrator for the whole country, leaves us wondering. But it is not the failure to reconnect the electricity and water or contain the lawlessness and violence or get ministries up and running again that shocks. These things take time.
What is astounding about the shake-up is Washington’s evident failure to know what it was getting into in the first place. It proves that the Bush administration did not even begin to understand the scale of what it was going to have to do after the invasion. Having decided Saddam Hussein must go, it simply went in, guns blazing. It is a vivid example of the “Shoot first: Ask questions later” attitude which the rest of the world so often accuses Americans of and which incenses Americans to hear.
It is not Washington’s only Iraqi setback. The announced departure at the end of the month of US weapons inspectors is another admission of failure. They have found nothing and clearly expect to find nothing. If they did, they would stay on. It is bad news for President Bush because there will now always be the suspicion that there never was anything to find, that he knew it and was only using weapons of mass destruction as an excuse to flex American military muscles.
But let us assume that the White House was entirely genuine in its conviction that Saddam Hussein had these unfound weapons. If so, it must have been because it had reports to that effect. In which case, US intelligence on Iraq on the existence of such weaponry and on the administrative mountain to be climbed after overthrowing Saddam Hussein, has been staggeringly incompetent. Incompetence is not a word usually associated with the US, where everything is usually done with extreme efficiency.
It is an irony that a nation so often accused of imperialism should prove so incompetent when it comes to playing the colonial administrator; the French and British are still so much better at these things, even decades after their empires have gone, as the latter have demonstrated in Basra. But those who gloat at American failures should examine their own consciences. No one should want the US to fail in Iraq at this point in time — because the people who suffer all the more if they do are the Iraqis. Better that they do the job of rebuilding the country quickly and well, and then get out as soon as possible. Those who want it all to go pear-shaped self-evidently do not care anything about the well-being of the Iraqis.
There is a mountain of a task ahead for Paul Bremner. It is not just getting the infrastructure back in action; there is an economy to rebuild as well. Iraqis have to be paid to go back to work — in money that is both usable and stable. Bremner has to do something fast about the currency, otherwise there will be riots. It is as important as the electricity and water. As for Bremner’s insistence that he will be working with the man President Bush first appointed to run Iraq’s administration, retired US Gen. Jay Garner, it is difficult to see what role he could play. It will be surprising if he does not quickly fade from the picture.
