A mired Iraq originated from the US political wrangle?

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Tuesday, November 11, 2003

A mired Iraq originated from the US political wrangle?

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The guerrilla war, power blackout, looting, and upheaval, all that is haunting Iraq, in the eye of those who are reflecting on the war on Iraq in the US, is originated from the ideological struggle in Washington and the inadequate information service and misleading policies that accrue from such struggle.

The Newsweek reported that retired admiral Jay Gardner short-listed 20 US state department officials in his expert list when he led the "Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Affairs." But US defense secretary Donald Rumsfield ordered him to slash sixteen of them because they had defended Iraq, favored UN, or been "politically erroneous". In another word, their political stance does not agree with the defense department's neo-conservative. An aid to Mr. Gardner said that even doctors helping rebuild Iraq��s health care system must be anti-abortionist. The effort of the State Secretary Colin Powell, also the leading figure of "doves", who stood out to oppose Rumsfield on this issue, failed. Only one of the sixteen re-entered into the list in the end. Ostensibly, it was a victory of Rumsfield's. Substantially, he was just following an order. The ideological clout comes from a level higher than him.

When Gardner protested Rumsfield's exclusion of an expert on Iraq, the latter responded that he was sorry but he had just received a call from a rank too high to argue with. According to Newsweek, vice president Dick Cheney was the real power to decide America's policies for post-war Iraq.

However, the fruit of victory tasted rather bitter now for neo-conservatives. Most senior officials in the institution responsible for daily operation on Iraq issue are not tech experts, but diplomats, republicans, or White House officials instead.

There is even no information sharing between the defense department and the state department. When Rumsfield was shocked by the shattered Iraq power facilities, officials in the state department didn't take it as anything new. They had known about it from UN institutions responsible for the "food-for-oil" program. The jammed information flow caused by ideological disagreements between the two functions led to Bush administration's underestimation of the difficulty in Iraq's reconstruction.

But Condoleezza Rice, National Security Adviser to US President, passed the buck around by arguing that the duty of her office was putting forward proposals for policy making while policy implementation was none of their business. Other officials in the White House, out of their misgivings, shirked and left the security issue in Iraq to the defense department. But peacekeeping is only the "fourth stage" in the defense department's war plan and Rumsfield would never like to have his army connect with anything like "peacekeeping" or "national reconstruction". Most US soldiers sent to Iraq battlefield are armored forces and sheltered in tanks and armed trucks. There are less than 2000 military police for peacekeeping in Iraq.

The White House had hoped that US troops would withdraw from Iraq soon after they swiftly overthrew the Saddam regime. American soldiers, according to vice president Cheney, would be welcomed as "liberators". After "hooligans" were driven away, Iraq's middle bureaucrats would, as it was planned, resume managing the country. Now the reality is nearly six years after the "liberation", the Iraqis still have to live with energy shortage and no job while one or two US soldiers were assassinated on average nearly on a daily basis.

Some experts in the US government have already expressed their concern about an Iraq in uncontrollable chaos or even in a civil war as a result of escalating terrorist activities and hatred toward the US. Some foreign observers also thought that the best time to stabilize Iraq is slipping away.

(An article from the Overseas Edition of People's Daily and translated by PD Online staff member Lijia)

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