Paul Bremer, former American proconsul in Iraq, recently recalled his first impressions of the country he came to govern in May last year. ”As I drove from the airport, Baghdad was on fire,” he said. ”There was no traffic, and not one policeman on duty in the country.” Now, after transferring power to an Iraqi government on Wednesday, he leaves a city again in flames.
Up to 30 000 Iraqi police officers are to be sacked for being incompetent and unreliable and will be given a -million payoff before the United States hands over to an Iraqi government, say senior British military sources. Many officers either deserted to the insurgents or simply stayed at home during the recent uprisings in Falluja and across the south.
The export of oil from Iraq was brought to a halt last week after attacks on two key pipelines and the assassination of a top oil executive dealt a fresh blow to United States plans to hand over sovereignty at the end of the month. The attacks sent the global price of US light oil up 26 US cents to ,45 a barrel and forced Opec, already pumping out extra oil to meet soaring demand, to step in.
Wednesday’s carnage in Basra is another twist in the downward spiral of violence endangering Iraq. It puts security back at the top of the agenda in the run-up to the long-heralded transfer of sovereignty at the end of June. Only if the United Nations breaks with United States plans for a cosmetic handover can it win Iraqi confidence.
The United Nations’s adviser on Iraq made a surprising attack on Washington’s handling of its year-long occupation this week, condemning the detention of prisoners without trial or charge and offering a withering analysis of the United States’s governance of the country.
The latest atrocity in Afghanistan — a dozen children killed by a ”bicycle bomb” in Kandahar on Tuesday — is a reminder that Iraq is not the only place where US-sponsored regime change has not produced peace. Defeating insurgencies cannot be done by the iron fist alone.
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/ 16 December 2003
The results of Russia’s parliamentary elections ought to come as no shock. In spite of the huge accretion of power that they have handed to President Vladimir Putin, they also contain more good news than bad. Although widely considered a disaster for democracy, things can only get better, argues Jonathan Steele.
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/ 5 December 2003
The Pentagon’s one-size-fits-all ‘liberation’ is a disaster in Iraq. American efforts to foist new rulers on the people of Iraq are becoming increasingly grotesque. In some cities US troops have sparked demonstrations by imposing officials from the old Saddam Hussein regime.
”My time here could come to an abrupt end,” Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN’s special representative to Iraq, commented just three weeks ago as I sat on a sofa in the Baghdad office that last Tuesday became his tomb. He never seriously imagined he would be an assassin’s target.
About 10 000 young men have come forward to join an ”Islamic army” in the holy city of Najaf, according to Muqtada al-Sadr, the fiery cleric who is trying to become the unchallengeable leader of Iraq’s Shia opposition.